Haitians and Hasidim find common cause

NEW YORK - The urgency of the moment looms larger than the cultural chasm that usually separates them...

From the New York Times:

Spring Valley, NY

Spring Valley Village Hall sits in a drab strip mall along with Angel Nails, the Family Dollar discount store, the Caribbean Village restaurant and other modest businesses in this Rockland County village, which has a mix of Hasidic and other Orthodox Jews, Latinos and blacks. Haitians make up roughly half the population of more than 25,000.

So in terms of demographics, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the scene at Village Hall on Tuesday, with bearded Hasidic men in their long black coats and a largely black crowd of workers and volunteers scurrying around the lobby, which was filled with boxes of medicine, cotton balls and crutches, big black suitcases and an air of incessant activity.

Still, disaster makes strange bedfellows. Hence the cast of characters in a community where the melting pot usually melts only so far and the Hasidim and the Haitians invariably find themselves in separate worlds or competing ones. Nevertheless, for a day, there was the Haitian mayor, Noramie F. Jasmin, and her Hasidic administrative assistant, Aron Wieder, directing traffic inside the cavernous lobby, the urgency of the moment looming larger than the cultural chasm that usually separates them.

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