Photo Credit:
Alan Jay Gerber

“When done properly…an eruv can be a boon to a community of Shabbat observers. The Ramah summer camps, for example, set up an eruv so that the entire camp becomes one large domain, and things may be carried freely from one place to another within the boundaries of the marked eruv.”

The Ramah camps referred to in the above paragraph comprise the camping arm of the Conservative movement, and while the authors of the eruv essay, Rabbi Gershon Schwartz of blessed memory and Rabbi Michael Katz, note that there are Jews who do not abide by the eruv, their firm position is that such non-abidance is not the normative stance of traditional Conservative Jewish observance.

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Given all of the above, perhaps any Conservative Jews who belong to or sympathize with Jews Against the Eruv will rethink their opposition to a religious requirement that is mandated by their own movement and that has historically come to represent the true unity of the Jewish community.

A careful reading of The Observant Life would do many of these people a lot of good.


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Alan Jay Gerber, a graduate of Yeshiva University, is a life member of the Association of Orthodox Jewish Teachers and a member of Kehillas Bais Yehudah Tzvi in Cedarhurst, Long Island. This article also appeared, in somewhat different form, in The Jewish Star.