The long-resisted go-ahead for a Jewish eruv in London is a victory for multi-ethnic and religious tolerance
Ned Temko
Wednesday August 14,
2002
The
Guardian
Most people in this country -
indeed, many of its roughly 280,000 Jews - will have lived their lives quite
happily without knowing what an "eruv" is, much less forming an opinion on
whether one of them should be established in north-west London. Yet
astonishingly, and shamefully, a political battle worthy of Westminster at its
most savage has been waged against the proposed eruv for the past decade.
Yesterday, with the local council's announcement that the scheme is to go
ahead, the pro-eruv forces apparently won - though, trust me, the opponents
won't concede gracefully. The debate is likely to rumble on, with implications -
stretching well beyond the proposed eruv area - for how modern Britain functions
as a multi-ethnic society. It is even possible the issue may eventually find its
way into the European court in Strasbourg - a city which, by the way, managed to
erect an eruv of its own without any of the cataclysmic effects predicted by the
opponents here.
So what is an eruv? It is a notional boundary, delineated partly by existing
features like major roads and partly by a few dozen poles connected by narrow
filament wire, within which observant Orthodox Jews are religiously allowed to
carry or push some items otherwise forbidden on the sabbath. Specifically, it
allows families to push infants in prams or disabled relations in wheelchairs to
synagogue, and to visit neighbours - meaning they are no longer effectively
housebound on Saturdays.
There is an eruv not only in Strasbourg, but in the centre of Washington DC,
and in dozens of towns and cities worldwide which have significant communities
of Orthodox Jews. None of them has prompted much outside interest, let alone
opposition on the scale emanating in recent years from the drawing rooms of
Hampstead and across the heath in Hampstead Garden Suburb.
The arguments against the eruv, and the individuals making them so
passionately, vary. But a core of the anti-eruv group is Jewish - though
decidedly not Orthodox - and it is doubtful whether non-Jews would have cared at
all had not Jews convinced them of the ostensible gravity of the issues at
stake.
One of their arguments is avowedly philosophical: the notion that it is
frankly ridiculous to order one's life in such a way that ancient Jewish law and
rabbinic rulings should determine whether one can push a pram or a wheelchair to
synagogue. That view, of course, would by extension reject the very idea of
religion - any religion - though interestingly, and thankfully, the anti-eruv
brigade seems disinclined to go on the warpath against Christianity, Hinduism or
Islam.
Another objection raised is "environmental" - at one council meeting years
back, it was suggested in all seriousness that the eruv would be nothing less
than a environmental scourge. Again interestingly, telephone or electricity
poles, and other far more intrusive bits of local street furniture, seem to have
escaped the anti-eruv campaigners' wrath. When the eruv debate first surfaced in
the early 1990s, I took the opportunity of a weekend visit to an extremely
Orthodox friend in Englewood, New Jersey - across the river from New York City -
to try to establish what the fuss was about. I asked my friend to show me the
local eruv. He obligingly agreed, and we set out early on Sunday morning to have
a look. Unfortunately, try as he might, he couldn't find it.
The real root of the anti-eruv campaign's concern is - to borrow the
euphemism usually employed - the prospect that the "character" of eruv
neighbourhoods might be altered. Clearly, the fear of at least some in the
anti-eruv group is that significant numbers of Orthodox Jews will move into
their backyard. Setting aside the difficulty of finding, much less affording,
homes in Hampstead Garden Suburb these days, the astonishing aspect of all this
is that the Nimby brigade is uneasy about prospective newcomers not because they
are apt to break into cars and houses, deal drugs, or hold loud parties - but
because they will walk to and from synagogue on Saturdays with their prams or
infirm grandparents.
The answer to this core argument is, to my mind, simple. We live in a country
which, thankfully, is far more varied ethnically and religiously, far more
vibrant, and - for all the injustice and bigotry that survives, as in any part
of the world - far more tolerant than a century ago. Like many Jews, though I
attend an Orthodox synagogue, I am not so rigorously observant that I would rely
on an eruv to allow me to take an infant or an elderly relative along with me on
the sabbath. And it may well be that the pro-eruv estimates that 10,000
Londoners stand directly to benefit from the eruv are overstated. But if even a
few thousand, indeed a few hundred, families will have their lives
transformingly enriched by its construction, without encroaching on anyone else,
surely it deserves not only acceptance but wholehearted support. That it has
prompted not only concern, but a decade of organised opposition, is astonishing.
· Ned Temko is editor of the Jewish Chronicle