Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on December 3, 2014

Sex Abuse Trial Offers Rare Glimpse at Insular New Square

Arit126

Rabbi David Twersky holds a Torah scroll.

Published December 03, 2014.

New Square, New York To his hasidim, Rabbi David Twersky is nearly akin to God.

But that does not mean he exempts himself from the obligations God imposes on all Jews, at least as traditionalists understand them.

Like his followers, Twersky prays to God three times a day. But unlike other Hasidic grand rabbis, Twersky does not pray in the main synagogue with his hasidim. He worships, alone, in an adjoining room. When he has completed his silent readings of the daily prayers known as the Shmoneh Esrei, he knocks on the wall to signal the waiting congregants outside. Only then can the communal service move forward.

Similarly, Twerskys home in New Square, New York, the exclusively Hasidic upstate enclave where he presides over his sect, has its own mikveh, or ritual bath, built exclusively for him and his sons. His followers use the communal bath.

And when Twersky feels a need to get away from the community he leads where more than half his followers live below the poverty line he can summon his black Cadillac XTS and instruct his chauffeur to drive to his multimillion-dollar lakeside vacation home in Nyack, New York, which also sports a private mikveh.

For outsiders, such royalty-like privilege may inspire disapproval. But for his followers, the separateness that Twersky cultivates only increases the holiness with which he is regarded. To them, he is a revered tzadik, a higher spiritual being endowed with saintly wisdom.

Read more:

Hasidic Enclave Keeps Its Secrets Amid Elusive Rebbe's Tight Control

Category: Hasidic
Tags: