The Los Angeles Times ran a story this week on the LA Eruv and how the freeway reconstruction is affecting us.
Thanks to the LA Times coverage, we’ve also done interviews with KNX radio and NBC TV. Here’s a link to the NBC TV video on the Eruv.
here’s what Mitchell Landsberg of the LA Times had to say:
Carmageddon, schmarmageddon.
Like just about everybody else, Orthodox Jews in Los Angeles have their issues with the 405 Freeway widening project. Unlike most people, however, their primary concern is not necessarily the impending closure of a stretch of the freeway on the July 16-17 weekend.
Their problem is that the 405 construction project keeps messing up their eruv.
Some explanation is probably in order.
An eruv is a ritual enclosure surrounding a neighborhood. It can be a fence, a wall, a piece of string — or a freeway. And it must be unbroken.
Its purpose is legalistic, a loophole, some might say. It allows observant Jews to perform certain actions on the Sabbath — carry a tray of food or push a baby stroller, for example — that Jewish law prohibits in public on that day.
In effect, it creates an entire zone that is considered communal.
Some eruvs can be fairly small, enclosing a tight-knit Jewish neighborhood. Brooklyn, for instance, is checkered with relatively small ones. It is perhaps not surprising that Los Angeles, the city that practically invented urban sprawl, is home to one of the largest eruvs anywhere, a vast enclosure 40 miles in circumference, surrounding much of the Westside and spilling over into the San Fernando Valley.
Read the full story here: