Shuttered Shuls, Shattered Trust

Photos: Len Weinstein

When Governor Cuomo sprang a surprise crackdown on Jewish locales last week, instituting a draconian lockdown, closing schools and nonessential businesses, limiting shul attendance to ten mispallelim regardless of a building’s size, and denounced the ultra-Orthodox sector as a community of lawbreakers, even his staunchest allies were
shocked.
Can the rift ever be repaired?

Andrew Cuomo and the Jews go back such a long way, he frequently injects Hebrew words into his speeches. “You’re all, as they say in Italian, mishpachah,” he once told a non-Jewish crowd at a fundraiser.

It is therefore bewildering, to say the least, for longtime Cuomo watchers as the governor has appeared to embrace confrontation and battle with the Orthodox community these past few weeks. He referred to them with the pejorative term “ultra-Orthodox,” denounced them on national television as lawbreakers, and used fake pictures and audio as “evidence” of a plot against him.

All this is leading longtime allies of the governor to demand an apology, with many saying that the rupture is the worst of his ten years as the state’s chief executive.