“We Don’t Protest”: Borough Park’s Mask-Burning Orthodox Jewish Demonstrators

Jacob Kornbluh, a Hasidic journalist, has lived in Borough Park, in southwest Brooklyn, for eighteen years. He has written on local and national politics from the neighborhood—which is home to one of the largest Haredi, or traditional Orthodox, communities in the city—for twelve. “Pre-pandemic, if you walked into any major Jewish event in New York City, you’d undoubtedly see him,” Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt recently wrote for the Forward, where she is an editor. Last month, mid-pandemic, hundreds of Haredi Jews took to the streets in protest of a new set of coronavirus restrictions on Borough Park. Kornbluh was there to report the story; he watched as the protesters—mostly young men and boys—tossed their masks into a makeshift bonfire in the middle of Thirteenth Avenue. The crowd was densely packed into a single street block, but it would occasionally part ways for one man, a big guy in a wrinkled suit, who commandeered a police megaphone. He spoke with a throaty, Brooklyn drawl, all “W”s and no “R”s. “You are my soldiers!” he bellowed. “We are at war!”

The man was Heshy Tischler, a local talk-radio host and a candidate for City Council. Kornbluh had covered Tischler before: in 2017, when the radio host had launched an earlier bid for City Council (and lost, having received just four per cent of the vote), and more recently, as Tischler had emerged as the leader of a local uprising against government covid measures. Lately, Tischler had begun accusing members of the community of being so-called government informants. The crowd noticed one such man filming their protest; he tried to run, but the protesters set upon him and beat him unconscious. Kornbluh left the scene when the violence began. There was a chance that it might turn on him next.

When the pandemic hit, in March, the coronavirus eviscerated Haredi communities like the one in Borough Park. Large families, crowded neighborhoods, and communal life and prayer functioned as preëxisting conditions. Entire communities across Brooklyn decided, by consensus, to shut themselves down, even as schools and restaurants throughout the city remained open.

But it’s hard to put faith on pause. Some Haredi Jews don’t watch television, and many keep “kosher” phones that filter or block the Internet; virtual worship isn’t possible when electronics are forbidden on holidays. There were scattered reports of congregations illicitly gathering throughout Brooklyn. When a prominent Hasidic rabbi in Williamsburg died in late April, the funeral procession drew thousands of mourners. The ceremony was outdoors and masked, and the N.Y.P.D. barricaded the streets, but at that point in the pandemic—the number of covid cases had reached a new peak just two weeks before—it was perceived as a serious violation. Mayor Bill de Blasio ordered that the event be broken up and tweeted a “message to the Jewish community” that “the time for warnings has passed.” Many Jews felt that the tweet was a crude generalization; the head of the Anti-Defamation League called it “scapegoating.” The Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council, an organization meant to counter discrimination against the Orthodox Jewish community, pointed out that thousands of New Yorkers had gathered the same day to watch the Blue Angels and Thunderbirds do a flyby. Where had the Mayor been then? And what about all the other Jewish communities who were following the rules?

Kornbluh documented the tensions in Borough Park. Among the city’s political press, he’s known as a reporter’s reporter—a news junkie who wears a yarmulke and speaks with a Yiddish-inflected British accent. Kornbluh grew up in London’s Stamford Hill, where his father started an emergency medical service. At a young age, he developed a fascination with journalism. “I knew probably the names of all the Knesset members,” he said, referring to Israel’s parliament. Kornbluh went to yeshiva but never finished high school. In 2001, he moved to Brooklyn, the center of the Hasidic world in the United States, and worked at a kosher deli; later, he opened a kosher pizza place. He had eclectic tastes for a member of his community, which tends to be highly insular: he taught himself to write by studying biographies of famous Americans; he read the Times. He started a blog, and began showing up at major city events to write about them. He covered the Anthony Weiner frenzy and Donald Trump’s fateful escalator ride. At such events, he would often run into Ben Smith, then a reporter at Politico, who is now the Times’ media columnist. Smith encouraged Kornbluh to pursue journalism full time. Kornbluh took the advice, selling off his pizzeria.

In 2015, he was hired by Jewish Insider, a daily news outlet that reports on political and business news from a Jewish angle. (Two of its recent headlines are “Twitter CEO Dismisses Ayatollah’s Threats to Israel as ‘Saber-Rattling’ ” and “Congressional Dems Urge Biden to Continue Campus Antisemitism Protections.”) With his tireless reporting on local and national politics, and on happenings within his own community, Kornbluh became well known to his readers and a rare channel through which they could hold their local elected officials accountable. He can ask the types of questions that don’t typically come up in a debate or press conference. Chizhik-Goldschmidt described him in the Forward article as “the most famous Hasidic journalist in America.”

One of Kornbluh’s most distinctive qualities as a journalist is his closeness to the community. When he covers local news, he is hardly an outsider “parachuting in” to get some quotes from a seemingly opaque group of people. “Political reporters sometimes don’t realize how real the stakes are and don’t have to live with them,” Smith told me. He added that Kornbluh “is writing about these life-or-death issues in this community, whose divisions mirror the country but where passions are really, really high.”

Borough Park tolerated Kornbluh’s feel for the divisions in the community when the subject was politics, less so when he began writing about the pandemic. In April, during Passover, as most of Borough Park remained on lockdown, Kornbluh began outing rule-breakers. He tweeted a video of a man exiting a synagogue that should have been closed. He called in a complaint to a government hotline about a synagogue that was flouting city restrictions. A digital flyer circulated on WhatsApp calling him an informer. “I lost some friends,” Kornbluh told me. His reporting for Jewish Insider and his posts on social media had been critical of both the restrictions and his neighborhood’s response to those restrictions, but only one aspect of his coverage had stuck. One day in April, a crowd of about a hundred Haredim, noticing Kornbluh walking nearby, chased him down the street, chanting insults.

By June, the weather had warmed and the curve had flattened. It was no longer just a small group ignoring public-health guidelines. In Borough Park, the rhythms of life returned to near-normal. Revellers packed wedding halls. (Tischler claims to have attended seventeen weddings in one month.) “The few who were wearing masks—people looked at them a little funny,” Yochonon Donn, a resident of the neighborhood and a writer for Mishpacha (Family), a popular Haredi weekly, told me. The number of new cases stayed relatively low over the summer, but, in August, de Blasio noted an uptick in Borough Park. He warned of harsh measures if behavior didn’t change. On went the masks. Then, de Blasio, noting the still-worrying numbers, imposed closures anyway. People felt lied to, betrayed by the city. The masks came off. Governor Andrew Cuomo developed his own plan. On October 6th, he set up a call with Haredi leaders and urged them to limit their synagogues to half capacity. Later that day, he announced a plan publicly. He’d scrapped the fifty-per-cent idea. The new limit was ten worshippers for each shul, no exceptions.

That night, protesters filled the streets. The man caught filming it was beaten. Kornbluh, taking on a more activist role, messaged Tischler urging him to apologize for inciting violence. But the following evening, at a second demonstration, the vitriol only increased. Back on the scene, Kornbluh took notes from a distance, watching as the crowd pulsed with energy. Tischler noticed Kornbluh and shouted at him: “You’re a pig!” A group of protesters swarmed Kornbluh and cornered him against a wall. The police had to rescue him.

Kornbluh said afterward that he had been hit in the head and kicked. (Tischler has denied this.) What set the crowd into a frenzy was when Tischler, inches from Kornbluh’s face, called the reporter a moser, a Hebrew word for a traitor—a Jew who informs on a Jew. Tischler had encouraged the rest of the mob to chant it, too: “Everybody scream ‘moser!’ ” Some interpretations of religious law, including that of Maimonides, the hugely influential twelfth-century Jewish philosopher, dictate that a moser must be stopped before he informs again—even if it means killing him.

For most of New York’s Haredi Jews, demonstrating in the street is a rarity. (“We don’t protest,” one of them told me, while protesting.) Counterparts in Israel frequently stage demonstrations—usually in response to things that they perceive as existential threats, such as conscription in the Army—and, more recently, in response to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coronavirus restrictions, calling them anti-Semitic. Many of the young men in Borough Park have taken their cues from what they’d seen of Black Lives Matter protests. (“Jewish lives matter!” has become a common refrain.) But videos of looting and violence had circulated on WhatsApp, and Haredi protesters were eager to draw a contrast, to show that their demonstrations were more peaceful and more proper. “We come out to protest something, there’s music playing, we’re not looting, we’re not rioting,” one Haredi protester told me. This was after the counter-protester had been beaten.

On October 11th, after the first two demonstrations in Borough Park, Tischler was arrested by the N.Y.P.D. for “inciting to riot and unlawful imprisonment in connection with an assault of a journalist.” (He pleaded not guilty.) Soon after, a Tischler fan tweeted out Kornbluh’s address, and a mob of roughly two hundred people—mostly Yeshiva-age boys, but a few families with young kids—gathered outside his home at midnight. (Someone had brought a bullhorn: “Good morning, Jacob! We’re all waiting for you!”) A man in his thirties, who said that his name was Mendel, argued that Kornbluh had become a tool of an oppressive governor by outing Haredi rule-breakers. “Do you think that we were so dumb and stupid, that we paid such a heavy price, so many lives taken away from us, and we wouldn’t do everything to protect us?” he asked. “I prayed on my porch not for one month—four months!” Now, he said, everyone had antibodies. (The antibody rate in Borough Park is estimated to be forty-three per cent—below the theoretical threshold for herd immunity.) Mendel dismissed the new restrictions as theatre. He’d heard rumors that the local testing books were cooked.

Secular, right-wing symbols dominated the event. maga paraphernalia was everywhere; at a previous demonstration, people waved “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and Tischler wore a Trump sticker on his chest. The rhetoric was familiar, too. One boy told me, “It’s not about corona anymore. It’s about fake news.” Mendel said, “When Trump blames the ‘China Virus,’ liberals say, ‘You can’t say that, that’s racist!’ But when it comes to us, it’s not racist!” Then he cited Tucker Carlson.

The demonstrators’ resistance to public-health measures may be better understood as part of the larger far-right coronavirus denialism, albeit spiced with a set of anxieties particular to the Haredi community. In the Presidential election, Joe Biden, like many Democrats before him, is likely to win an overwhelming majority of the American Jewish vote. Polls have long shown that the secular and less observant American Jewish community is distinctly liberal on a range of social, economic, and political issues. Trump, however, is wildly popular in the Haredi community; in a recent poll of Haredi voters, Trump led Biden by seventy points. “What we are seeing is the evangelicalization of Orthodox Judaism—at a time when evangelicalism is more about an idolatrous nationalism than about Jesus Christ,” Joshua Shanes, a professor of Jewish studies at the College of Charleston, wrote recently in Tablet magazine. The animating political forces for Haredim are conservative Justices, school choice, “law and order,” and opposition to same-sex marriage. Support for Israel, particularly conservative leaders like Netanyahu, is paramount. With television and Internet access limited in the community, radio is unusually important. Many Haredim listen to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Ben Shapiro. Nathaniel Deutsch, the director of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, characterizes Hasidic political preferences as those of “working-class white ethnics” anywhere else.

In Borough Park, Tischler has become the leader of this movement. He has posted hundreds of videos on social media, in which you’ll find him using bolt cutters to break into a locked playground or harassing local health inspectors. In each video, he also plugs his weekly radio program, “The Just Enough Heshy Show,” where he reflects on topics such as whether he should apologize for calling a young Muslim girl a terrorist (initially yes; later no), and the intellectual capacity of women (“not as smart as men”). The other day, on the air, he challenged the Mayor to a fight on his deck, “man to man, because I think he’s not a man.”

“If you want to look at this from a Jewish literary perspective, every shtetl had their own meshuggener,” a prominent member of the Hasidic movement, in Brooklyn, told me, meaning that every village has its nut, its clown. “The kids would follow him around and laugh at him, but also laugh with him sometimes.”

However, some in Borough Park view Tischler as not just a clown or a provocateur but as a kind of guardian of the community. The son of Holocaust survivors, Tischler has a reputation for altruism, taking in kids who come from broken homes or have drug problems. He feeds the hungry, visits the sick. Asher Lovy, a twenty-eight-year-old man who runs an advocacy group for Orthodox survivors of sexual abuse, was one of the children whom Tischler mentored. He told me that Tischler was generous and affable. But then, about ten years ago, something changed. Tischler grew bitter. He went to prison for a year, after having been implicated in an immigration-fraud scheme. Lovy said that Tischler became obsessed with his real-estate businesses. “It’s not that I don’t think that there are very many issues that he’s a true believer in,” Lovy said, “but if he can insert himself into an issue that’s controversial and get himself attention for it, then he’s going to do it.” Borough Park, Lovy went on, was split between those in Tischler’s thrall and those “disgusted by him, who think that he’s a loudmouth bombast idiot who misrepresents the community.”

When police came to apprehend Tischler, the radio host filmed his own arrest. He did not exercise his right to remain silent; rather, he badgered the officers and complained loudly of his treatment at their hands. At one point, he stared straight at the camera and declared, “My name is Heshy!” Despite the bluster, his expression betrayed fear. He had vowed, earlier, to turn himself in the following morning, and the arrest galvanized some Borough Park residents who’d initially dismissed him. For a community on edge about persecution, the late-night perp walk was bad optics.

Tischler was released the following day. When I spoke to him, he sounded chastened—his lawyers had suggested that he quit talking so much, he said. (“They’re trying to control my mouth, my son, but I don’t think they can do that,” he told me.) At his most serious, Tischler says that he stands against governmental double standards and inconsistent enforcement. He stands for the well-being of children and the sanctity of the right to worship. He insists that he represents the will of the people—in his case, the purported will of the Haredi community. “They are not my soldiers,” he told me. “They’re my constituents. They’re the people I love and care for. I’m here to support them, not them to support me.”

Tischler also offered many arguments that seemed transparently false. He claimed that he hadn’t even wanted to go to the first protest; he’d been picking up something at the store when he noticed people gathering. “I got out of my car,” he said. “ I spoke to a small crowd. Then I said goodbye.”

I pointed out that his political message, as it were, was often subsumed by a compulsion toward self-promotion, a desire to further his own interests: the radio show, the run for City Council.

“You want me to deny that?” Tischler asked.

In the hours after Tischler’s arrest, Kornbluh texted me an apology. We had scheduled a time to meet the following morning, but now he had to cancel. “Dunno where I will be in the am,” he wrote. “I have to be somewhere safe.”

Through the middle of October, Tischler’s followers circulated misinformation about Kornbluh on WhatsApp—that he had suffered a heart attack, that he’d committed suicide. They continued to protest; a small gathering made its way to midtown Manhattan. Meanwhile, a significant portion of New York’s Haredim have condemned Tischler’s movement. Part of what angers them about de Blasio’s and Cuomo’s admonishments of “the Orthodox community” is that adherence to public-health guidelines varies greatly. Avi Shafran, the spokesperson for Agudath Israel (Union of Israel), an organization that represents Haredi Jews, said that the group had distributed almost half a million masks in Borough Park. (“All we did was announce that they’re available, and people came,” Shafran told me.) One local rabbi dispensed blessings before Yom Kippur from his porch; recipients were gloved and masked and stayed far away from the rabbi and one another. Bad actors also abound. Three weeks ago, on the final night of Sukkot, a weeklong celebration of the harvest and the exodus from Egypt, a rabbi who’d recently tested positive for covid-19 held a five-hour service, indoors, for three hundred congregants in Borough Park. No one wore masks. The rabbi merely set up a Plexiglas shield. Samuel Heilman, an emeritus professor at Queens College and a preëminent scholar of Hasidic society, noted that Haredi culture, at its core, stands in opposition to solitary life. “It’s the absolute opposite to social distancing,” he told me. “Since they were old enough to pray, they’ve done it together.”

The day of the maskless service, I attended a socially distanced celebration hosted by a Hasidic family on the other side of the borough. There was Purell at the sukkah’s entrance, and taco salad and gefilte fish in takeout containers; the attendees, who wore masks and sat far apart, drank rosé out of cans. That Sunday was Simchat Torah, a holiday that usually culminates in raucous dancing and singing. My hosts were planning a more muted evening, with a synagogue service outside. They’d been careful throughout, but they knew that they couldn’t stop everyone from partying that weekend. They told me that they were worried about the younger men in their community. “College students are going to be college students, whether it’s rabbinical students or what,” Chana Lightstone, one of the hosts, said. “It is imperative that we always recognize others as individual human beings,” Motti Seligson, a spokesman for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, told me that same day, “and not lump them together and treat them as a monolithic blob.”

In that regard, both de Blasio and Cuomo have failed. As of September, the city employed zero Yiddish-speaking contact tracers. Yiddish was used for a recent public-health campaign in Haredi communities across Brooklyn and Queens—trucks went around blaring reminders about getting tested and wearing masks—but this was useless for many of the Jews in Queens, who speak Russian. Meanwhile, the Governor has alienated even those inclined to ally with him by placing harsh restrictions on communal prayer. “Ten people is laughable,” Kornbluh said, of the synagogue-capacity limit. (Borough Park has synagogues that can accommodate several thousand worshippers.) “Even if you wanted to comply, even if you are wearing masks and keeping social distance, the Governor said, ‘No, that’s not good enough.’ Did the Governor come up with solutions, like street closures, so the congregations can actually do the services outside? No.” Several synagogues were fined as much as fifteen thousand dollars for holding services for Simchat Torah. They paid the fine, and continued praying.

It can be difficult to determine what proportion of the community wants to behave responsibly. Kornbluh explained that Tischler and his followers represented a small part of the community, while those like Kornbluh, who advocated vocally for more masks and social distancing, were also in the minority. The majority, he said, were those “who won’t protest, who are silent, who want to deal with a problem, but are sometimes either uneducated, misinformed, or just want to go on with their religious practices.” Heilman, the Queens College professor, noted that many local rabbis have endorsed public-health measures, but typically not too strenuously. “Why aren’t most rabbis taking a strong position?” Heilman asked. “Because the truth is that they can’t really get too far ahead of their people. This is an old principle of Jewish life, that you can’t do what the people are not willing to do. And so these rabbis, even when they will say something that’s in line with what they should be saying, namely, put on masks, distancing, and so on, they say it with sort of a wink and a nod.” In an argument (and a culture) dominated by men, what do the women think? Dr. Leslie Ginsparg Klein, a dean of the Women’s Institute of Torah Seminary and College, in Baltimore, recently wrote in the Times of Israel that some concessions to safety during holidays—more distance, more spectating, less participation—is the experience of many women, all the time.

I met Kornbluh a day later than we’d initially planned. He wore a surgical mask, which fogged his glasses. He said that he’d been receiving hate mail—“You remind me of the Jews that tried saving themselves by coöperating with Nazis”; “When you die, we will put the mask in your grave”—but he had continued to do his job. “I feel that I’m the right person to actually report the facts on the ground, what is really happening, but also what the government is doing,” he told me. “I’m not a scooper on Orthodox Jewish violations. I am a politics reporter who happens to be a member of the Hasidic community.”

We met in Madison Square Park. I assumed he was staying in Manhattan until things calmed down, but I was mistaken. His office was nearby. After work, he would be returning home to Borough Park.