Scoop

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/environment/20060531/7/1871

Harvesting the Rain
by Sam Williams
31 May 2006

In 2002, when a severe decline in winter snow and spring rainfall forced the city to declare a drought emergency, gardeners throughout New York City faced a new twist on an age-old dilemma.

Unable to tap city fire hydrants -- the traditional irrigation source for community gardens -- garden managers looked to the skies for respite. Taking a cue from early farmers, they gathered as many jars, barrels and cisterns as they could find and set them out to capture and store a portion of every summer downpour that passed over the city. By the end of the year, at least seven gardens had created elaborate rainwater harvesting systems channeling water from neighboring rooftops and downspouts to 55-gallon drums and underground cisterns.

Four years later, the pressure to capture each precious drop of water may not be as high, but the rainwater harvesting continues. A loose-knit coalition of environmental groups calling itself Water Resources Group has helped community gardeners install water retention systems in 25 local gardens. The group has even secured a $45,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to finance systems in at least four community gardens, starting with the Bedford Avenue Block Association Garden in Brooklyn near the corner of Bedford and De Kalb avenues.

Some of the larger sites use 1,000 gallon tanks, says project coordinator Lenny Librizzi of the Council on the Environment of New York City, a group member. But others use 55-gallon olive barrels donated by a Queens olive distributor.

As assistant director of the Council on the Environment’s open space greening project, Librizzi sees rainwater collection as an easy way to fulfill that project’s agenda to expand and enhance comunity gardens. For now, most community gardens rely on free city water from fire hydrants. This makes the gardens beholden to the whims of a city government that, for at least the last 10 years, has taken note of the value of the land underlying most community gardens and considered putting the acreage to more financially profitable use. For security's sake, many of the green spaces would prefer to have their own back-up water supply, free of city control.

But there are additional environmental benefits. Last year’s grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, came about because the group was able to show that recycling rainwater reduces demand on the city’s storm sewers and so can help cut water pollution. Although the city is overhauling its aging combined sewer overflow system, many neighborhoods still send storm water runoff and household waste into the same sewers. Catching rainwater reduces the demand on the sewers, giving city pumps in these neighborhoods more time to work before the sewers reach the overflow stage and send untreated sewage into local waterways.

“It’s a win-win for the environment and for gardeners,” says Robin Simmen, manager of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s GreenBridge horticulture program. “First of all, rainwater is better for plants than chlorinated tap water so you’ll get bigger, healthier plants. Also, by harvesting rainwater, we reduce the amount of storm water that we are currently flooding into our sewer system.”

Or as Librizzi puts it, “In collecting rainwater, we’re not only making the city greener, we’re making it bluer.”

Granted, it takes more than a few dozen community gardens to put a dent in the city’s storm water runoff problem. The Water Resources Group estimates that its 25-garden network currently captures a little more than 250,000 gallons of rainwater annually. Compare that to the average family’s use of an estimated 100,000 gallons a year and it’s hard to resist the punning drop-in-a-bucket metaphor.

But rainwater harvesting can also produce a change in the way New Yorkers think about water. Once New Yorkers stop seeing water as something they can take for granted, they start appreciating what it truly is: a fickle resource that takes time to capture.

“We happen to be kind of lucky in that we just turn on the tap and have all the fresh water we want, but that may not always be the case,” Librizzi says. “The educational aspect is a big part of this.”

Just as community gardens have taken the lead in bringing nationwide issues such as open space preservation and solid waste composting into the five boroughs, so too has the movement played a leadership role in a city where many residents already grasp the common-sense value of rainwater recycling but don’t see how to make it work in a heavily urbanized environment.

“In a way we’re reinventing the wheel,” Simmen says. “Many of the immigrant cultures in our city come from places where rainwater harvesting is a way of life. People who come from the Caribbean -- there’s no groundwater supply there, every drop of water you use for irrigation comes from the sky, and people know to catch and store the water when it rains.”

To further that education, numerous websites offer set up and safe storage tips to the aspiring rainfall harvester. For example, the site for Tree People, a Los Angeles tree-planting group, offers an interactive application to help calculate proper cistern size depending on the size of the collecting rooftop and the expected rate of rainfall. A University of Florida Extension site, meanwhile, provides a how-to guide for anyone looking to hook up a simple, self-containing 55-gallon rain barrel system to an existing gutter or downspout.

Designing a self-contained system is important. Not only does rainwater evaporate when left uncovered, it also can be a magnet for mosquitoes, rodents and other disease-bearing pests. Finally, there are the issues of drowning risk and potability. Like a backyard pool, a good rainwater collection source should we well marked and well-guarded, and it should be abundantly clear to passersby that the water that just flowed in off somebody’s rooftop is for plant use only.

“Rainwater is generally free of harmful materials and in most cases chemicals, but can be adversely affected by air pollutants and/or contaminated by animals in the catchment area,” warns the rainwater harvesting website Harvest H20.

There are various methods to prevent contamination. Jonah Braverman, an urban agricultural coordinator with East New York Farms, says his group uses a “first flush” system. This involves a plugged, 10-gallon PVC downspout directly adjacent to the collection source - the gutters of a nearby house. Once the downspout fills completely, remaining water is automatically diverted to the main downspout, which flows directly to a 500-gallon tank. After the rainstorm, garden volunteers, remove the plug and dispose of the first few gallons of water, and with it, whatever early sediment came washing in off the rooftop. Most research has found that filtering the first 10 gallons – as the first flush system does – is enough “to protect yourself from bird excrement and other pollutants,” Braverman says.

The collection system also includes a direct line to the city sewer, so that volunteers can shut off and drain the system during the winter when freezing might shatter the permanently filled water lines. So far, the only lingering concern with the three year-old irrigation system is water pressure. To address that, the group is planning to purchase a solar-powered pump. “We will also be hooking the system up to a second roof,” he says.

Looking down the road, rainwater collection enthusiasts sees opportunities to expand the Water Resources Group’s efforts to private lots and facilities other than community gardens. In early June members of the Water Resources Group along with members of the City Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection will visit Philadelphia where Philadelphia Green, a project funded by the Philadelphia Horticultural Society, has been working on pilot projects involving permeable paving materials, including asphalt. Such projects, if successful, could dramatically increase the percentage of rainwater captured and minimize storm runoff from parking lots and streets. The newly permeable surfaces can then be planted with trees and other plants, making them cooler and more attractive – without consuming additional drinking water.

In a sense such projects hark back to an earlier era. Simmen notes that that the lots of many Brooklyn brownstones still contain the buried backyard cisterns local residents once used to store rainwater during the dry months. “Since the early 20th century, New York has one of the few cities that doesn’t exist next to or on top of its water supply,“ Simmen says. As a result, many of us haven’t learned the importance of protecting the local waterways from pollution, something we might have learned growing up in another city. It’s something that we had here and it’s something that we’ve lost.”

Gotham Gazette - http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/environment/20060531/7/1871

The New York Times
Printer Friendly Format Sponsored By

May 30, 2006
For Sailors, a Calmer Shore Leave in N.Y.
By ANTHONY RAMIREZ and KATE HAMMER

After being cooped up for months in giant rolling tin cans in the Persian Gulf, the sailors dock on the West Side piers of Manhattan and stay for a few days. New Yorkers see them move about in groups or in pairs, their crisp summer whites against the gray of the asphalt.

The city they are visiting is different from the city New Yorkers live in, even different from the city as experienced by other tourists. But it is also nothing like the one experienced by the untold thousands of sailors in untold thousands of ships who have come before them over the decades.

Once it was strip clubs and bars and tattoo parlors and girls. And while there still may be some of that, sailors who sauntered around Midtown on Memorial Day gave some surprising answers when asked how they experience New York City in the two or three short days they are here.

They mentioned frozen cappuccinos, and Off Broadway, and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, and architecture — specifically, terra cotta facades.

And they said they range far and wide away from the West Side blocks — once very seedy, now less so — and Times Square — also once very seedy, now completely not so — that used to be their first ports of call. Part of the reason is that they get to ride the subways free.

For the men and women of ships like the U.S.S. Kearsarge, a 40,500-ton amphibious assault ship docked at Pier 88, near West 48th Street, the New York of shore leave in 2006 is different.

For one thing, many are married or are in relationships, so if there is carousing to be done, it seems to be low-decibel and over shortly after midnight. Besides, the wives and girlfriends are sometimes here.

Petty Officer First Class Brian Shonyo, 31, from the Kearsarge, was here with his wife, Ginnele, 27, who came up from Norfolk, where the ship was last stationed. "Usually I only get to hear about these places," she said. Still, she said she was shocked to see a man dancing in his underwear in Central Park.

William Hamb, 34, a petty officer first class on the Kearsarge, was planning on having a frozen cappuccino at Serendipity 3 on East 60th Street. Geoffrey Roediger, 22, a boatswain's mate third class from St. Matthews, S.C., went to see the Off Broadway musical satire "Burleigh Grime$." And Jason Kinsey, a boatswain's mate first class on the Kearsarge, wanted to visit the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art on Broadway in SoHo for its exhibition "She Draws Comics: 100 Years of America's Women Cartoonists."

Boatswain's Mate Kinsey took a circuitous subway ride to Gowanus in Brooklyn to find American Legion Post 1636, at Ninth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues, where a tombstone in the basement dates to the Revolutionary War.

"I'm a history buff, and I got a great picture of it," said Boatswain's Mate Kinsey, 35, referring to a relic of the Maryland 400, a famed band of citizen soldiers in the Battle of Brooklyn. He was born in Hagerstown, Md. "I love this stuff to death."

For other sailors, their concerns are more traditional. Craig Smith, 27, a seaman apprentice on the U.S.S. San Antonio, a 25,000-ton amphibious warship, said he just had "one of those fancy burgers, you know, with Swiss cheese and mushrooms."

For sailors, traditional and nontraditional, New York has been their fried pork dumpling.

Max Johnson, 28, a damage controlman second class on the U.S.S. Anzio, a 9,600-ton cruiser, met his wife and her sisters in Manhattan to see the tourist sites. His sailor's uniform prompted officials to put the Johnson family at the head of the line for the Empire State Building.

Midshipman Scott Clark of the Kearsarge, originally from Los Angeles, was especially lucky. On Friday, he and three friends were given Yankees tickets. A man in a suit stepped out of one of the tall buildings near Times Square and gave them the tickets, three rows behind third base, he said. At the game, "I was within talking distance of A-Rod," Midshipman Clark said.

First Class Petty Officer Jason Loftin, a radar technician on the Kearsarge, got a free sightseeing flight over Manhattan. The prize was donated by a local businessman and Petty Officer Loftin was the first to volunteer to take it. The flight left from Staten Island. "I'm glad to get away from everyone else in uniform," he said.

William Hamb, petty officer first class on the Kearsarge, said he did not need anything half that spectacular. "I don't have to do anything special. I'm in New York. Look at me, I'm in an elevator and it's in New York. I'm in a taxi, in New York. I'm in a subway and it's in New York. You can't go around the corner without bumping into a landmark."

For Boatswain's Mate Kinsey, the history buff, he said even the buildings that have no special designation are interesting. "We spent the day on a bus tour mostly looking for nice architecture, so I'm in seventh heaven when I see brownstones."

"You remember the terra cotta surfaces," said Boatswain's Mate Third Class Ryan Bily, 23, of Cincinnati. "Oh, I forgot, you fell asleep."

And the sailors all laughed.

The New York Times

May 7, 2006
Art
Looks Brilliant on Paper. But Who, Exactly, Is Going to Make It?
By MIA FINEMAN

WHEN Jeff Koons's giant topiary sculpture "Puppy" was installed at Rockefeller Center in May 2000, the three-week-long process involved about 100 riggers, planters, engineers and studio assistants. They erected a 43-foot-high stainless steel armature, which they covered with foam and blanketed with some 70,000 flowering plants.

Robert Lazzarini, who started out as an assistant in Mr. Koons's studio, called on 45 different contractors — from chromers and acid engravers to graphic designers, silk-screeners and metalworkers — to fabricate his weirdly disorienting sculpture of a New York City phone booth, which became the hit of the 2002 Whitney Biennial.

For "Wave UFO," the teardrop-shaped installation she exhibited at last year's Venice Biennale that created video light shows based on projections of visitors' brain waves, Mariko Mori needed a dozen industrial fabricators, as well as architects, composers and computer technicians.

Each of these projects garnered loads of attention for the enormous effort they involved. Yet much of the actual labor was performed not by the artists themselves, but by an army of technicians, studio assistants, artisans and engineers who worked behind the scenes.

As art with high production values has become increasingly common, the role of the artist has evolved into something closer to that of a film director who supervises a large crew of specialists to realize his or her vision. But there's a difference: in filmmaking, each individual — from cinematographer to key grip — is acknowledged, if only for a few seconds when the final credits roll. In the art business, there are no established conventions for crediting the people who transform artists' ideas into well-made objects. And some art workers may just prefer it that way.

ON a recent Friday morning, Konstantin Bojanov's sunny studio, on the fifth floor of a former factory building in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, was crowded with sculptures at various stages of completion. One of his five assistants stood on a ladder, pressing wet clay onto a 10-foot-tall winged figure; nearby, a young woman carefully sanded the interior of a plaster mold.

It looked like a typical scene in a successful artist's studio — but when these sculptures are exhibited next year, it will not be Mr. Bojanov's name that appears above them on the gallery wall.

Mr. Bojanov, 37, is a professional art fabricator. Like many people in this business, he is also an artist himself and began producing work for his more established peers while waiting for his own career to take off.

"Somewhere down the line in art school, this idea was implanted in my head that you always have to have another way of supporting yourself," said Mr. Bojanov, who studied sculpture and filmmaking, first in his native Bulgaria and then at the Royal College of Art in London.

Shortly after graduating, he started a business producing limited-edition sculptural objects for other artists. Among his first clients was the Los Angeles-based artist Paul McCarthy, for whom he produced "Yaa-Hoo Town" (1996), an elaborate installation of mechanized sculptures depicting an Old West town populated by dog-headed bartenders and masturbating cowboys.

The next year Mr. Bojanov rented a studio in New York, where he produced a group of white fiberglass sculptures for Barbara Kruger, one of which — a larger-than-life depiction of Marilyn Monroe held aloft on the shoulders of John and Robert Kennedy — was featured on the cover of Art in America in November 1997.

Now he fabricates sculptures and installations for about a dozen artists, including Jason Rhoades, Marcel Dzama, Richard Jackson, Vanessa Beecroft, Richard Prince and Christian Jankowski. Because artists tend to conceive large-scale works specifically for exhibitions, it's usually their galleries that contract and pay for Mr. Bojanov's services. The studio's busiest times are just before large international contemporary art fairs like Art Basel and before the opening of the fall art season.

Mr. Bojanov and his assistants sculpture in clay, foam, plaster and metal and cast objects in rubber, silicone and carbon fiber. For bronze or aluminum casting, they create molds and ship them to foundries in the United States or Bulgaria.

"Basically, I look at myself by analogy as a musician for hire," Mr. Bojanov said, seated in his office wearing plaster-stained jeans and a denim shirt. "I can play anything from free jazz to classical music. You name the style, and what you want, and the idea, and I know how to turn it into a high-end art object.

"I'm not necessarily proud of it, but I'm really good at it."

Often, Mr. Bojanov's starting point for a new sculpture is nothing more than an artist's rough sketch, followed by an explanatory phone call. Or it may be a small plastic toy or figurine that an artist wants blown up to monumental proportions.

At each stage of the monthslong production process, Mr. Bojanov takes digital photographs of the work in progress, which he e-mails to the artist for approval. While some artists like to come in for a few days of hands-on work in the studio, others don't see their actual sculptures until they are installed for exhibition.

Mr. McCarthy, who has been working with the studio for 10 years, appreciates Mr. Bojanov's intellect as well as his technical expertise. "He's very good in terms of skill — as a sculptor, as a mold maker — but the part that's critical to me is that I trust him and I think he understands my aesthetic," he said by phone from Los Angeles.

"I operate in a really dysfunctional way," Mr. McCarthy explained. "I'll give Konstantin a model, some small figurine, and ask him to sculpt it. He sends me the images, I draw on the images and send them back. Then I go out to the studio and take this fairly refined sculptural object and alter and disfigure it over a few days with saws and axes and hammers. Then he takes a mold and casts it, and then we do it all over again."

"I think most fabricators would just flip out," he added.

ARTISTS have relied on the aid of apprentices, artisans and studio assistants for centuries. Raphael, Titian, Rubens and Rembrandt all presided over busy workshops where apprentices churned out paintings to which the master would add finishing touches — and his signature. What has changed is the expectation that artists actually possess the skills to produce their own work.

It wasn't until the early 20th century that the avant-garde challenged the popular notion of the artist as a skilled artisan. In 1917, Duchamp famously displayed a factory-made urinal as a readymade; in 1923, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy picked up the phone and placed an order for five enamel-on-steel pictures to be produced by a sign company in Berlin, making the point that the hand of the artist no longer mattered.

By the 1960's, Andy Warhol had called his studio the Factory and employed a team of assistants to turn out silk-screened canvases that intentionally bore little or no trace of the artist's hand. With Conceptualism, some artists refrained from making objects altogether, insisting, as Sol LeWitt put it, that "the idea itself, even if not made visual, is as much a work of art as any finished product."

But in the 90's, a new generation of artists, including Mr. Koons, Damien Hirst and Takashi Murakami, decided they could have it both ways: they could be Conceptualists who also created big, beautiful, expertly made objects — and they could commission others to produce them.

"We're in a post-Conceptual era where it's really the artist's idea and vision that are prized, rather than the ability to master the crafts that support the work," said Jeffrey Deitch, whose SoHo gallery specializes in large-scale productions by contemporary artists. "Today our understanding of an artist is closer to a philosopher than to a craftsman."

But if artists no longer possess the technical skills to produce their own work, who does?

Katy Siegel, a critic and professor of contemporary art history at Hunter College, points out that while some art schools train students to philosophize, others concentrate on more traditional skills like carpentry, welding, stone carving and metalwork. "Places like Ohio State versus, say, the Whitney program, still teach manual labor skills in addition to — or as opposed to — conceptual problem solving and networking," she said, "and there is a real class divide in the art world between the art workers and the art thinkers."

Patrick Barth, a Brooklyn art fabricator with a graduate degree in sculpture from Ohio State University, agrees that ideas are more highly valued than the technical skills required to execute them. "You come out of these schools knowing how to build things," he said, "then you get to New York and find out that that has nothing to do with your success as an artist. I have no problem with that now, but I was upset for a while that no one had told me how things work."

Mr. Barth, 39, began producing work for other artists at 18, when he landed a summer job casting sculptures at a bronze foundry in Provo, Utah. Since then he has worked for a number of other artists, including Ann Hamilton and Sarah Sze, who are known for their sprawling and labor-intensive installations.

"We have a prosperous art market that can support ambitious fabrication that couldn't be supported 10 years ago," Mr. Deitch said. "But even in the most prosperous market, there's no way that the majority of young artists are going to make a living just from their own art."

WHILE many artists rely on outside fabricators to produce their work, there are others — like Mr. Koons, Robert Gober and Matthew Barney — who employ dozens of assistants to fabricate work in their own studios, where, they feel, they can exert more control.

To produce the massive thermoplastic sculptures in his current exhibition at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, Mr. Barney had 16 assistants working in two 7,500-square-foot studios, one in the meatpacking district in Manhattan, the other in Greenpoint. For Matt Ryle, who used to fabricate signage and theme architecture in Las Vegas but has worked for Mr. Barney for 10 years, the challenge comes in inventing new techniques to realize Mr. Barney's vision.

Nobody starts out as an expert in casting petroleum jelly,Mr. Barney's trademark material. So when a group of his assistants recently gathered to pull apart a room-size mold filled with seven tons of the greasy substance, no one knew quite what to expect. "We were taking bets," Mr. Ryle said. "Would it be the consistency of cheddar cheese or melted brie?" (It turned out to be more like brie.)

But even in a studio full of experts, there's one opinion that weighs more heavily than any other. "In the end, the artist is always right," Mr. Ryle said. "You might try to convey that there's a better way to do something, but if they want to do it another way, you always cave in."

For years, the extensive use of studio assistants was an open secret in the art world: everyone knew about it, but the few artists who tried to acknowledge it in public met with resistance. In the early 80's, Robert Longo created a minor stir when he silk-screened a gallery wall with the names of the assistants who had helped produce his huge graphite drawings of writhing men in dark suits.

"I was, in part, trying to cash in on the shock value," he said in an interview in Art in America, adding: "My dealers were a little reluctant about this, since I was almost throwing it in people's faces. To a certain extent it backfired, with viewers often talking about how things got made, not what they were."

Now, in what some are calling the post-skill era, the extensive use of fabricators has gained wider acceptance. One sign of this shift was the 2003 book "Making Art Work," an illustrated history of the Mike Smith Studio in London. The book features drawings, correspondence, photographs of works in progress and interviews with artists who have worked with the studio, including Rachel Whiteread, Mr. Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Mona Hatoum, Keith Tyson and Darren Almond.

The Los Angeles-based artist Liza Lou, known for creating elaborate environments covered with thousands of glittering glass beads, recently employed 20 Zulu women in Durban, South Africa, to fabricate a piece for her latest show in London. In an empty dance hall that Ms. Lou rented and converted into a makeshift studio, the women spent six months adorning the surface of an 8-by-8-foot barbed wire cage, applying tiny glass beads, one at a time, with tweezers and glue.

"These were women living in the townships who were totally disenfranchised, and this work helped them put food on the table," said Ms. Lou, who plans to establish a permanent studio in Durban.

When the finished sculpture, "Security Fence" (2005), was exhibited at White Cube Gallery in London this year, the Zulu bead workers were not credited in the publicity materials, Ms. Lou explained, because she didn't want to call attention to the fabrication process.

"Art has two lives," she said on the phone from Los Angeles, "the process and the finished product. What an artist goes through to make the work is not necessary for understanding the finished work. The work has to exist on its own terms for its own reasons."

THE issue of acknowledgment for the process is further complicated by the fact that many of the assistants are artists themselves who don't necessarily want to see their names attached to someone else's work.

For some, like Mr. Bojanov, art fabrication is a day job that supports but also distracts from other ambitions. When he is not making sculptures for other artists, Mr. Bojanov directs independent films and videos. As a filmmaker, he is best known for "Invisible" (2005), a documentary feature about young heroin addicts in Sofia, Bulgaria; he is currently working on an adaptation of "Crime and Punishment" set in Red Hook, Brooklyn.

In his role as an art fabricator, Mr. Bojanov works closely with other artists, interpreting their intentions and giving form to their ideas, but he doesn't view this work as collaborative. "Even if it is," he said, "I never thought of it as such. I have no claim for authorship whatsoever."

Down the hall from Mr. Bojanov's main work space in Greenpoint, there is a small room in which he stores works in progress. Laid out on blue foam pallets on the floor a few weeks ago were several lifelike white resin sculptures of reclining figures, part of an unfinished commission for Ms. Beecroft.

The figures, Mr. Bojanov explained, were life-casts of people close to the artist, which will be painted realistically and displayed in glass coffins.

"That's her sister," he said, looking down at one of the figures, which was shrouded in a funereal white cloth. He pointed at another. "And that one, I think, is her former assistant."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Cityside: Hats On, Gloves Off
The death of the rebbe frees his sons Aaron and Zalmen to go to war. But is the prize—all of Hasidic Williamsburg—a poisoned chalice?

By Michael Powell

Aaron, eldest son of Moses, received the summons in the spring of 1999 at his home on Sanz Court in Kiryas Joel, a small town upstate. His father, the leader of the largest Hasidic sect in the world, requested Aaron’s presence in Brooklyn. It was no small matter to be called to Moses’s court during Passover, a season when every Satmar stays close to home and family to concentrate on the joy of God.

Aaron was a scholar, a writer of learned disquisitions on the Torah and Talmud and a most unyielding leader. In his sixteen years as rabbi there, Aaron had overseen a small miracle in Kiryas Joel. Hundreds of affordable tract homes for the fast-growing community of nearly 20,000 Hasidic souls had been built along its winding roads, and a town hall and shopping mall sat across a plaza from a synagogue grander than any found in Satmar Brooklyn. There was a fine brick-and-marble yeshiva, the United Talmudical Academy, of which Aaron was the dean.

Aaron’s tisch, the Sabbath dinner each Friday, was a delight for the yungerleit, the young men who begged to join in the evening of clapping and singing and keening prayer. Afterward, he would offer counsel about religion and the importance of repressing adolescent longing.

Aaron was building the foundation of a new home for the Satmars. And, he felt sure, demonstrating why one day he should rule as his father’s successor.

Aaron’s driver took him down in an SUV over the George Washington and Williamsburg bridges to 550 Bedford Avenue, the three-story red-brick house of his father, Grand Rebbe Moses Teitelbaum.

Inside he found his brothers, Lipa, Shulem, and Zalmen, the latter freshly arrived from Jerusalem, where he served as Satmar rabbi. Aaron said hello to his father’s gabbai (secretary), Moses Friedman—a political force who, in truth, Aaron could barely tolerate. Then the rebbe, his face thin and wreathed by a beard long and white, sat down and explained a new world to his eldest son.

The Satmars are a great people, he said in Yiddish. But when a sect stretches from Williamsburg to Montreal, London to Antwerp, Jerusalem to Kiryas Joel, the wisdom of a prophet is required to lead. A rebbe can no longer hope to say “mazel tov” at every child’s birth nor recite a blessing at every boy’s Bris. A Satmar knocks at the door seeking advice and you barely know him. You have done a fine job in Kiryas Joel, but growth begets problems. One man cannot rule all.

So the rebbe told Aaron that as his eldest son, he had a right to choose: Kiryas Joel or Williamsburg. You rule one, and your brother Zalmen will rule the other.

Aaron protested. He had trained to become the grand rebbe. Aaron left that night undecided—he complained to aides that the decision should be left to a rabbinical court after his father’s death. But a few days later, he called his father.

I will rule Kiryas Joel, Aaron said.

The grand rebbe, who had seen other Hasidic sects split asunder, insisted his son announce this decision in his Kiryas Joel synagogue on June 29, 1999. It’s known as Aaron’s “confession speech.”

“Today I am one who was told what to do and is doing it,” Aaron said to his congregation in Yiddish. “My father, shall he be healthy and strong, called me this morning and told me a few words . . . That he appointed Rabbi Zalmen as rabbi in Williamsburg . . . Whoever will dare to cause a commotion . . . shall have no right of entry into the synagogue.”

So it ended and so it began, the war between the Cain and Abel of the Hasidic world. In the seven years since the confession speech, Aaron and Zalmen, two middle-aged brothers, have engaged in a succession war so nasty that the ledger includes accusations of forged papers and purloined tapes, broken bones, and a brawl with a platoon of nightclub bouncers inside a Williamsburg synagogue.

Last week, the 91-year-old grand rebbe died at Mount Sinai Hospital, as dementia dimmed his eyes and cancer nested in his spine. At the funeral on April 25 in the Rodney Street synagogue in Williamsburg, in front of thousands of Satmar men pressed so tightly together a spectator could barely draw a breath, Aaron and Zalmen gave a show of unity, sharing a dais as they wailed lamentations and bowed toward their father’s wooden casket. But it soured even before the day was over. Supporters threw punches at the shul in Kiryas Joel, sending two—including Moses Friedman—to the hospital; rumors of two different versions of the grand rebbe’s last will and testament circulated; the local rabbinical court, the beit din, declared Zalmen the grand rebbe, while Aaron claimed that the boards of directors of congregations in Israel, Great Britain, and, of course, Kiryas Joel threw their weight behind the elder son.

Not even sitting shivah has muted the war. Last Wednesday, Aaron announced that he was returning to take over Williamsburg and leaving his son in charge of Kiryas Joel. Two grand rebbes, one flock. The Royal Teitelbaums have ruled the Satmars for decades, during which time the theocratic sect has experienced catastrophic loss in the hills of Transylvania and extraordinary rebirth in a once-forgotten industrial corner of Brooklyn. But if the brothers cannot make peace (and no shtreimel-hatted bookie would take odds that long), the sect will divide.

“Another month, or maybe a year, the split will be complete, that’s for sure,” says an adviser who ranks high in the royal court of Zalmen. “We’ll have our Satmar schools and shuls, and the Aaronis will have their Satmar schools and shuls. We wear fur hats, they wear fur hats. Both sides are using the same name.” He pauses to mull that over. “It will be very confusing, no?”

The two brothers’ leadership styles inhabit distant poles. Aaron casts himself in the model of his great-uncle, the late, revered grand rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, the charismatic leader who brought the sect to Brooklyn in 1946. But Aaron can be an iron-fisted political boss. Those he favors obtain jobs and the rebbe’s love. Those who cross him are sometimes frozen out. And more than a few Kiryas Joel dissidents fear the blows of Aaron’s yungerleit legions.

From his first days in Kiryas Joel, Aaron was opposed by a purist Old Guard aligned with Joel Teitelbaum’s formidable widow, Feige the Rebbetzin. (She has since died.) Aaron lashed back with angry words, and the yungerleit and dissidents clashed in shadowy battles—cars were torched, windows broken, men beaten. Aaron barred one outspoken purist from sending his children to a school and barred other dissidents from visiting dead relatives in the cemetery.

Michael Sussman, a secular lawyer who represented some of the Old Guard, once visited Aaron at his Kiryas Joel home: a modern two-story affair. Why, Sussman asked, can’t you tolerate a little dissent?

“He was polite but very adamant that this was a theocracy: If people want to remain in his congregation, then he had the authority to dictate what people can do,” Sussman recalls. “And if they don’t listen . . . ” His voice trailed off.

As ever, the actions of Aaron’s supporters spoke loudest. The Aaronis marched into a Williamsburg synagogue less than a month after the Zalis repulsed a similar attack. This time, the Aaronis brought a platoon of bouncers from a nightclub. The bouncers climbed onto the dais that leads to the Torah scrolls and coldcocked several Satmar men in the face, dropping them to the floor.

Afterward, Zalmen’s followers began saying aloud what the late grand rebbe Moses would only hint at: that Aaron, with his arrogance and tolerance of violence, had weakened the pillars of his own temple. “Aaron acts like straight-up John Gotti,” says burly fish-store owner Abe Braun—an obvious exaggeration from someone who has himself brawled with Aaron’s forces.

Zalmen, 55, is temperamentally his father’s son, milder of manner and with a more gentle grip on the reins of power than Aaron, 57. Zalmen had seemed content to rule a lesser shul in Borough Park until his father sent him to Jerusalem, a prelude to succession. Even so, Zalmen’s scholarship was never as deep nor his Friday tisch so electric as Aaron’s.

To this day, followers compare notes like scouts sizing up a middling pitching prospect. So he’s getting better, no? His speeches, more self-confident, yes?

No one who analyzes Zalmen’s rise can discount the white-bearded gabbai, Moses Friedman, the grand rebbe’s gatekeeper and confidant. Friedman convinced the grand rebbe that Aaron lacked the temperament to succeed him, aides for both sides say. What’s more, Friedman took a personal hand in grooming Zalmen for leadership, helping him to understand that a successful rebbe must seek consensus rather than command it. Today, the old gabbai supervises Zalmen’s court with a master bureaucrat’s touch, while Zalmen, who is no fool, takes the role of chairman of the board. Friedman talks to local pols; Zalmen closes the deals.

Yet the deal that matters most—the 1999 agreement that Aaron would take Kiryas Joel and Zalmen would take Brooklyn and the schools and shuls that come with that inheritance—has never been sealed.

This past week, when the beit din ruled Zalmen is the rightful heir to the throne, Aaron complained that the judges were biased. For years, Aaron has ignored the board of directors of the Williamsburg congregation, arguing that it was elected illegally. He’s currently waging a court battle to install his own board and let it choose a future leader (inevitably himself). When his father’s 2002 will was read, the one that gives Williamsburg to Zalmen, Aaron charged that Zalmen manipulated the old man into signing it. A year ago, the rebbe turned on Aaron in a public confrontation, according to a report in HasidicNews.com. “You rushe ben rushe [evil person],” the grand rebbe yelled. “You think I’m already kaleching [mentally declining]? You think I don’t know what’s going on?”

The conflict is fueled by an army of royal-court officials and hangers-on—so many jobs and perks and loans depend on which son rules. Thousands of Satmars define themselves as Zalis or Aaronis, and some are cheerfully willing to commit mayhem in service of their chosen leader.

All charismatic Hasidic sects run a risk of dynastic wars, notes David Pollock of the Jewish Community Relations Council, not least because none possesses a clear process for choosing a successor. But the rivalry of Aaron and Zalmen is sui generis. The Satmars have 120,000 members, more than any other sect. The Satmar congregation controls a portfolio of shuls, yeshivas, no-interest-loan associations, meat markets, and charities valued at more than $500 million. That’s not counting a social-service empire that pulls down millions of public dollars for health, welfare, food stamps, and public housing. (For all their wealth, the sect knows poverty—the median income in Kiryas Joel is $15,800, and 60 percent of the families live below the poverty line).

This empire is concentrated in Williamsburg, 50,000 strong, and Aaron has decided to make a play for it. He cannot hope to compete with Zalmen there unless he gains control of at least a few schools and social-service organizations in Brooklyn. To build new institutions from scratch in Williamsburg, at today’s inflated land prices, is nearly impossible. So with Aaron moving back into the old neighborhood, determined to become the grand rebbe, the community is steeling itself for more violence.

“We have one God and one wife,” says Isaac Abraham, a short, husky Aaron supporter who, as a young man, served Grand Rebbe Joel. “We should have one leader.”

He shrugged. “If not, maybe we’ll cut the baby in two.”

The founding father of all Hasidic sects is the Ba’al Shem Tov, an eighteenth-century mystic steeped in Kabbalah who taught Jews in pogrom-ravaged Eastern Europe that scholasticism wasn’t the only way to experience God—loving worship was another.

The Ba’al Shem Tov’s disciples fingered out through Eastern Europe. The sects took the names of their towns. So the Lubavitchers hail from Lubavitch in Belarus, the Belz from Belza in eastern Poland, the Bobov from the similarly named Polish town. The Satmars take their name from Satu Mare, the Romanian hill city (annexed by Hungary during the war) where Joel Teitelbaum, the sect’s modern founder, was appointed rabbi in 1934.

The Satmar story nearly ended in a concentration camp. In 1944, the Nazis invaded Hungary and deported or killed 70 percent of its Jews. Rebbe Joel was shipped to Bergen-Belsen, only to be saved by Reszo Kasztner, a Zionist who negotiated with Adolf Eichmann to buy the rabbi’s freedom.

This was a curious vessel of salvation. The Satmars are fervent anti-Zionists who believe that to create a Jewish state before the Messiah comes courts God’s wrath. “It is because of the Zionists,” Teitelbaum wrote later, “that 6 million Jews were killed.”

Joel Teitelbaum arrived in New York on Rosh Hashanah in 1946. He came with the barest minyan—the ten Jews needed to establish a synagogue. His nephew Moses Teitelbaum arrived as well, having lost his wife, Leah, at Auschwitz. Hasidic Jews had settled in Williamsburg since the twenties, but the atmosphere was that of a trayfe medina (a nonkosher city). It was Rebbe Joel’s all-consuming desire to rebuild the Yiddish-speaking world of Eastern Europe. No compromise with modernity was tolerated. Hence the emphasis on fur hats and white knee-stockings. Boys are schooled in the Talmud while girls learn math. (Biology is a nonstarter; the Satmars believe God created the world 6,000 years ago.)

“Joel turned his back on secular education,” says Zalman Alpert, a reference librarian at Yeshiva University. “He wanted folkways, the food, clothing, even the humor of Eastern Europe.”

When Rebbe Joel noticed many young men passing their days humming prayers, he called them together. We will only survive, he said, if you work and generate cash to nourish us. Those Satmar men branched into real estate—buying up much of Williamsburg—and the diamond business. Their money girds what is now a small empire.

But Joel was not above picking fights with other sects, perhaps to stir the blood of young followers. Many Hasidim share the neighborhood, but the Satmars insist their laws must rule. Recently, the Lubavitchers—who are Zionists and former egg-throwing antagonists of the Satmars—suffered their own schism. When Rebbe Menachem Schneerson died twelve years ago, many Lubavitchers declared him the Messiah and still await his resurrection.

This strikes the Satmars as nutty. They revere but don’t quite worship leaders. Rebbe Joel died in 1979 and the Satmars were rudderless. But the board members kept the religious corporations alive. One year later, Moses Teitelbaum was selected as the new grand rebbe. He was knowledgeable, he was a Holocaust survivor, and if he was a bit of a caretaker, he would steer his sect into a new era. But what now?

The chatter on Lee Avenue, where the Satmar women in head scarves and long spring coats load up on veal at the Satmar Meat Market, is of Aaron’s return and Zalmen’s stand. Next week, Aaron will haul in dignitaries from every corner of the Satmar world, from England and Israel, Belgium and Canada, to declare himself the grand rebbe.

The prize is Williamsburg, but if the battle between the brothers Teitelbaum is long and distracting enough, the neighborhood could turn into a poisoned chalice. Aaron is not the only problem: Gilt-edged gentrification presses at every edge. Once Satmar developers could fill suitcases with cash and persuade poor Latino families to vacate their rowhouses. Now Jewish builders struggle to outbid luxury developers for land upon which to put apartments with five and six bedrooms. Procreation may be a Satmar imperative, but it could create a demographic crisis. The average Satmar family has eight children, and to walk into Satmar tenements is to find poorer parents setting up cots in the kitchen and laying down bedding in the bathtub.

Gentrification’s cultural gravity is no less threatening. The Satmars are insistently hermetic. Rabbis proscribe television and the Internet as sin. In recent weeks, Satmar boys, side-locks—known as payes—bouncing as they ran, pasted up the Yiddish wall posters that functioned as breaking-news bulletins on the fate of the grand rebbe.

Aaron sometimes bows to the imperatives of the modern world. Zalmen, by contrast, is a proud kanoi—a zealot. He would not allow the construction of an eruv in Williamsburg, the wire enclosure that permits mothers and fathers to lift children and push strollers on the Sabbath. Aaron has an eruv in Kiryas Joel. The theological differences between the brothers are thin as a page in the Talmud.

Each brother inveighs against such sins as masturbation and women talking on cell phones in public. Ari Zupnick, a well-to-do importer and Aaron man, insists every Satmar—every one—likes it this way. “No one is interested in modern culture. We have a saying . . . ” he pauses and wags a forefinger in the air. “ ‘Don’t be smarter than your father.’ ”

That’s fine bluster, but in reality, trying to double-lock the door against modernity is a chancy business. What is to be done about the thousands of Satmar men who carry fancy cell phones and BlackBerrys and keep a computer jack in their cars? How to account for the Zalmen supporter who in the midst of talking about how ultra-ultra-Orthodox the Satmars are, confesses a love of Notorious B.I.G., Eminem, and Wilco?

“The artists,” the Satmar term of derision that encompasses hipsters, trustafarians, and even vaguely trendy yuppies, are a fatter apple of temptation than most Satmars acknowledge. Mothers who live near the hipper side of Williamsburg constantly complain about artists canoodling in front of their children.

“My friends who live near Broadway, they talk of the stress,” says Chaya Kurz, an attractive 22-year-old mother of a 10-month-old. She wears the required wig—all married women shave their hair on the wedding night—that proclaims her modesty. “Where we live, in the middle of our neighborhood, it is easy. On the edges, it is harder.”

An air of apprehension is palpable, not least for Zalis who face invasion from all sides. A few fathers described stopping by Zalmen’s modest home on a recent Friday evening. They put questions to their rabbi: What should we do with our teenage girls who peer covertly at these artists? Why do these artists never put curtains on their windows? Can we force them out?

Zalmen, they reported, meditated a moment. “You must close your curtains and pray and remember what it is to be Satmar,” he said. “This is our shtetl, and our walls must go high.”

Find this article at:
http://www.newyorkmetro.com/news/cityside/16864/index.html