Members of the Tribe

by Zev Chafets

  While I was in New York, the Satmar Chasidim were involved in an illuminating controversy. They send their children to parochial schools, of course, but for some reason a group of Satmar girls were enrolled in a public school remedial education program. Satmar doesn’t allow its women to mingle freely with men, Jewish or otherwise, and the group’s leaders demanded that a screen be erected down the middle of the classroom to keep the girls separated from the rest of the students.

  This demand was immediately and vocally rejected by the parents of the other children, most of whom were blacks and Puerto Ricans. For years there had been tensions between the communities, mostly over street crime and competition for public housing; the classroom controversy brought things to a head. A Puerto Rican spokesman claimed that the Chasidim were elitist and racist, a charge the Satmar spokesman blandly denied. “They think we look down on them,” he told reporters, “but they are mistaken. We don’t see them at all.”

  Since that same attitude applies to writers, secular Jews, and Israelis, it was not easy finding a Satmar Chasid who would talk to me. After several abortive approaches, I was finally introduced to one by a mutual acquaintance. The Chasid agreed to meet me on the condition that I wouldn’t publish his name. This seemed like an unnecessary precaution—the Satmar Chasidim read only holy texts—but he insisted. “Just call me Mendel,” he said.

  At thirty-four, Mendel is a short, stocky man with a beard, side locks, and a crewcut. He is a craftsman, and we met in his workshop, a small building located not far from the main shopping district of Williamsburg. Every time a customer came in, Mendel interrupted our conversation and pointedly ignored me. Speaking to strangers is frowned upon by the Satmar community, and he didn’t want to be caught in an act that could be construed as disloyal.

  In the world of Satmar, the most talented young men spend their lives studying Talmud on a community dole. The merely clever go into business, and many can be found in the Diamond District around 47th Street in Manhattan. Neighborhood merchants and artisans like Mendel are at the bottom of the status ladder.

  As a boy Mendel studied Talmud like everyone else. His secular education consisted of one hour a day—arithmetic, spelling, and grammar—for four years. “I was born in Williamsburg, but I din’t know Hinglish till I was a big boy,” he said, sounding as if he had just gotten off the boat from Europe.

  As we talked, I saw that Mendel had two walkie-talkies strapped to his belt. One was for Hatzollah, the ambulance service. The other connected him to the shomrim network, a kind of Satmar Conelrad system of early warning against undesirable strangers in the neighborhood.

  “Shomrim” is the Hebrew word for “guardians,” and Mendel is one of the unit’s senior members. A few years ago, street crime began to be a problem in Williamsburg. At first the Chasidim staged mass demonstrations at City Hall. They stormed the local police station after a woman was raped. Finally, unable to get satisfactory protection from the authorities, they created their own private vigilante force.

  “We protect the people from the chayas, the animals on the street,” Mendel said in a soft voice. “Believe me, this is no expression, they are really chayas. We’re surrounded here by animals.” People in the neighborhood know the shomrim number, and they can call for help any time of the day or night. “We have a two-minute response time,” he said proudly.

  “Two minutes for what kind of response?” I asked. Mendel looked around the shop, although there was no one there. “Two minutes for a chopsim,” he said, looking down at his workbench.

  Chopsim, pronounced with a throat-clearing “ch,” is Yiddish for “grab ’em.” The phrase became a battle cry a few years ago when an elderly rabbi was mugged by a couple of street thugs. “Yidden, chopsim!” the old man managed to shout, and dozens of yeshiva boys came charging out of a nearby Talmudic academy in hot pursuit. Within seconds the thugs were a bloody pile on the sidewalk, and a new battle cry was born.

  Since that night, the shomrim have become an organized force. Only married men can belong (“We see sometimes on the street things a boy shouldn’t see,” Mendel explained), and they patrol armed with walkie-talkies, clubs, blackjacks, and brass knuckles. “We are the eyes and ears of the police department on the street. We don’t bother nobody, but we keep the animals out of the neighborhood,” he said.

  Before going out to Williamsburg, I had been briefed by a New York police officer who specializes in the Chasidic community. The officer, himself an observant Jew, clearly had mixed feelings about the Satmar approach to law and order. “All together, you got fifty-five different Chasidic groups out there,” he said, gesturing in the general direction of Brooklyn. “Most of them are pretty small and quiet. Of the big groups, your Lubavitchers rarely take to the streets. But your Satmar, when they get angry—look out, they don’t fool around.”

  I asked the policeman about rumors that a rapist had once been beaten to death by an outraged group of Chasidim. “I never heard that one,” he said, “but nothing’s impossible. These are very dangerous people. A lot of them are Holocaust survivors and they want to be left in peace. They don’t start trouble but they aren’t about to be molested, either. I don’t know, maybe they’ve got the right idea after all.”

  Much of the sect’s violence is directed against other Chasidic groups, or rivals within the group itself. For years, Satmar was controlled by a venerable old rebbe, Moshe Teitelbaum. When he died a power struggle broke out between his widow and her son, the official heir. Psychological warfare raged between the two camps, with the widow’s forces claiming that the young rabbi’s wife was insufficiently pious. The campaign came to a head when a group of Chasidim broke into the son’s house and smashed all the mirrors in protest against his wife’s alleged narcissism.

  A few years ago a form of gang warfare broke out between the Satmar Chasidim and the rival Belz group. Satmar refuses to recognize the state of Israel on the grounds that only the Messiah can reestablish Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land. Belz takes a softer line, and its leader, the Belzer rebbe, agreed to accept Israeli government support for his schools in Israel. This decision precipitated a clash between the two groups. Synagogues were trashed and Chasidim fought each other in the streets. The two sects eventually reached a truce, but they still keep a wary eye on each other.

  The great rivalry in the Chasidic world is between Satmar and Lubavitch. The police officer who briefed me recalled one time when reserves were needed to save the life of a Chabadnik who had ventured into the Satmar stronghold. “It was one of the holidays, and this fellow came to a synagogue in Williamsburg, got up, and tried to give holiday greetings from the Lubavitcher rebbe,” the cop said. “The Satmar people heard about it and I guess they thought it was a power play. They found him on the street and chased him all over the neighborhood. He finally ran into another shul, and in the meantime somebody called the precinct.

  “When we got there the place was surrounded. At first he refused to leave with us—he didn’t want to violate the law by riding on a holiday. But I explained that his life was in danger, and that riding with us would be ‘pikuach nefesh’—saving a life—which is permitted. We finally got him out of there, but if they had got their hands on him he would have been a dead man, believe me.”

  I asked Mendel about these incidents, but he had nothing to say. He had already said too much, and I could tell he regretted the meeting. There was no profit in this kind of encounter, nothing the Satmar Chasidim could gain from good publicity. They want to be left alone, to pursue their eighteenth century European lives in the heart of New York. His answers grew shorter and shorter, his silences more impatient.

  “Have you ever seen a Charles Bronson movie?” I asked, closing my notebook and getting ready to leave. He looked at me with incomprehension. “He’s an actor,” I explained. “He makes movies about fighting chayas.” Mendel shook his head. “We don’t go to movies, or watch television. It’s a waste of time, goyishe naches [gentile pleasure],” he said.<
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  “You mean you’ve never seen a movie?” I asked.

  Mendel hesitated, and then, in a soft voice, confessed. “When I was a boy, I went once. I saw a cowboy by the name Roy Rogers.”

  “Did you ever dream about being a cowboy after that?” I asked, but the mellow moment was past. “That’s ‘meshuggeh,’ ” he said harshly, almost pushing me in the direction of the door. “Only a goy would dream about being a cowboy.”

  It is a short drive from Williamsburg to Crown Heights, capital of the Satmar’s great rival, Lubavitch. The two sects are more than political enemies; they are ideological foes, exponents of vastly different philosophies of Jewish survival. Satmar is isolationist, but Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Lubavitcher rebbe, is a man who believes in planting flags all over the world.

  There is nothing else like Chabad in Jewish life. It is a cult of personality based on the charismatic leadership of Rabbi Schneerson. His supporters make extravagant claims for his wisdom, holiness, and mystical powers; his detractors consider him an egomaniac or even a false Messiah. But no one disputes that he is a powerful figure, able to command a small army of fanatically dedicated followers in his war against secularism, assimilation, and modernity.

  Over the years the rebbe has wrapped himself in a carefully crafted cloak of mystery. He receives important visitors by candlelight in the middle of the night and he almost never leaves his home. “Once, back in 1949, the rebbe was going on vacation,” a Chabadnik once told me. “He got a flat tire on the way over the bridge, and he considered it a sign. He hasn’t left Brooklyn since.”

  The rebbe has never visited Israel. Unlike his Satmar rivals, he strongly supports the Jewish state and is a hawk on its defense policies. On the Israeli political scene he is a force in absentia, directing his disciples’ lobbying efforts on behalf of an agenda full of theocratic legislation. But the rebbe himself stays at home and has remained silent about his refusal to travel to Jerusalem. “The time isn’t ripe yet,” his followers say, a mysterious evasion that has given rise to the charge that he has messianic pretensions.

  There are thirty thousand Jews in Crown Heights, almost all of them connected with Chabad. The neighborhood itself looks a lot like Williamsburg—unimpressive apartment buildings along a main street, shoddy-looking shops with signs in Yiddish and Hebrew with names like The Shabbos Fish Market, The House of Glatt Butcher Shop, and M. Raskin’s Fancy Fruits and Vegetables. On the wall of Jacoff’s Drugs I saw a number of notices: an invitation to the Mitzvah Kashrus Tea, where Rivka Shurtzman was scheduled to give a talk titled “Keeping Kosher, My Giant Leap”; an ad for a Hot Shmurgesboard (sic) at the Olei Torah Ballroom; and a sign promising GOOD NEWS, NO MORE MESSY SCHACH for people who suffer from succah drip.

  The differences between Crown Heights and Williamsburg are subtle. There are few women drivers in either neighborhood, but in Crown Heights wives sit next to their husbands in the front seat, while in Satmar country they stay in the back. And, not far from Chabad headquarters, there is a bookstore. It is not exactly Scribner’s, but in its display window Kosher Calories and King David and the Frog. shared a shelf with Brimstone and Fire. As I stood peering into the shop, two young men in dark raincoats and fedoras came out and smiled at me. The atmosphere in Crown Heights is friendly, hospitable; it is hard to imagine these people out on a chopsim.

  The heart of the neighborhood is the rebbe’s mansion and headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. It is from here that young men are dispatched to isolated Jewish communities to act as teachers, kosher butchers, and religious functionaries; orders are drafted for Chabad lobbyists in Israel; and the rebbe’s words are disseminated by pamphlet, tape, and videocassette.

  I went, uninvited and unannounced, to the headquarters and asked to meet with someone who could tell me about Chabad. One of the yeshiva boys led me through a maze of classrooms and delivered me to the office of a young rabbi named Friedman. He had no idea who I was, and he was obviously busy; but he put everything aside and listened with an encouraging smile as I explained my project. Chabadniks have the missionary’s worldliness; unlike the Satmar Chasidim, they are comfortable with non-religious Jews and understand them, up to a point. They are also not averse to publicity. Friedman loaded me down with great piles of press clippings, translations of the rebbe’s speeches, and other “background material,” with the gentle insistence of a professional flack.

  “Is there anything else you need?” he asked helpfully.

  “Yes, I’d like to go out with one of your mitzvah tanks,” I told him. A mitzvah is, literally, a religious commandment. There are 613, regulating every aspect of life, but the rebbe especially emphasizes one—the commandment to put on tefillin, or prayer phylacteries. Chabad dispatches roving bands of Chasidim who visit businessmen in their offices and implore them to put on the leather straps; others run tefillin stations—known as mitzvah tanks—on street corners of major cities.

  Rabbi Friedman picked up the phone with the dispatch of a junior executive and spoke briefly with a subordinate. “We’ve got a few mitzvah tanks going this week. You can visit any of them but I suggest the one on 47th and Fifth Avenue. That’s where the action is,” he said with a smile.

  That Friday, I found the tank at its appointed spot in midtown Manhattan. Despite its paramilitary name, it proved to be a disappointingly civilian GMC Vandura mobile home, stocked with prayer books and sets of tefillin. The tank crew consisted of seven young men in their late teens or early twenties, all hardened veterans of two years of Chabad missionary work in the Pacific Northwest. Five were native Brooklynites; the other two were from Oak Park, Michigan, and São Paulo, Brazil.

  Mendy (“it’s short for Mendel”) Kalmanson took charge of me. A smiling, fresh-faced boy in a man’s dark suit and fedora, he led me inside the van, offered me a diet Pepsi (“a little nosh,” he said shyly), and explained the operation. The crew is divided into two teams—outside men who stop passersby, strike up a conversation, and try to convince them to put on tefillin; and inside men, who wait in the tank and show the volunteers how to do it.

  At headquarters, Rabbi Friedman had explained that the Chabad emphasis on tefillin stems from the Six-Day War, when the rebbe ordered his followers to convince fellow Jews to wear them in order to demonstrate Jewish power and solidarity. Rabbi Friedman strongly implied that Israel’s victory had been a result of that order—rebbe-centered explanations of historical events and natural phenomena are common among his disciples. But Mendy didn’t know the background of the tefillin campaign, and he seemed surprised that I would wonder about it. “It’s a commandment,” he told me with boyish conviction. “It’s straight outta the Torah. What more do you need?”

  As we were talking, the door of the van opened and a young man in a business suit entered, followed by one of the outside men who blocked his retreat. The man, a Russian immigrant, looked around nervously. “We must make this quick, all right?” he said, but his concern was unnecessary; Mendy was already working with a practiced dispatch, rolling up the man’s sleeve and winding the leather straps around his arm. “We’ll have you out of here in a jiffy,” he said cheerfully as the man looked on with a dubious expression. Mendy handed him a prayerbook, led him in what was obviously an unfamiliar benediction, unwound the straps, and wished him a good Shabbes. The whole operation took about three minutes.

  Thousands of people passed the mitzvah tank in the next hour, but only seven more came in—two more Russians, a Moroccan Jew from Montreal, an Israeli who lives in Queens, two Mexican tourists, and a Turkish businessman. There wasn’t a single American customer. I pointed this out to Mendy, but he simply shrugged. “It’s like anything else, you get your good days and your bad days. Besides, a Jew’s a Jew and a mitzvah’s a mitzvah.”

  Curious to see what was happening on the street, I left the van and joined the outside men on the corner of 47th and 5th. Each one had a stack of pamphlets he offered to passersby, asking likely candidates, “Are you Jewish?” People
rushed past without looking up, or shook their heads briefly. No one stopped.

  “If a person says no right away, that means he isn’t Jewish,” explained Shaya Harlig, one of the outside men. “So I just say, ‘have a nice day.’ But if he hesitates before saying no, then he’s Jewish. Usually I don’t say anything, but sometimes, if he really looks Jewish, I say, ‘Come on, gimme a break.’ ”

  “That’s right,” said another one of the boys. “But you know, sometimes people have funny reactions. Like one time a man came over to me and said, ‘Last week you asked if I was Jewish and I said no. I haven’t been able to sleep all week. So, yes, I’m Jewish.’ ”

  “Did you get him into the tank?” I asked. The boy shook his head. “He said he was too busy. But at least it was a start,” he said, sighing.

  A well-dressed lady stopped to talk. The mitzvah tank crew does not stop women, who have no religious duty to put on tefillin. But, unlike other Chasidic men, Chabadniks are not afraid to talk to them in public. The lady had just seen a production of The Merchant of Venice. “Are Jews allowed to charge interest or not?” she asked one of the crew, who answered her politely, as if he had been put on the corner as a municipal Talmudic information service.

  One of the boys came up to me with a stack of pamphlets. “Why don’t you give it a try?” he offered with a grin. “You almost look like one of us.” I realized that he was right. I had a beard, a dark coat, and black trousers, as well as a black silk yarmulke on my head, and I looked like an older version of the tank crew. I accepted the pamphlets and, feeling somewhat foolish, took my place on the corner.