For Upcoming Concert Barclays Offering Separate Seating
The home of the Brooklyn Nets is courting a new crowd. In what is believed to be a first for a major sports and entertainment venue, Barclays Center is offering gender-divided seating for ultra-Orthodox Jews at a public event.
Several hundred seats are being set aside so that Jewish men and women can sit in separate areas — as is custom — at a Feb. 28 concert by violinist Itzhak Perlman. The night features Jewish music and cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot. The tickets for the aisle-divided section cost $50. The remaining seats are open to anyone else.
The new arena will also augment its regular Avenue K kosher food service that night with entrees from Abigael’s, a kosher restaurant in Manhattan.
Bruce Ratner, Barclays majority owner and developer, said “to [his] knowledge” the ultra-Orthodox arrangement was a first.
“Being in Brooklyn and being an arena that caters to such diversity, the opportunity to do things different than elsewhere is enormous,” Ratner told The Huffington Post.
Ratner, who is Jewish and a fan of liturgical music, said marketing to the strictly observant is worth a try. He said he will soon discover whether the demographic is “too niched.”
However, the potential customer base is there. About 40 percent of New York City’s 1.1 million Jews consider themselves Orthodox, according to a UJA-Federation study published in The New York Times, and many of them live in Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Borough Park is home to 130,000 Jews, most of whom are among the most conservative, according to a UJA follow-up in the Forward. Williamsburg has 74,500 Jews, also predominantly ultra-Orthodox.
Benny Rogosnitzky, a cantor under Helfgot at Manhattan’s Park East Synagogue, helped coordinate the concert. He noted that marketing, which includes ads in Jewish newspapers, has its challenges.
“The ultra-orthodox have been reclusive for years,” he explained to HuffPost. “They have not been open to outreach.”
Barclays will cut the main arena’s 19,000 concert capacity to 5,000 for the Perlman performance, meaning that a good chunk of patrons in the center’s Cushman & Wakefield Theater could be from the most traditional communities.
ben Torah
“The ultra-orthodox have been reclusive for years,” he explained to HuffPost. “They have not been open to outreach.”
That is beyond ironic.
We are ‘outreach’.
It’s beautiful that the non-orthodox are reaching out to unite orthodox and non-orthodox together for an ‘orthodox’ (Helfgot etc) venue.
The future has arrived!
Simchah poiretz geder!
Thank you to the Rebbe for making open hearted Ahavas Yisroel so widely practiced and known that those who feel outside of the religious Jewish community can also realize, appreciate and practice it fully.
As today’s Tanya says:
Even the greatest transgressor and sinner, it is the bad in him/her that we are to hate, yet even the capacity for their being additionally good we are to Love so much so that the hate we are commanded to have is overshadowed by the Love.
Keep it up Mr Ratner.
You’re bringing our family closer together.
From strength to strength, and
from Love to LOVE!
Chovevei
Support Mesivta Chovevei Torah in Crown Heights (a branch of Yeshivas Tomchei Temimim Lubavitch) and get your tickets to this historic event for only $36!
We have Men, Women and Open seating available.
Call the yeshiva between 11am – 1pm at 718-735-6601 x101, or email ULYChoveveiTorah@gmail.com
To number 1
I think the author means to say we’re not open to outreach from “outside communities” or “outside influence.” We’re very open to outreach when we’re trying to make people believe “our” approach to life, but we’re not at all receptive to other people’s point of view, or “outreach” from other communities.