BOULDER — The city has extended a lifeline to Boulder’s Orthodox Jews, helping keep a day of worship and rest from continuing to be a day of stress.
Boulder will soon become the latest city to add an eruv, pronounced ay-ROOV, a boundary that allows exceptions to strict law that prevents Orthodox Jews from carrying anything — including their children or a wallet — outside their homes on Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath.
Though the city lease is token, a dollar a year for a decade, members of the Aish Kodesh synagogue in Boulder raised roughly $20,000 for construction, maintenance and insurance for 3 to 4 miles of thin, nearly invisible Kevlar line, about the width of a fishing line, strung 20 to 40 feet high on utility poles.
The eruv “fences in” a 1-square-mile area of north Boulder, between Canyon Boulevard and Iris Avenue, and Ninth and 29th streets.
The eruv extends the boundaries of “home” to grant some leeway in the relatively strict interpretation of Jewish law.
For Rachel Sacks, a mother and Orthodox Jew inside the boundary, it means she can better tend to her children, as well as allow the entire family to attend synagogue on “a day of rest instead of a day of extreme stresses.”
“The most wonderful thing in the world would be for my family to take walks with the children in the stroller on the Sabbath,” she told the City Council, which approved the eruv on a 5-2 vote on Tuesday.
Colorado has about 79,000 Jews, according to the 2006 “American Jewish Year Book.” Orthodox Jews represent 11 percent of the U.S. Jewish population, according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
The symbolic fences are common across the United States. Denver has two, and Greenwood Village and Glendale also have allowed the boundaries.
For now in Boulder, the fence benefits the 65 members of the Aish Kodesh synagogue.Gavriel Goldfeder, the synagogue’s rabbi, said it was essential to helping the small congregation survive and grow.
Council members Macon Cowles and Lisa Morzel voted against the eruv. Cowles said it could raise First Amendment conflicts, intertwining church and state.
Yaakov Watkins, a Jewish faith consultant in Denver who has helped establish many of the Denver area eruvs as well as the new one in Boulder, said researchers found no eruv had ever been turned down in the United States based on constitutional grounds.
The First Amendment says the government can’t impede the free exercise of religion. The Constitution prevents the promotion of a state religion, but government routinely makes comparable accommodations for churches and synagogues, such as directing traffic outside of a crowded religious service.
Joey Bunch: 303-954-1174 or jbunch@denverpost.com
