Sociocultural and Religious Perspectives Toward the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Haredi Jewish Community

Journal of Religion and Health https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-022-01667-6 ORIGINAL PAPER Sociocultural and Religious Perspectives Toward the COVID‑19 Pandemic in the Haredi Jewish Community Tehilla Berger Lipsky1 · Ezra Gabbay1 Accepted: 6 September 2022 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2022 Abstract The Haredi Jewish community is centered around its religious life and commitment to Jewish law. Understanding aspects of the community’s faith, as well as Jewish history and culture, are essential in examining the social determinants of health that affected the community’s perspective in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The American Haredi community’s trajectory throughout the pandemic was marked by high caseloads early on and throughout the pandemic, and a deep yearning to return to religious life. Some community members’ non-adherence to public health guidelines led to public attention and scrutiny, which led many community members to feel unfairly targeted. This exacerbated feelings of dissonance toward the medical community, which to date has led to low communal vaccination rates. We examined religious texts, along with cultural factors and historical precedencies that contributed to the Haredi response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We offer guidance as to how understanding the religious and sociocultural makeup of the Haredi community could have resulted in a more effective and engaged pandemic response and provide a framework for creating a more beneficial alliance with the community in the future. Keywords Haredi Jewish community · COVID-19 · Halacha · Jewish law · Social determinants of health Introduction The Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish community was hit hard and early in the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 2, 2020, the first community-acquired COVID19 diagnosis was made in New York, with ‘patient-zero’ being an Orthodox Jew (Gold & Ferre-Sadurni, 2020). This index case foretold an early rapid spread * Tehilla Berger Lipsky 1 Weill Cornell Medicine, 1300 York Ave, New York, NY 10065, USA 13 Vol.:(0123456789) Journal of Religion and Health that disproportionately affected the Haredi community (Zyskind et al., 2021). The community experienced many painful losses, including some of its most prominent leaders (Stack, 2020). When serum antibody testing became available between May and July 2020, the Haredi community (a more favorable categorization of the Ultra-Orthodox community which includes Hassidic, Yeshivish/ Lithuanian, and other Jews) (Gabbay et al., 2017) showed high levels of positive seroprevalence. In the New York state region, these factors led many community members to believe (not unreasonably according to some experts) that the community had achieved “herd immunity” (Hanau, 2020). As the pandemic progressed, the community came under unprecedented scrutiny due to some members’ lack of adherence to COVID-19 guidelines. Additional restrictions were imposed on Haredi communities in response to local caseload upticks, and media outlets scrupulously underscored some community members’ defiance of guidelines. Tensions continued to develop between public health enforcement and the community (The Yeshiva World, 2020). Understanding the Haredi community’s religious and sociocultural characteristics is integral to investigating its response to the pandemic. Notably, the American Jewish Orthodox community includes both Haredi and Modern Orthodox Jews, who comprise 62% and 31%, respectively, according to a 2015 Pew Center survey (Pew Research Center, 2015). Modern Orthodox Jews closely adhere to the central tenets of religious law (Halacha) but are culturally and socially integrated into modern life. Haredi Judaism, however, is a way of life dominated by religion in all aspects, and eschews many of the values of modern Western cultures (Gabbay et al., 2017). Our focus in this article is on the Haredi community, who was at the center of conflicts around public health measures, and whose specific cultural, social, and religious characteristics are crucial to understand in this context. At the same time, given significant interaction between Modern Orthodox and Haredi communities, we do refer to a larger Orthodox context wherever it is relevant. Many aspects of the Haredi and larger Orthodox community’s experience during the COVID-19 pandemic have been studied, including its impact on mental health, virus proliferation in geographically separated Jewish communities, perceived risk of the pandemic, community vaccine sentiment, and vaccination rates, and how the pandemic impacted religious life in the Orthodox community (Carmody et al., 2021; Trencher, 2021; Weinberger-Litman et al., 2020; Zyskind et al., 2021). However, no study to date has specifically focused on the intricate inter-relationship of social realities in the Haredi community, complex religious legal and philosophical attitudes toward risk, and the effect of antisemitism as factors that shaped the pandemic’s effect on the community and its response to it. In this study, we evaluate the social and religious factors that molded the community’s pandemic response. To do that, we delineate (1) the initial timeline of the virus spread in the community in relation to religious and social events and public health measures; (2) the major tensions that formed between community members, public health officials and mainstream society; (3) social considerations, including socioeconomic factors, education level and health literacy; (4) the history of antisemitic scapegoating of Jews during pandemics, and (5) an analysis of religious attitudes toward safety, plague and prayer. Our aim was to go beyond the current 13 Journal of Religion and Health Fig. 1  Major events in the COVID pandemic for the New York Haredi community journalistic account of events and to understand them in a broad and deep context. We conclude with a set of proposals for culturally informed engagement with the Haredi community to promote constructive dialogue and public health. Timeline On February 23, over a week before his official diagnosis, ‘case-zero’, a Modern Orthodox Jew, had attended both a Bat Mitzva and a funeral (Fig. 1). Attendees of these two events participated in the American Israel Political Action Committee conference in Washington, (March 1 through 3). The timing of these two events and his subsequent diagnosis on March 2 sent over one thousand people from his synagogue and greater community into quarantine (Gold & Ferre-Sadurni, 2020). While these were not necessarily predominantly Haredi, these events did draw attention to the Orthodox community as connected to the beginning of COVID-19 spread in New York State (Weinberger-Litman et al., 2020). On March 12, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo deployed the national guard to New Rochelle, case-zero’s hometown, to enforce a containment zone. Additionally, he restricted all events in New Yor (...truncated)