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Woodward Ave. Birmingham, MI 48011 642-0460 168 FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 9, 1988 like Monsey and Monroe. (The buses are segregated by sex — women sit in the back — and no private buses run between Williamsburg, which is Satmar country, and Crown Heights, which is Lubavitcher turf.) More deeply, young Chasidim do occa- sionally "intermarry" across sect lines, bringing even adversarial Lubavitcher and Satmar members into the same wedding hall. And by the way, marriages are ar- ranged by matchmakers just as they have been for centuries, although prospective mates do have veto power if the chemistry isn't right. Not surprisingly, Chasidim ex- plain their innate drive toward pan- Chasidic, not to mention pan-Jewish solidarity, in cosmic terms. "On Yom Kippur," explains Rabbi Alter Metzger, a Lubavitcher scholar and pro- fessor of Jewish studies at Stern College, "all Jews recount their sins, because all Jews are part of a collective identity. One person may be having a mystical ex- perience in Jerusalem. Another person may be intermarrying or taking drugs. The actions of each individual affect the whole of Israel equally." This lesson in strength through unity has found its practical as well as spiritual applications. In the free, and free-swinging, climates of modern Israel and America, Chasidim have begun to master a game of hardball politics and exert a political clout that would have been utterly undreamed of in old Europe. In Israel, the growing demonstrative- ness of the ultra-Orthodox, which has become almost synonymous with Chasidism, provoked a violent backlash - last year after religious arsonists demol- ished bus shelters displaying ads deemed too sexually provocative and protesters in- veighed against the showing of movies on Friday night In the United States, Chasidic leaders, exploiting the tightly structured respon- siveness of the communities under their aegis, have gathered their flocks into powerful and attention-getting voter blocs. And no politician running for mayor of New York City, governor of New York State or President of the United States would dream of facing election day without hav- ing paid a photo opportunity visit to the Lubavitcher Rebbe. "Chasidim are more comfortable in socie- ty, more rooted," explains Rabbi Morris Shmidman, executive director of the Coun- cil of Jewish Organizations of Borough Park, an umbrella group encompassing 170 religious, educational and human services agencies. "It's their last stop. A spirit of activism has grown throughout the com- munity, over a little more than a decade, because the community is their vital con- cern." A major expression of that activism is getting more government money funneled into Chasidic neighborhoods for social staples such as housing, police and clinics. Beyond these basics, Chasidim, with their innate conservatism, have bought easily into the country's swing to the right dur- ing the past several years. In Rabbi Shmidman's Borough Park area, for example, 70 per cent of the Chasidic vote went to Reagan in 1984, a figure several percentage points higher than the national average and far higher than the percentage for Jews overall. Pat Robertson, despite his evangelical career, is favored by a number of Chasidim for his fundamentalist beliefs. On a more local level, the old Jewish allegiances to the traditionally liberal Democratic Party held up a little better. New York Chasidim split their ticket in re- cent regional elections, sharing their sup- port for Reagan with conservative Republican Sen. Alphonse D'Amato, while solidly backing liberal Democrat Mario Cuomo in gubernatorial contests. In Kiryas Joel, the Satmar land parcel inside the suburban town of Monroe, New York, Chasidim failed to bar female bus drivers employed by the local school district from transporting Satmar boys to their yeshiva. And in Williamsburg, community pro- tests led to a court order preventing the New York City Board of Education from walling off Satmar girls in a remedial reading class held at a local public school. Both decisions hearkened to constitu- tional safeguards against religious favoritism in the public sphere. Chasidim are not strangers, either, to the raucous ethnic politics that contribute heavily to the American urban scene. In Crown Heights last year, years of simmer- ing tensions between blacks and Luba- vitcher residents pushed uncomfortably close to the exploding point with charges of harassment, angry demonstrations and typically inflamatory intrusions by New York Mayor Ed Koch. A deal involving the formation of a novel integrated citizens' anti-crime patrol helped defuse animosities, though many blacks remain disgruntled by aggressive Lubavitcher moves to expand their hous- ing base in the neighborhood, and by Chabad's formidable political muscle that, blacks charge, diverts badly needed human services from the black to the Jewish neighborhoods. Worldly Confrontations Chasidim have fought hard to preserve their neighborhoods and to salvage a socie- ty from what they regard as crumbling moral values. In Williamsburg, they agitated unsuccessfully to kill plans for an environmentally controversial garbage recycling plant, drawing analogies between the toxic gasses they said the plant would discharge and the Zyklon-B of Auschwitz. Again, without success, many Chasidim