By Jordan Heller for The Christian Science Monitor
Hasidic groups in New York patrol religious neighborhoods in marked cars, but they occasionally clash with outside groups and even among themselves.Night watch: Shomrim volunteers Gadi Hershkop (left) and Binyomin Lifshitz (right) patrol the Crown Heights neighborhood in New York. (Taylor Umlauf/Special to The Christian Science Monitor)
NEW YORK — The disheveled man looks momentarily confused. He’s wearing a puffy red coat that looks as if it was salvaged from the city dump. “Are you guys cops?” he asks.
He’s been set upon by four Hasidic Jews in the center aisle of House and Home Hardware on Flushing Avenue, a commercial strip that runs through the Hasidic section of Williamsburg in Brooklyn – a neighborhood uncanny for its resemblance to a 19th-century shtetl.
Jewish Street Patrols Curb Crime – and Generate Controversy
By Jordan Heller for The Christian Science Monitor
Hasidic groups in New York patrol religious neighborhoods in marked cars, but they occasionally clash with outside groups and even among themselves.
Night watch: Shomrim volunteers Gadi Hershkop (left) and Binyomin Lifshitz (right) patrol the Crown Heights neighborhood in New York. (Taylor Umlauf/Special to The Christian Science Monitor)
NEW YORK — The disheveled man looks momentarily confused. He’s wearing a puffy red coat that looks as if it was salvaged from the city dump. “Are you guys cops?” he asks.
He’s been set upon by four Hasidic Jews in the center aisle of House and Home Hardware on Flushing Avenue, a commercial strip that runs through the Hasidic section of Williamsburg in Brooklyn – a neighborhood uncanny for its resemblance to a 19th-century shtetl.
7
