Milwaukee cyclist injures neck due to fallen wire put up by Orthodox Jewish group

"I thought I was going to be decapitated," said Ronald Ekker after hitting the faith-based wire

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A Wisconsin bicyclist, Ronald Ekker, suffered injuries to his neck—to the point where he thought he was getting “decapitated”—all because a hard-to-see piece of wire wrapped around it as he was biking down a hill. That dangerous wire was only up to satisfy a religious superstition for Orthodox Jews.

Ronald Ekker (screenshot via CBS 58)

Ronald Ekker (image via CBS 58)

Under Jewish law, on the Sabbath (Friday night to Saturday night), you’re not supposed to carry any of your possessions between private domains (e.g. your home) and public domains (e.g. outside your home).

But what if you want to take your baby to synagogue? What if you want to carry your keys from inside your home to outside where your car is parked? You can’t do it. Jewish law forbids it.

Orthodox Jews figured out a theological loophole.

All they have to do is turn a “public” domain into a larger “private” one and problem solved! They accomplish this by creating what’s known as an eruv (AY-roov).

An eruv is essentially a gated community built using poles and string. You put up the poles all around a city, connect them with a piece of string, and—voila—you’ve created a brand new giant private domain. Orthodox Jews can roam and carry items freely within that space, even on the Sabbath!

(We can have a separate debate over whether or not God sees through that little trick…)

In Milwaukee County, officials have allowed Orthodox Jews to place miles of cables around poles on the east side of town. Rabbi Yisroel Lein of Chabad of the East Side told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that those wires are inspected weekly.

Last month, for whatever reason, an eruv that was attached to a light pole got detached from the other pole it was connected to. So instead of the wire hanging up in the air, it formed an almost invisible triangle with the pole and the ground. That’s what Ekker ran into when he was biking:

Ekker said he was riding his electric bike down a hill on Lincoln Memorial Drive near the Linnwood Water Treatment Plant on Sept. 18, reaching up to 25 mph, when a wire snagged around his neck…

… when he ran into it, the entire roughly 60 feet of wire skated across his neck, he said, leaving marks on the front, side and back of his neck.

"It happened so fast, you couldn't really see it because it's so thin," Ekker said. "Quite frankly, I thought I was going to be decapitated."

Lein later apologized to Ekker, but there was no indication he’ll remove the wires. After all, for some people, religious mythology always overrides other people’s safety. But he added that the wires would definitely get fixed by his people because the alternative is having a broken eruv and then what would the Orthodox residents do?! If the imaginary boundary gets broken, then the whole imaginary facade crumbles.

Speaking of which, if everyone agrees that eruvs are symbolic, even if the Orthodox community takes them seriously, why do the wires in this case need to be so damn thick to the point that there are multiple threads?! Why not just use something softer and less hazardous if they’re meant to be untouched and temporary?

Anyway, while local officials have allowed the eruv to stay up, that’s likely because it seemed like a small ask for an important reason for a segment of the community. But that may change after this injury:

Since the land where Ekker was injured is managed by Milwaukee County, Lein said county attorneys are determining whether a wire over the road poses too much of a liability. If it does, and they ask him to move it, he will, he said.

"We will definitely make any effort to mitigate any of those possibilities for injury," he said.

That’s the right thing to say. Though the easiest way to prevent eruv-based injuries is to get rid of the eruv entirely.

If the county decides this is a problem, Lein would presumably move the eruv to a slightly different location where it wouldn’t be in anyone’s way. Still, it’s absurd that we’re having this discussion at all. Why does a religious group—any religious group—have the ability to put wires around a community at all? Do other groups have the same kind of permissions?

I should point out that there are reasons to defend the eruvs. For one, they just make life for Orthodox Jews (especially women) easier by giving them a way to function on the Sabbath without violating their religious beliefs. And sometimes, anti-eruv sentiments come with antisemitic overtones (If we get rid of the eruvs, the Jews will leave). There’s also the argument that these wires really don’t hurt anybody, assuming they really are out of the way and not injuring random bikers. And unlike, say, a Ten Commandments monument outside a courthouse, there’s no implication that people of other faiths or no faith are wrong or immoral. Most people don’t even know the eruvs are there.

In fact, there’s a massive eruv circling all of Manhattan, which has a large population of Orthodox Jews, and you likely wouldn’t know it’s there unless someone pointed it out to you. The maintenance cost for it? Nearly $150,000 a year. All for a symbolic wall.

Still, I fear this could be a stepping stone to more egregious church/state violations. It ought to be irrelevant that the string might go unnoticed because, ultimately, a religious group is still getting a special privilege. In this case, someone was injured because of it. That ought to be more than enough reason for the county to put a stop to this charade. If the boundaries formed by the eruv are imaginary, the wires can be too.

(Portions of this article were published earlier)

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