One Community, 6,000 Miles Apart, Is Wracked by Coronavirus

(Bloomberg) -- The new coronavirus is tearing through the leading centers of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life, despite the 6,000 miles between them.

Ultra-Orthodox communities have become virus flashpoints in both New York and in Israel, after many residents, at the behest of revered rabbis, flouted social distancing orders that clashed with their religious lifestyles. Some of those rabbis have changed course.

The Trump administration recently singled out New York’s Rockland County, with its large ultra-Orthodox population, as having one of the fastest-growing rates of spread in the U.S. Last week, Israel took the unprecedented step of sealing off Bnei Brak, an ultra-Orthodox city of 210,000 near Tel Aviv.

The standoff over social distancing reflects a wider conflict between religious and secular authority that’s played out across the globe as governments struggle to contain the virus. Religious communities have been responsible for major clusters of illness in countries including South Korea, France, Indonesia and Iran, and even as the death toll surged, evangelicals in the U.S. called for big gatherings over Easter.

In Jewish ultra-Orthodox communities, there was stiff resistance to orders to close schools and halt religious study groups, synagogue prayers and mass ceremonies like weddings and funerals. The virus can also spread more easily in these communities because families tend to be large, in line with a biblical prescription, and to live in cramped quarters since many men study religious texts instead of working.

The confirmed rate of infection in Bnei Brak is 0.7%, versus less than 0.1% for the country overall. Israel has more than 9,000 confirmed cases, and 60 people have died.

Ultra-Orthodox Health Minister Yaakov Litzman caught the virus, and that’s also forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials to self-isolate protectively. Israeli television reported that Litzman attended group prayers in defiance of his ministry’s own guidelines, and refused to have his temperature taken before parliament’s swearing-in ceremony last month and ahead of a TV interview. He’s denied deliberately flouting guidelines.

That some ultra-Orthodox initially could defy the rules with impunity may be testimony to their parties’ political clout. Though they number 12% of Israel’s population of 9.1 million, Netanyahu has relied on the ultra-Orthodox parties to keep him in power throughout most of his political career.

Late last month, 400 mourners came to bury a prominent rabbi, but police didn’t confront them. Around the same time, dozens of ultra-Orthodox Jews gathered for the wedding of a relative of Bnei Brak’s mayor.

Political leaders failed the ultra-Orthodox community, said Yair Sheleg, a columnist for Makor Rishon, a weekly newspaper with a Jewish nationalist viewpoint.

“The ultra-Orthodox politicians didn’t say from the beginning that there was no choice but to shut down because they feared the response from the community,” Sheleg said in an interview. “Netanyahu was scared to annoy his coalition partners. The facts speak for themselves.”

In New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo is weighing a curfew for the state’s hardest-hit areas. In addition to Rockland County, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency has reported that four heavily ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods in Brooklyn have especially high rates of the disease.

“We always come together in celebration and in mourning,” said Mona Montal, the ultra-Orthodox chief of staff for the supervisor of Ramapo, a town in Rockland. “Not to be able to do that is very challenging for everybody, but it’s all the more challenging for the community here.”

Most of Ramapo’s 90,000 ultra-Orthodox residents are now complying with social distancing, Montal said. Religious leaders are speaking daily with police and politicians, rabbis disseminate updates, and there’s now a coronavirus hotline for speakers of Yiddish, the language spoken predominantly by ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Ensuring safe funerals, however, remains a “challenge,” she said.

Under the tightened restrictions in Israel, police have set up barricades at entry points to Bnei Brak and the army has sent in soldiers to enforce the rules and deliver food to at-risk residents. The government arranged care facilities outside the city for infected residents, but many have remained in Bnei Brak, media reported.

Efforts to enforce compliance in other ultra-Orthodox areas have run into turbulence. Police have been cursed for breaking up prayers, and rescue service workers who came to perform a coronavirus test in a Jerusalem neighborhood were pelted with rocks, media reported.

“There are always those who don’t listen, who think they know better than the authorities,” said Lior Alperovitch, a Holocaust historian who lives in Bnei Brak. “You don’t need 210,000 to do that for the virus to spread. Just the couple hundred who went to a funeral there, a wedding here.”

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