Beards and face masks: Boro Park prepares for Passover
A year ago, I profiled Avi Kaye, an Orthodox street photographer who mostly works in Boro Park and Williamsburg, and who posts his photographs on an Instagram account, ‘Hasidim in USA.’.
As COVID-19 hit the Orthodox community, I noticed that Kaye was posting photographs of Orthodox Jews wearing face masks on Instagram — he was driving around Brooklyn, and walking around using hip photography, trying to capture this moment. So I reached out to him and asked him to take us along on a walk in Boro Park, as communities rush to prepare for Passover in the bizarre silence of a pandemic.
“The whole atmosphere in our communities is surreal right now,” Kaye told me. “You walk down the main avenues, and it’s dead — on erev Pesach! Very few stores are open in Boro Park now, mostly essentials – food, and hardware stores.”
“I know some people are not listening to the rules, you see it in the media,” Kaye said. “It’s unfortunate that there are these extremists, those who don’t believe in the system. But in general, the streets of Boro Park are really empty for this time of the year. The majority of people are really indoors. I followed a truck that was playing festive music for hours in the streets, to uplift people – and I could see, most families were staying home, waving from their windows and porches.”
Kaye said that most people he saw in the streets were not wearing masks. “It was hard for me to find people wearing masks to photograph,” Kaye said. “I had to walk around a lot for these pictures. In Boro Park, they just don’t have access to masks. Perhaps local community organizations like Hatzalah and Misaskim should have bought masks and handed them out. These boys were selling masks for five dollars a piece, and every car that passed by, stopped and bought two to three masks. There’s just nowhere to buy them here.”“Usually cleaning the car is exciting – but this time, it’s the oldest brother who got the job. His siblings were watching him from the porch.”
“I’ve seen some elderly walking around, into groceries, without masks and gloves. It’s mind-boggling. I really don’t and can’t understand it. I don’t know what’s wrong with the system. What happened to all the rebbes? Is it a lack of knowledge? I don’t know. I have a lot of questions. Because, at this point, everyone knows someone who’s gone.”A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
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