NY Times Needing to abide by their tribe’s traditions of modesty, Hasidic women
want the city to post a female lifeguard during a women-only swim
session at a municipal pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and have lobbied a
local councilman to take up their cause.
On another front, Hasidic matzo bakeries, citing ancient Jewish law,
have insisted on using water from groundwater wells rather than from
reservoirs in preparing the dough used for matzos and have found
themselves tangling with health officials worried about the water’s
purity.
And on a public bus service that plies a route between the Hasidic
neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Borough Park, Brooklyn, men sit up
front and women in the back, hewing to the practice of avoiding casual
mingling of the sexes, even after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg condemned
the arrangement.
While these episodes may not have reverberated beyond New York’s Hasidic
enclaves, taken together they underscore a religious ascendancy
confronting the city’s secular authorities in ways not seen in decades.
The remarkable rise in the population and the influence of Hasidim and
other ultra-Orthodox Jews has provoked repeated conflicts over revered
practices, forcing the city into a balancing act between not treading
over constitutional lines by appearing to favor a particular religious
group and providing an accommodation no more injurious than suspending
parking rules for religious holidays.[...]