This spring, his small, independent Yiddish-language magazine-called Der Veker, meaning “One Who Awakens”-published an investigative report on how the COVID-19 death rates in Hasidic neighborhoods compared with those in other parts of New York State. Far less common is pushback like Reuven’s, from within the Hasidic world. New York papers have published plenty of criticism of the Hasidic community’s disregard for COVID-19 safety, covering secretive weddings, massive funerals, and violent anti- lockdown protests. “What’s so disappointing and depressing, and even shocking, is the fact that we chose to do all this with zero precautions, for which there is absolutely no excuse.” “We shouldn't be judged merely on the fact that we feel that some forms of gatherings are important to us, even during a pandemic,” he told me. Reuven knows this he doesn’t fault the Hasidim for the way they live. For many people in these communities, sealing themselves inside their apartments for a year simply wasn’t possible. Orthodox Jews in New York are distinctly vulnerable to the virus for many of the same reasons low-income Black and Latino neighborhoods have been hit hard: crowded living spaces, lack of public-health infrastructure, jobs that require in-person work. Many large families share small apartments or rowhouses, where they stage elaborate meals each week on Shabbat and during the Jewish calendar’s many holidays, filling their homes with scrambling kids and occasionally the cousins and uncles who live just blocks away. Men crowd into synagogues in his Brooklyn neighborhood to pray together three times a day-morning, afternoon, and night. The Yiddish-speaking, Hasidic Jewish world that Reuven inhabits is intensely communal. “I have to weigh my options.” Reuven’s parents and siblings roll their eyes when he constantly talks about their risk of getting sick, just as he did at the beginning of the pandemic. But if they hadn’t gone, his relatives would have felt as if he were “judging them” for gathering, “and they judge me back,” he told me.
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No one who attended was in any rush to get a vaccine.