The Young and the Restless

By Samuel C. Heilman

Published: April 9, 2006

THE Orthodox Jews of Borough Park in Brooklyn lead a double life. They are at once an insular community, deliberately isolated from what many see as the corrupting force of the surrounding culture, and an integral and recognizable part of New York. That duality was on display last Tuesday, when protests erupted after an encounter between police officers and an Orthodox Jew who was stopped for talking on his cellphone while driving.

Of all the Jews in Brooklyn, about 37 percent call themselves Orthodox, and of all the neighborhoods in Brooklyn, none is a better known Orthodox heartland than Borough Park (or, as the locals spell it, Boro Park). The neighborhood, which took on a suburban character in the 1920's when rows of houses were built on tree-lined streets, has been transformed over the last 40 years from ''suburb to shtetl,'' as the sociologist Egon Mayer put it.

The Hasidim and other ultra-Orthodox Jews -- men in black coats, beards and earlocks, modestly dressed women pushing strollers overflowing with children -- make up a significant proportion of what seems to many outsiders an extraordinarily closed society, with its Yiddish vernacular and expressive Jewishness. When I take my students on tours of Boro Park, which has more than 110 yeshivas, 240 synagogues and many Jewish specialty shops, and where the sexes are segregated to the greatest extent possible, they often feel that they are visiting another country.

For many of its residents, too, Boro Park has the feel of a separate enclave, surrounded by an invisible wall of virtue that divides residents from what they view as a culturally dangerous surrounding society. Manhattan, the sin city that is so near and yet so far, is a potent symbol of the values and trends from which Orthodox society imagines it must shield itself by means of customs, language, religious rites and education (almost all the Jewish youngsters attend yeshivas or private day schools).

But as any New Yorker knows, ultra-Orthodox Jews are also very much a part of the ethnic mosaic of the city. What candidate for city or statewide public office has not made the trip to Boro Park for a photo op with one or another Hasidic rebbe? On victory night, the bearded, black-coated Orthodox are typically present at the scene of electoral celebrations. And can there be a shot of the New York City marathon that doesn't show the runners passing by Hasidim handing them drinks and applauding? Or is there a baseball game, on any night other than the Sabbath or a Jewish holy day, where the Orthodox are not to be found? For all their efforts at separation, these Jews are at once insiders and outsiders.

Police officers of the 66th Precinct know that Boro Park is a safe place to serve (so far this year, crime complaints -- already low -- have declined by 16 percent from last year). Yet it is also a place that seems, to many of the officers who are not Orthodox Jews, both strange and self-centered. A neighborhood where people speak a foreign language and live according to another calendar can be, for many police officers who serve it, puzzling at best and culturally threatening at worst.

Community leaders and most of the adults in the enclave know that they depend on the police to make their island in the city secure. They value their officers -- even if they are certain that many have no understanding of the culture and society they protect. This is a profound change for a group that includes a great many children of Holocaust survivors as well as survivors themselves; in their collective memory, the police were often a part of the problem rather than a source of security. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of these older people, including the 75-year-old man at the center of the incident, were unwilling to condemn the police unequivocally.

Young people, born and raised in New York, were the ones who caused most of the hubbub last week, and for all the efforts their elders have made to insulate them from the surrounding culture, they've absorbed it. When they began yelling, ''No justice, no peace,'' they were not quoting the Hebrew prophets or the Torah; they were echoing their African-American neighbors in the borough, who abhor what they perceive as disrespect from the police.

These young Orthodox Jews have learned how a beleaguered and threatened minority in this city can respond when it wants to rein in the police or the powerful. This Passover season, as the Jewish people celebrate their liberation from slavery, these youngsters wanted to express their liberation from what they saw as another too-powerful arm of tyranny -- even if the problem was nothing more than a misunderstanding, rather than a return to the bondage of Egypt.

Their rabbis and elders must surely be concerned about this turn of events. More threatening than the incident with the police is the possibility that their children, the products of so much concern and education -- the future of their community -- may have become too much like the other New York, the one outside the enclave.

I have no doubt that many Orthodox leaders are looking forward to curbing the passions of those who lost control and bringing them back to concerns about the perfidy of the Pharaoh against their ancient forebears, rather than the acts of a couple of police officers on the streets of Boro Park. Everyone will be counting the days to Passover.