No Eruv 4 Lower East Side

 

Manhattan, NY - Strung together out of poles and wire, is the symbolic boundary known as an eruv by a group of rabbis who decided last fall to extend an uptown Manhattan eruv southward.

Formerly, the eruv had run from 125 Street to 56th Street; by summertime, it will stretch to Houston Street.
But one area conspicuously left out of the eruv is the Lower East Side. And some in that neighborhood are asking, why not us?
Juda Engelmayer, the owner of Kossar's Bialys, a 70-year-old bakery, said he had seen the local Orthodox community dwindle. And if they build an eruv "People will say, 'Hey, I'll come down here, there's an eruv, I can carry,' " Mr. Engelmayer said. "And maybe a community would grow down here again.

But unlike most other Manhattan neighborhoods, the Lower East Side has traditionally shunned the eruv.
"It's like a taboo word," said Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, manager for religious life at the N.Y.U. Jewish center, who helped organize the eruv's extension to Houston Street. "There are strong voices on the Lower East Side who are opposed to putting up an eruv, and we didn't really have an interest in butting heads with them."