By Cindy Mindell ~

Rabbi Brahm Weinberg

WESTPORT — After the electricians and bucket-trucks have restored power to West Hartford residents, one of the next requests they receive will be from Rabbi Brahm Weinberg. The spiritual leader of Young Israel of West Hartford is also responsible for maintaining the community’s eruv, the ritual enclosure around a Jewish home or community that allows observant Jews to carry objects outside their homes on Shabbat.
Because many eruvim make use of existing telephone poles and wires, damaged during the October snowstorm, those ritual enclosures are considered unkosher and must be repaired.
Two Connecticut eruvim – West Hartford and Westport-Norwalk – are among many along the East Coast that were rendered unusable, making it halachically unacceptable for observant Jews to carry objects outdoors on the Sabbath.
The Westport-Norwalk eruv relies almost exclusively on existing telephone poles and wires, some of which were damaged during the storm.
“One of the rabbis responsible for maintaining and supervising the eruv informed me that it sustained significant damage during the storm and will need to be repaired,” says Rabbi Ron Fish of Congregation Beth El in Norwalk, one of the synagogues included in the eruv.
“A lot of things are damaged,” says Weinberg. “We’re now going around to assess what needs to be fixed.” Eruv maintenance is a weekly task, Weinberg says, and it’s normal to find small breaks that can easily be fixed. In the case of electrical damage, Weinberg calls in an electrical company with a bucket truck, something that’s been in high demand in the wake of the storm. “What’s most important is that the roads get cleared, the power gets restored, and people are safe,” he says. “Then we can work on fixing the eruv.”
The West Hartford eruv information phone-line is now the equivalent of the CL&P hotline, with eruv users calling daily to check the status. But the line was down after the storm, and users had to rely on Weinberg’s email updates and on Twitter. Stephen Mendelsohn of New Britain is Twitter-master for the eruv, a task he took on in January. The weekly feed, is also carried on the websites of Young Israel of West Hartford and Young Israel of Hartford, and can also be received on a Smartphone, Mendelsohn says.
Mendelsohn got the idea to put the eruv status on Twitter while researching the circumcision-ban controversy in San Francisco, one of the last major U.S. cities to get an eruv. A member of that eruv committee worked for Twitter, and was asked by the committee’s rabbi to employ the technology. Now there are many eruvim using Twitter, Mendelsohn says, as well as a centralized list: http://twitter.com/therealdesh/eruvs.
“Eruv may be among the least visible institutions in the Jewish community, but a traditional Shabbat is not the same when it goes down, or is re-routed,” Mendelsohn says. “That is especially true for mothers of small children, people with disabilities, and others who have a particular need to carry outside their homes.”
Weinberg says that halachically, it’s no different if an eruv is broken in one spot or one hundred. “Even if there’s a tiny break, the whole eruv is down,” he says. “This week is different only in terms of the scope of what needs to be repaired. And what’s unprecedented is the number of eruvim damaged all over the East Coast, at the same time.”