Will New York City’s Orthodox Jews Leave Too?

For Brooklyn’s diverse communities of Orthodox Jews, it was a summer like none other.

To be sure, every year as the temperature rises and the city empties out, there is a heightened sense of lawlessness—fireworks illegally set off in advance of July 4th, homeless men and women sleeping on the streets rather than in designated shelters, and the stench of uncollected trash sweltering in the heat.

But this summer brought additional pressures. By summer’s end, nearly 25,000 city residents had died of the coronavirus, and many more fallen ill, while the rest were confined to life at home and under mask. Hundreds of thousands lost jobs and businesses closed en masse, many permanently. Violent crime rose; the murder rate in June 2020 was up by 23 percent from 2019, and there was a 130-percent increase in shooting incidents compared to the previous year. All of which would be reason enough to lose sleep, if New Yorkers weren’t already losing sleep because of the absurd number—much higher than in previous years—of illegal fireworks exploding everywhere at all hours of the night in the weeks running up the 4th, leading to thousands of desperate complaints and even to conspiracy theories that the police were setting them off in a campaign of psychological warfare. (Perhaps because the other problems were so intractable, everybody I spoke to for this report fixated on the fireworks.)