The Brooklyn shopkeeper was already home for the night when her phone
rang: a man who said he was from a neighborhood “modesty committee” was
concerned that the mannequins in her store’s window, used to display
women’s clothing, might inadvertently arouse passing men and boys.
“The man said, ‘Do the neighborhood a favor and take it out of the
window,’ ” the store’s manager recalled. “ ‘We’re trying to safeguard
our community.’ ”
In many neighborhoods, a store owner might shrug off such a call. But on
Lee Avenue, the commercial spine of Hasidic Williamsburg, the warning
carried an implied threat — comply with community standards or be
shunned. It is a potent threat in a neighborhood where shadowy,
sometimes self-appointed modesty squads use social and economic leverage
to enforce conformity.
The owner wrestled with the request for a day or two, but decided to
follow it. “We can sell it without mannequins, so we might as well do
what the public wants,” the owner told the manager, who asked not to be
identified because of fear of reprisals for talking.
In the close-knit world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, community members
know the modesty rules as well as Wall Street bankers who show up for
work in a Brooks Brothers suit. Women wear long skirts and long-sleeved,
high-necked blouses on the street; men do not wear Bermuda shorts in
summer. Schools prescribe the color and thickness of girls’ stockings.
The rules are spoken and unspoken, enforced by social pressure but also,
in ways that some find increasingly disturbing, by the modesty
committees. Their power is evident in the fact that of the half dozen
women’s clothing stores along Lee Avenue, only one features mannequins,
and those are relatively shapeless, fully clothed torsos.
The groups have long been a part of daily life in the ultra-Orthodox
communities that dot Brooklyn and other corners of the Jewish world. But
they sprang into public view with the trial of Nechemya Weberman,
a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidim in Brooklyn, who last week was
sentenced to 103 years in prison after being convicted of sexually
abusing a young girl sent to him for counseling.
Mr. Weberman, an unlicensed therapist, testified during his trial that
boys and girls — though not his accuser — were regularly referred to him
by a Hasidic modesty committee concerned about what it viewed as
inappropriate attire and behavior.
The details were startling: a witness for Mr. Weberman’s defense, Baila Gluck,
testified that masked men representing a modesty committee in the
Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., 50 miles northwest of New York
City, broke into her bedroom about seven years ago and confiscated her
cellphone.
The Brooklyn district attorney, Charles J. Hynes,
who prosecuted the Weberman case, has now received allegations that
members of a modesty committee forced their way into a home in the
borough, confiscating an iPad and computer equipment deemed
inappropriate for Orthodox children, officials say. Allegations have
also surfaced that a modesty committee threatened to publicly shame a
married man who was having an affair unless he paid the members money
for what they described as therapy.
“They operate like the Mafia,” said Rabbi Allan Nadler, director of the
Jewish studies program at Drew University in Madison, N.J.
Rabbi Nadler, who testified at Mr. Weberman’s trial, said that modesty
committees did not have addresses, stationery or business cards, and
that few people seemed to know where their authority originated, though
it was doubtful, he said, that they could continue operating without the
tacit blessings of rabbinical leaders.
“They walk into a store and say it would be a shame if your window was
broken or you lost your clientele,” he said. “They might tell the father
of a girl who wears a skirt that’s too short and he’s, say, a store
owner: ‘If you ever want to sell a pair of shoes, speak to your
daughter.’ ”
In Israel, there have been similar concerns. Though no modesty committee
was overtly involved, there has been anger over ultra-Orthodox zealots
who spit on and insulted an 8-year-old girl for walking to school
through their neighborhood in a dress they considered immodest.
In Brooklyn, Assemblyman Dov Hikind,
who has represented the heavily Hasidic neighborhood of Borough Park
for 30 years, said that he had never met a modesty committee member, but
that “there are a lot of independent operators that believe they are
protecting God and have to do this kind of stuff, and that’s sickening
and gives us all a black eye.”
“If you want to advocate modesty,” he added, “do your thing, but when
you stuff it down my throat physically, that undermines us and hurts
us.”
Hasidic leaders contend that the modesty committees are nothing more
than self-appointed individuals who, indignant at some perceived
infraction, take matters into their own hands.
“These are individual people who decide to take on this crusade,” said
Rabbi David Niederman, who as president of the United Jewish
Organization of Williamsburg is a sometime spokesman for the Satmar
Hasidim. “You see posters telling people do this and do that. It does
not represent an authorized body.”
But many Hasidim say they have seen or heard how a shadowy group of men
seeks to pressure parents to rein in children who wear dresses too short
or stockings too thin, or who chat on cellphones with friends of the
opposite sex. One family reported being harassed because the wife had
stepped outdoors with a robelike housecoat rather than a long dress.
While many of the rules of conduct are announced on Yiddish broadsides
posted on trees, lampposts and walls, residents of Hasidic neighborhoods
say some store owners have received rough verbal warnings from a
modesty committee to stop selling magazines that carry photographs
considered too revealing, or articles that dispute the Satmar Hasidim’s
belief that Israel should not have existed until the Messiah’s arrival.
The Central Rabbinical Congress of the United States and Canada, in
addition to certifying foods as kosher and adjudicating matrimonial and
commercial disputes, does at times remind the Satmar community of the
community’s modesty rules. It is made up of scores of rabbis, but it has
an address — it is housed on the second floor of a Williamsburg row
house — and it signs every decree it issues.
“We give out proclamations,” said Rabbi Yitzchok Glick, its executive
director. “We don’t enforce. It’s like people can decide to keep Shabbos
or not. If someone wants to turn on the light on Shabbos, we cannot put
him in jail for that.”
But Hasidim interviewed said squads of enforcers did exist in wildcat form.
“There are quite a few men, especially in Williamsburg, who consider
themselves Gut’s polizei,” said Yosef Rapaport, a Hasidic journalist,
using the words for “God’s police.”
“It’s somebody who is a busybody, and they’re quite a few of them —
zealots who take it upon themselves and they just enforce. They’re
considered crazy, but people don’t want to confront them.”http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/30/nyregion/shadowy-squads-enforce-modesty-in-hasidic-brooklyn.html
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