Saturday, October 10, 2009

Reasons I Still Love NYC #290: The Sukkah Mobile




Or is that a "mobile sukkah"?  I saw this on the Thursday of Sukkot in Fulton Mall (which, if aren't familiar with it, is a huge, delapidated shopping district in downtown Brooklyn that is mainly catered to African-American shoppers).  Hebrew-language disco was blaring out of the SUV which towed the sukkah.

It's worth noting that this particular sukkah is wrapped in an image of the late Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who some Chabad Lubavicher Hasidim believe to be Moschiach, aka "The Messiah" (and as such not really dead).  These followers of Schneerson are a subset of Hasidic Judaism, itself a subset of Orthodox Judaism in America.  As such, it makes a strong statement of identity -- of faith, of culture -- to drive through town towing his image behind your car.  There's a building in my neighborhood, on the border between mainly-African-and-Puerto-Rican Bushwick (Brooklyn) and mainly-Eastern-European-Catholic Ridgewood (Queens), that has a photo of Schneerson on a bumper sticker on its door, with the words MOSCHIACH IS COMING in English.  There's also a sign on the door advertising YOUR 1-STOP FOR ALL THINGS JEWISH.  The Chabad Lubavichers are mostly based in Crown Heights, miles away.  I've wonder if it's located so far from the Hasidic neighborhoods in Williamsburg (on the same subway line) because it needs to be distanced from the more prevalent Hasidic community.

On that same note, I wonder if the Sukkah Mobile drives through the Hasidic neighborhoods in Williamsburg (and now Bedford-Stuyvesant)?  It might be more tense to do that than to drive through Fulton Mall, because Hasidim who aren't Chabad, who don't agree that Rebbe Schneerson was the Moschiach/Messiah, will know a lot more about, and quite possibly be more offended by, the yellow flags that flew on the back of the sukkah:



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