(JTA) – In synagogues and car parks, in the garden tent and in Zoom, Jews around the world will spend the Yom Kippur holidays providing a definitive plea to prevent death and be inscribed in the e-book of life over the next year.
As the Jewish world prepares for Yom Kippur, already on a day when the problems of life and death are at the forefront, the doors are final, not only in repentance, but also in the possibility of a wave of infection in Jewish communities around the world.
In New York, a deadline was looming to lower the positivity rate of COVID-19 control in several Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods as Yom Kippur approached. Israel has once damaged its daily infection log, with 8,315 new cases in the 24 hours they ended. Saturday night. And in Chicago on Friday, Orthodox doctors warned that a “second wave of COVID-19 has begun to spread in our community. “
While maximum synagogues made their plans for the big vacation weeks or even months ago, when COVID instances were more controlled after a warm-weather summer that allowed for safer outdoor socialization, the question of whether the construction in the instances led synagogues to replace their plans temporarily remain to be noticed , as well as the question of whether Yom Kippur can make a contribution to construction in some cases.
Masking the most frequent Sunday in Borough Park, one of many Orthodox neighborhoods that are experiencing accumulation in COVID cases and under the supervision of the New York Department of Health, while others are ready to fast. Automatic calls to neighborhood residents, roadside symptoms Car speaker messages encouraged the local network to wear masks on the street with warnings that the network is being “monitored” through the media and government and that the education of network youth is at stake.
In Israel, where cases have increased dramatically, which has led to a strict national shutdown, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested israelis not attend Yom Kippur synagogue facilities.
But it remains to be noted whether these adjustments lead to the safety of internal synagogues, a fertile site for disease transmission. In Israel, strict closure regulations still allow others to attend on a small scale near their homes, and Byzantine regulations allow up to 50 more. people to care for households at the same time in some parts of the country.
In the United States, most non-Orthodox synagogues continue their practice of organizing online-only facilities, and outdoor tent facilities are not unusual in many Orthodox communities, but home facilities also take position and remain silent, while some synagogues do. They do not require a mask or make them optional.
Several synagogues in Orthodox Brooklyn have brazenly sold vacation tickets that differentiate between masked and unmasked sections. In one of them, Agudath Israel Bais Binyomin in Midwood, the rabbi tested positive for the coronavirus a few days after Rosh Hashaná, sending others close to him to quarantine.
In Chicago, a letter from thirteen Orthodox doctors to the network documented at least 3 Rosh Hashaná where prayer leaders or those who touched the shofar who were unmasked and “unconsciously positive for COVID-19” exposed their fellow nuns, many of whom were also unmasked, to the virus.
The exact extent of the disease in Jewish communities at this time is unclear, in part because detection has been brazenly discouraged in some places out of concern about the consequences, which may come with school closures if many others test positive. and even death is on the rise.
“From a non-medical rabbinical point of view, I can tell you that I am receiving ongoing fasting questions for others who have just tested positive,” Nassau County Rabbi Aryeh Lebowitz tweeted. “We all have to be very attentive, and much more. It doesn’t look good. ‘
What is transparent is that Yom Kippur has the prospect of being a mass market event, just like Purim in March. The cabalists have even discovered a link between the two festivals, despite the differences between Purim’s merry dinner and the darkness. Yom Kippur’s day, noting that the word “pure,” meaning lottery, appears in the names of the two days.
If Jews pay attention to the increasingly urgent warnings of their doctors and, in many cases, rabbis, the intensity of this pandemic wave may end in some of the communities that have been most affected from the outset.
“The next two weeks,” Glatt said in a COVID update broadcast live Saturday night, “it will be a lot, a lot. “
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