A Night Ride With the Williamsburg Shomrim
The anti-Semitic attacks that have drawn attention to the Haredi enclave of South Williamsburg are worrying, but luckily they’re not happening on a nightly or even a weekly basis. A weeknight patrol with the Shomrim, the Williamsburg community’s neighborhood watch, is unlikely to encounter an unprovoked assault on anyone who’s visibly Jewish. The attacks have no logic or organization behind them—they cannot be anticipated, and they aren’t geographically clustered. So far, nothing has been able to stop or deter them.
As a longtime Shomrim volunteer explained to me as I rode along for a shift that lasted from around 11 PM until 3:30 a.m. on a recent Monday night, the organization is like a Jewish 311, local-level solvers of problems for which the police might not be perfectly suited—crowd control at major community events, helping elderly people who have wandered from home, or resolving raccoon or bird-related mishaps. Last year saw an epidemic of bicycle-jackings in the area. But the Shomrim are also extra sets of eyes in a place whose residents are increasingly concerned about their safety. Earlier this month, four attackers beat a 24-year-old Hasidic man in the south end of the neighborhood. Three Jewish men were attacked in separate incidents in the neighborhood early one morning in August, shortly after Tisha B’Av.
Over the course of the night, the two volunteers I rode with watched as sidewalk traffic thinned, and as the Jews of Williamsburg returned home from workplaces and kollels and simchas. The Shomrim drive unmarked SUVs in a circuitous patrol around a small patch of north Brooklyn, never straying north of Broadway, or, from what I could tell, south of Park Avenue. They dress in matching white button-up shirts, and communicate in English over walkie-talkie. We kept passing local landmarks: A fully-erected Leiter-brand sukkah in the median of a triangular intersection, the giant interlocking art deco boxes of the Pfizer Building on Flushing, Felty Hats on Lee Avenue, the glowing Hebrew letters announcing an enormous school just off of Penn Street. By 1 AM, the sidewalks were nearly empty—a few times an hour we would pass Jewish men walking alone; we drove around a skateboarder riding north on Flushing, heading towards hipster Bushwick.
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