Maintaining the eruv, which must be unbroken to be considered kosher, has been Tauber\u2019s job since 1999. Tauber says it doesn\u2019t make sense for someone else to sub in for him, simply because he knows the eruv so well and can do it so efficiently, after having inspected it for so many years. With Chaya\u2019s approval, he even missed the early-morning birth of his 13th and youngest child, now 7, to check the eruv on a Friday morning. He immediately went to the hospital to visit mother and baby after his inspection was done.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t know if I can explain what I like in this job,\u201d Tauber said. \u201cI like it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Now, for the first time, the eruv inspector is getting some high-tech assistance.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Installed in August, a new sensor system created by technology entrepreneur Jerry Kestenbaum \u2014 also the creator of the residential building software company BuildingLink \u2014 magnetically snaps onto multiple locations of the eruv. The 142 sensors detect changes in the angle of the wire and send a signal to a receiver held by Spectrum on Broadway, the lighting and electrical company responsible for maintaining the line per Tauber\u2019s instructions. The sensors themselves are battery-operated and meant to last for six to 10 years, sealed in a waterproof case.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt gives me more comfortability,\u201d Tauber said. But he\u2019s not planning on ceding oversight entirely to the machines, saying, \u201cI know I need to check because the sensors are not 100%.\u201d<\/p>\n
The sensors mark the first major innovation to Manhattan\u2019s biggest eruv, installed in 1999 after Adam Mintz, then the rabbi of Lincoln Square Synagogue, requested its installation to surround his Upper West Side neighborhood. (Prior to the borough-wide eruv, different parts of the city each had their own, but travel between them while carrying anything was prohibited on Shabbat.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
According to Jewish law related to Shabbat, no items can be carried outside the home on what is supposed to be a day of rest and prayer. Recognizing this as a potential burden, rabbis in the Talmudic era devised a workaround: The boundary defined by the eruv would extend the \u201cprivate\u201d zone where carrying is permitted. Despite some community objections \u2014 sometimes from Jews and non-Jews who worry that the eruv will change the \u201ccharacter\u201d of their neighborhoods<\/a>, or civil libertarians who worry about the blurring of church and state<\/a> \u2014 nearly every observant community, from big cities to small towns, is surrounded by an eruv.<\/p>\n The Lincoln Square eruv has expanded multiple times since 1999, now encompassing most of Manhattan, from 145th Street between Riverside Drive and Malcolm X Boulevard at its northernmost point, roughly down FDR Drive all the way to the bottom of Manhattan at the South Street Ferry, and back up the Henry Hudson Parkway.\u00a0<\/p>\n In the years since he became its inspector, Tauber\u2019s dedication to the eruv has been unflagging. He made sure it was unbroken after 9\/11 (it didn\u2019t extend all the way downtown at the time), after the 2003 citywide blackout, after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. In Tauber\u2019s 25 years of inspections, the eruv has only been down once over a Shabbat, during a snowstorm in 2010.\u00a0<\/p>\n In addition to checking the eruv twice a week, Tauber helps his wife run a daycare, and he teaches boys at a yeshiva. He hasn\u2019t taken a vacation longer than a few days for a quarter century.\u00a0<\/p>\n Chaya Tauber said she has a theory about why he likes the eruv job so much. \u201c[It\u2019s] many hours of a busy week \u2014 he has more jobs, it\u2019s not the only job \u2014 that he can be by himself,\u201d she said.\u201d Quiet time. I think he likes the traveling, also.\u201d<\/p>\n Just two weeks ago, he helped establish an eruv around Columbia University Medical Center in Washington Heights and the surrounding apartments. Eventually, the plan is to connect it to the main Manhattan eruv \u2014 and potentially to other smaller eruvs in Upper Manhattan. There, smaller eruvs serve portions of Washington Heights with many observant Jews, including one\u00a0 that is home to the Orthodox flagship Yeshiva University.<\/p>\n Kestenbaum, whose new business, Aware Buildings, provides sensors for home security, said the idea for the electronic eruv technology came about during a conversation with Mintz, now the rabbinic leader of Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim (The Shtiebel) on the Upper West Side at the Marlene Meyerson JCC.<\/p>\n \u201cI was saying to him that the sensors can be applied to many, many things that we\u2019re used to doing manually,\u201d said Kestenbaum, whose wife converted to Judaism under Mintz\u2019s supervision.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s a complicated eruv where the deployed environment changes,\u201d Kestenbaum explained. \u201cIt\u2019s not [like] in the suburbs, where the outline of the eruvs remains constant. Things go wrong. You\u2019ve got scaffolding that gets put up. You\u2019ve got other things that happen. The weekly eruv job is not just fixing, sometimes it\u2019s rerouting.\u201d<\/p>\n The complications are what gets Tauber out the door around 3:30 a.m. on inspection days. Not only does he beat rush hour, but once the sun begins to come up, it\u2019s far more difficult to see the wire.<\/p>\n Now, the sensors can help him locate the wires more easily \u2014 and safely. \u201cI used to walk [out of the car] because I couldn\u2019t see it without the sensors,\u201d Tauber said, pointing to a section near the Manhattan Bridge. \u201cSee the sensors? You don\u2019t have to see the actual line.\u201d<\/p>\n Newly added motion sensors, encased in plastic, are clipped onto a part of the eruv wire by the Manhattan Bridge. (Jackie Hajdenberg)<\/p>\n Tauber has been surprised by the willingness of various city agencies and construction crews to accommodate him in his unusual line of work.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though we are Jewish, and we know we are not the most liked people here, but I never, ever had a problem with any organization or department officials, or even a construction company \u2014 they always come across,\u201d he said. \u201cThey always look like they admire something which is religious.\u201d<\/p>\n For Chaya Tauber, the early mornings and constrained vacations are worth it because of the way her husband\u2019s work allows Manhattan Jews to observe one major law of Shabbat with ease.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is so much less desecration of Shabbos,\u201d Chaya Tauber said, adding that when the eruv is up, \u201cat least they\u2019re not transgressing on this particular halacha. That makes this job such a responsibility.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\tJewish stories matter, and so does your support.\t\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Around 6:15 a.m. on a recent Thursday, Rabbi Moshe Tauber parked his van in the merge lane of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11160,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63,7675],"class_list":{"0":"post-11159","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-manhattan","9":"tag-manhattan-headlines","10":"tag-manhattan-news","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-religion"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11159\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/10-16-25-Eruv-Sensors.jpg\")
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