By: Denis Cyr
Thousands of guests gathered in November for the wedding of the Satmar Grand Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum’s grandson, violating the limits on indoor gatherings. Days later the synagogue was fined $15,000, but the question remains, how did they pull off such a large wedding with the strict COVID limitations in place and why did NY take no action until after the story broke in the NY Post?
Many things still remain a mystery. NY Post reported:
City Hall has since refused to answer any questions about its one-day “investigation” into the wedding, including whether any coronavirus cases have been traced to it, or even which agency looked into it.
The mayor’s reps also would not say whether Pinny Ringel, the mayor’s senior liaison to the Jewish community, had any inkling about the illegal celebration.
Even stranger, after the $15,000 fine was announced by the mayor, videos began circulating which showed wedding-goers packed inside the Yetev Lev D’Satmar synagogue in Williamsburg on Hooper Street, singing and dancing with no face coverings, in a post wedding celebration held a day after de Blasio made his announcement of the fine.
“If there were further inappropriate activity, that is the precursor to the building being shut down permanently”, the mayor declared after the NY Post actually exposed the November 8th wedding. A day after the fines, the post wedding celebration was held.
Three days after the November 8th wedding were tagged in a tweet from a concerned social media user showing an article from a Yiddish magazine about this same wedding, yet no action was taken until the story broke in the main stream English speaking news.
“We haven’t seen this tweet previously, though it doesn’t include any information about what the event was or where it took place. Localities are in charge of enforcement and when we learned of the event, from reading The Post, we called the city and made sure they were taking action,” Azzopardi told the Post.
Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum made a powerful speech to his followers saying: “We won’t surrender. We will not close down. And indeed, we didn’t close down, neither the boys’ schools, nor the girls’ schools, nor the yeshivas. Neither the large ones nor the small ones. Everything proceeded as usual”
The issues surrounding religious gatherings in the time of a pandemic will continue to be debated after the recent Supreme Court ruling which landed in favor of religious institutions over pandemic rules.