A piece of string is the binding thread in a tapestry of pious Jews moving east of the Denver Tech Center.
It’s called an eruv — a symbolic wall that allows exceptions to strict rabbinical laws forbidding work, including lifting babies and carrying keys, outside the home on Sabbath.
Eruvs stretch the boundaries of that private space to include whole neighborhoods. This one in Greenwood Village is threaded from streetlamps to telephone poles, zig- zagging through housing tracts and chain-restaurant parking lots.
The Kevlar line allows otherwise homebound parents to wheel their babies to synagogue or bring brisket to neighbors Friday nights through Saturdays.
“Before we moved here, Shabbos used to be all about what our kids couldn’t do. Now they can play with their friends. We can have families over without breaking our laws,” said Mindy Berman, whose Grand Avenue home sits squarely within the eruv.
Many of us erect boundaries, both seen and unseen, in our neighborhoods. Some plant hedges. Some gate their communities. And others say, “That’s Five Points, I don’t go there.”
In this case, the line was drawn by Rabbi Yaakov Meyer, who established the Ahavas Yisroel synagogue in a neighborhood office building before moving to a Baptist church on East Belleview Avenue.
Like many members, Meyer kept a home in the eruv for use only on the Sabbath until he moved there permanently in 2004. His growing following clamored for an eruv like the two in east and west Denver and another since built in Boulder.
Meyer — who used aerial photos to plot out the route with a rabbinical specialist from New Jersey — found an ideal landscape in the cluster of housing tracts. Their high brick walls provided a religiously acceptable substitute for the 500-pound fishing line that could be installed only with the nod of planners.
It helped that DTC Boulevard had lots of streetlamps. But it didn’t help that the village master plan limits posts in residential areas.
That left out the Kaufmans, whose street, a half-mile from Ahavas Yisroel, doesn’t have enough lights on which to hang the line. Without the luxury of an eruv, Kathy Kaufman won’t attend Sabbath services until the baby she is expecting can walk without a stroller.
“There’s quite a lot of other families in the same situation. It’s a big bummer,” she said.
As it stands, the eruv runs nearly invisibly along the fences of Cherry Creek High School and Cherry Creek State Park. It passes through the parking lots of Grace Korean Baptist, St. Peter Lutheran and Hope United Methodist churches. And it’s hidden behind a drainpipe at “Sights and Sounds Dream Home Environments.”
Only in America.
“I mean, who would know it’s there?” asked the rabbi.
Not Kathy Wheeler, a 20-year resident who has never noticed the line luring so many newcomers to Beeler Street’s colonials.
“I love to see them walking,” she said of the men in black suits and yalmukes, women in long dresses and babushkas and boys with “tsit-tsit” tassels under their Broncos sweat shirts.
In an area where neighbors exchange flower baskets on May Day, old-timers like Wheeler haven’t much mingled with the Ahavas Yisroel newcomers. No one from the synagogue has joined the women’s book club in Village on the Lake.
“I’d like to get to know them better,” said 13-year resident Amy Mills. “They’ve made the neighborhood seem so much less parochial.”
But as Meyer tells it, the demands of observant Judaism “don’t leave a tremendous lot of leeway for other things.”
Susan Greene writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-1989 or greene@denverpost.com.
