Orthodox Graffiti

Featured News

Thursday, 23 June 2011 11:42

For this newspaper, there are about 200 dispenser boxes on streets throughout Long Island and the five boroughs of New York City. The fact is rather innocuous and inconsequential. Itâ€™s simply a circulation tool to make it more convenient for readers and potential readers to find the paper, take it home, and peruse its usually informative contents.

But these brown and black newspaper dispenser boxes are more than that. When they are empty, which is usually Monday through Wednesday, they serve as inanimate ambassadors of our company and as a reminder that Thursday is not that far away and a new and exciting issue of the Five Towns Jewish Times will once again be available shortly.

Their existence is rarely if ever brought to our attention. Our delivery team simply monitors them, makes sure they remain safe and mostly clean, and fills them with new editions of the 5TJT when the paper is printed every Thursday.

As publisher and editor of the paper, I oversee and am responsible for every aspect of this publication. Looking back over 11 years, I plainly would not have it any other way. Our office receives calls daily inquiring about any number of situations. As my father, of blessed memory, was wont to say in Yiddish sometimes, â€œAltz kumt ois tzum mein kup.â€ Loosely translated, that means, â€œIt all falls on my head.â€

So it was that early last week I noticed some words sloppily scribbled on one of the boxes out here in the Five Towns. I see this box almost every day, as it is just a few feet from the entrance to the Lawrence post office where I or someone from my office picks up our mail. At first I didnâ€™t focus on the words, but the other day two things happened. On Thursday I took a closer look and saw that the words sloppily displayed on the right side of the box say, â€œDamn Orthodox.â€

I canâ€™t say specifically that I know what this is about, but it is clearly intended to negatively characterize and offend the rather significant number of Orthodox Jews in the Five Towns, which has grown especially over the last decade and a half. This is not the first time Iâ€™ve seen these two words defacing property around town. In the last few months, Iâ€™ve received photos of the same two words written on a small advertising billboard at the Woodmere and Far Rockaway train stations.

So someone is obviously either angry about something, somewhat mentally unbalanced, or more likely a combination of the two. It is difficult to say who this is and as of this writing the matter has not been reported to the police. A meeting with local police officials is being arranged and surveillance cameras covering the area will be reviewed to see if the perpetrator can be identified. Iâ€™m not sure how the authorities classify or identify anti-Semitic incidents but based on my limited knowledge I would say that this can certainly be classified as such.

There is however something intriguing, I believe, about the difference between graffiti comments that target Jews in general as opposed to those that single out Orthodox Jews. The situation is that the act most likely comes from someone who is able to distinguish the difference between Jews in general and Orthodox Jews. If I had to go out on a limb and speculate, Iâ€™d say the intended offensive two-word remark came from someone with more than just general familiarity with the difference between the various streams of Judaism. We all know from history that when it comes to classic Jew-hatred, the haters either do not care or are simply unable to deconstruct the components that constitute Jewish life. My feeling is that someone has to possess some knowledge in order to harbor anti-Jewish animosity just for Orthodox Jews.

The fact is that the Five Towns Orthodox Jewish community today is one of the premier communities of its type and still causes some discomfort for many Jewish as well as non-Jewish neighbors. These sentiments are without foundation, are prejudicial, and should not be tolerated. Orthodox Jews, however, accept the harassment and intimidation as a matter of course and as a price for building modern Torah communities filled with shuls and yeshivas in the Diaspora.

Iâ€™m not saying that the animosity that may exist necessarily has to pour out and manifest itself in offensive and trite pejoratives scribbled on Jewish newspaper boxes. But sadly, in this instance, this may be precisely what we are dealing with. Additionally, it may not be so much about Orthodoxyâ€”which they probably donâ€™t understand anywayâ€”as it is about success that the haters envy.

The fact is that today in a community like Lawrence, the five governing members of the Village Board of Trustees are Orthodox and six of the seven school-board members are Orthodox too. That these individuals are also successful and accomplished businesspeople and have as governing entities righted situations that were spiraling out of control is often neglected and overlooked.

Our newspaper boxes clearly state that we are a newspaper that serves our New Yorkâ€“area Orthodox communities, so I suppose we are clearly a target. For me, the wonder is that the overwhelming majority of these boxes have remained chained in their spots on various street corners untouched and unbothered. I am asked on occasion about the many dispenser boxes we have out there and the regulations and laws involved in simply plunking down such a piece of equipment and chaining them to a parking sign or utility poll.

The distribution of reading materialâ€”newspapers, magazines, books, and the likeâ€”are covered by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that calls for free expression and free speech. There are, however, some municipalities, specifically on Long Island, that have local ordinances that call for the issuing of permits for the placement of these kinds of distribution points, without imposing any encumbrances on the right of free expression.

So while you have a constitutional right to freely express yourself, it still has to be done prudently and safely. I found that out over the last two years with two summonses our office received from the department of environmental protection in the City of New York. The city apparently has teams roaming the five boroughs snapping very clear and crisp photographs and sharing them with the alleged offenders (of which we are not one). Nevertheless, there have been instances where we have been asked to move these boxes because someone somewhere may have perceived their presence as creating some kind of potential hazard. We have complied, of course, with the several situations that have been brought to our attention, and as the number of dispensers increases we of course continue to do so.

One such situation, for example, was in Brooklyn, where there is a handsome milk-chocolate-colored box on the corner of Avenue I and McDonald Avenue. Apparently when the box is empty, after all the newspapers have been taken by readers in the area, the box is prone to falling over on its side when there is an excessively strong wind blowing.

The boxes are chained with a 5-foot chain so that there is some limited maneuverability yet people are discouraged from taking one of them home. If someone for some reason did take one of these boxes home, I have no idea what they could possibly do with it. The fact is that they serve no purpose other than what they have been constructed for, to house newspapers on street corners.

And yes there has been a mystery or two with missing newspaper boxes. Take the Crown Heights neighborhood. A few years ago, we naively set down two dispenser boxes on Kingston Avenue not that far from Chabad World Headquarters. It took just a few hours and the boxes had vanished.

Canvassing the neighborhood to see what happened to them, eyewitnesses told us that the chains on the boxes were cut by the sanitation department and then carted away. Apparently for security reasons, there are no such dispensers allowed anywhere on Kingston Avenue or at least on that avenue between Empire Boulevard and Eastern Parkway. That community is where I was born and raised; Iâ€™d like to have the boxes there and Iâ€™m still trying to figure something out.

Which brings me back to my hometown today and the offending hieroglyphicsâ€”â€œDamn Orthodoxâ€â€”on one of the Lawrence boxes. I walked into the post office to get my mail last Friday and was waiting to speak to one of the clerks when a lady in front of me on line turned to me and asked, â€œDid you see the box?â€ and she added, â€œWhat are we going to do about it?â€

I responded that I was going to look into the possibility of having it cleaned up but that I thought that in the meantime itâ€™s not such an awful sight to behold, as it serves as a reminder of what we may be dealing with and what others that preceded us had to deal with albeit on a much more profound and overt level.

The words on the box are what I refer to as â€œcalling-card anti-Semitism.â€ Itâ€™s there and for now itâ€™s part of our landscape. We are, as I mentioned, in touch with local police officials and searching for the right cleaning agent to expunge our innocent dispenser boxes of being proxies for hateful diatribes, no matter how juvenile they may appear to be on the surface.

Comments for Larry Gordon are welcome at editor@5tjt.com.