Paul Bass Photo
The rabbi pointed high up in the sky to a light pole bearing a barely distinguishable wire. “Do you touch that one?” he asked the civil engineer beside him.
“I need to look at my plans,” replied the engineer as cars whooshed by on Martin Luther King Boulevard.
For the most part, though, the engineer, Daniel P. Casey (at left in above photo), was asking the questions. The rabbi, Dov Greer (at right), was offering answers, offering a seminar on the Jewish concept of “eruv.”
An eruv is an area with a continuous symbolic boundary that allows the religiously observant to carry keys or food or push strollers on the Sabbath. Downtown New Haven has an eruv (known as the “Yale Eruv”), though most people don’t notice it. It consists of wires high up on poles connected to each other or to walls or fences; existing telephone and electrical wires can count, which is why most people don’t notice them. New Haven’s downtown eruv connects to an older west side eruv at Orchard Street, enabling religious Jews to travel on foot and carry things basically from the Wilbur Cross Parkway in upper Westville to State Street. (Details of the boundaries can be found here.) Eruvs date back some 2,000 years to the time of the Talmud.
The engineer and the rabbi’s colloquium was more than academic. Casey, on contract with the state Department of Transportation (DOT), walked along Route 34 with Greer to start figuring out how to keep the eruv intact next year when a $35 million overhaul of the road begins.
The state plans to gradually fill in the Route 34 Connector mini-highway-to-nowhere and reconfigure the streets there as part of a project called Downtown Crossing, which includes construction of a new $100 million 10-story biomedical-oriented office tower by developer Carter Winstanley.
In the process, crews will move or replace light poles that keep the eruv aloft and connected and rip up streets along the boundaries.
So Casey walked the stretch of road with Greer last Wednesday to start planning an eruv-preservation strategy, with the goal of avoiding any Sabbaths with the boundary broken.
“We’re getting on top of it before the project takes off,” Casey said.
In the process, the state hopes to avoid the headaches it caused observant Jews on its last controversial large-scale street reconfiguring in New Haven, the $18.8 million widening of upper Whalley Avenue. The removal of telephone poles near Dayton Street blocked the paths of some people walking to Sabbath services at Westville Synagogue. (Read about that here.)
Greer met Casey in front of Knights of Columbus headquarters at Church and MLK. The DOT will widen the street there to prepare for closing the last exit of the Route 34 Connector. In the process, it may have to move light poles out of the way, including the one pictured, atop of which runs the eruv wire.
Moving the wire from old poles to new poles “should be the last thing you do before removing the old poles,” Greer suggested.
“You don’t need a rabbi to relocate a wire,” Greer told Casey. Just remember that wires must always rest on top of the poles, not the side.
He also suggested moving wires on Mondays or Tuesdays, so that if a problem arises, a rabbi and the DOT can swing into action before Friday sundown ushers in the Sabbath.
How about wood rather than steel poles? Casey asked.
That’s fine, Greer responded. “The key thing is the wire on top.”
Casey took Greer’s number as well as the numbers of Rabbi Noah Cheses from the New Haven Eruv committee as well as of the rabbi overseeing Yale’s eruv, Mayer Behrend. “Every time a contractor comes on board” for a portion of the project, Casey promised, he will forward all the numbers.
They crossed the busy intersection to walk the grassy slope dividing MLK from the Connector just west of the Church Street intersection. The eruv crosses high over trees there before swinging back across MLK. Greer needed his sunglasses; you could barely see the wire in the midday sun.
The duo, by this point joined by Tony Bialecki (at left in photo) from city government’s economic development office, proceeded to the corner of MLK and College. Greer pointed across the bridge to the other side of the Connector, to the Yale-New Haven and medical school district. At that point you don’t see light poles on the west side of College. In fact, around the hospital complex the eruv committee has found too few spots for several blocks around to which to attach wire or otherwise complete a boundary. As a result, people have to walk through the children’s hospital to get into Smilow Cancer Hospital or the main Yale-New Haven buildings. Greer said he hopes that the Downtown Crossing street reworking will also lead to a solution for a complete Yale-New Haven eruv.
Next year in New Haven, perhaps, or the year after. In the meantime, modern progress is rumbling its way to Route 34, with an ancient imperative riding along.