Eruv in Lviv

In the early modern period, the Jews of Lviv lived in a separate quarter. This began to change only due to emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century. However, the boundaries of the Jewish space could be defined not only by the city laws but also by the rules of Judaism. Eruv, a boundary used by religious Jews to mark private space within which things could be carried on the Sabbath, was one among such phenomenons.

The eruv arragement changed as the Jewish community used various urban resources such as city walls and, later, telegraph and telephone wires for this purpose. Solving the eruv problem in Lviv in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries shows the peculiarity of the Jewish community modernization and as well as its interaction with the city authorities.

The eruv (Hebrew for "mixing") is a line used to symbolically unite private houses and to mark boundaries beyond which religious Jews could not go during the Sabbath, a day when restrictions on various activities were in effect. The eruv created a new private space within which one could move freely as the Torah prohibition against taking things outside one's own home on the Sabbath did not apply there (Behhofer, 2017, 199). The practice of the eruv developed in the Talmudic era (1st-7th centuries AD). We do not know much about how the eruv was handled in medieval and early modern European cities, but later sources mention that the eruv went along city walls. An important requirement was the wall continuity; if there were gaps in the wall, they were walled up. In the absence of a wall, the eruv was replaced by cords or wires.

We learn that this practice existed in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the directives of the Habsburg administration, which, having established control over the territory, allowed the practice by decrees of 1790 and 1791. However, there were some conditions: the cords were not to obstruct street traffic. In 1869, the Ministry of Religion and Education also clarified that if the cords passed over the territory where Christians lived, their additional permission was required (Śliż, 2004, 123). This was probably due to the fact that after the Constitution was adopted in 1867, Jews had the right to live outside their districts and the problem of a separate Jewish space became more complicated. Apart from that, this law allows us to know that non-Jewish houses could enter the eruv and become part of the Jewish sacred space. We can draw an analogy with the Kingdom of Poland. In the second half of the nineteenth century, eruv still existed there in most cities and towns. After restrictions on Jewish settlement were abolished, as much as the entire urban territory could be enclosed within the eruv, as in the case of Kłodawa and Turek (Bergman, 2002, 94). It is precisely during this period that discussions about the eruv, which could interfere with city officials' visions of an orderly urban space or cause hostility as an overly visible manifestation of the Jewish religion, became more known (Bergman, 2002, 90). 

The example of solving the eruv problem in modern times demonstrates how technical innovations were put at the service of religious norms and how Jewish communities were willing to be flexible in solving problems. With the advent of the telegraph in the nineteenth-century cities, its wires began to be used to mark the eruv and to fill gaps. Such a practice existed in Lviv as well, it was allowed by Rabbi Joseph Saul Nathansohn (1808-1875), the chief rabbi of the city in 1857-1873. However, a discussion arose in the rabbinical environment whether telegraph poles and wires were appropriate to be used as an eruv. Rabbi Shneur Zalman Fradkin (1830-1902) of Lublin wrote in response to the Lviv rabbi a responsa, a special document providing answers to controversial questions about the practices of Judaism (1883) in which he denied the possibility of such use. He was supported by Rabbi Abraham Feingold in 1891 (Mintz, 2011, 154). Debate arose as to whether or not poles intended for another purpose could be used. However, within the city limits it was difficult to erect structures without the approval of the city authorities and it was easier to use existing ones. The eruv continuity was controlled by the Jewish community in which an organization called khevra eruvin (the eruv society) was formed. Its members were to check the integrity of the eruv before each Sabbath and, in case of damage, to inform the community about it so that no one carried things on the Sabbath. 

The eruv question was solved in each city independently. Lviv’s eruv has a history that shows the interaction of the Jewish community, the city, and private companies. In 1894, during the construction of tram lines, one of the engineers noticed a wire of unknown purpose, which was laid at a height of 4.5 meters and whose ends, equipped with a telephone bell ringer, led to the center of the city. This story was found in the archive and researched by the Jewish ethnographer Giza Frenkel/Fraenklowa, who tracked the creation of the wire eruv in the Jewish community’s documents. The initiator of the new eruv was Rabbi Isaak Ettinger (1827-1891) in 1890. At that time, the telegraph wires could not perform this function anymore as they had been moved underground, their poles taken away. Therefore, the rabbi turned to the director of the Lviv telephone company, Solomon Bardach, to help him construct the eruv with telephone wires, since the latter had previously carried out such an operation in Prague and Chernivtsi. The rabbi suggested that the community add to its budget annual funds for the maintenance of such a line. The telephone company provided 140 poles at no extra charge (Fraenklowa, 1932, 5).

After the death of Rabbi Ettinger, there was an additional suggestion from the community that the wires be equipped with a telephone bell ringer so that its integrity could be checked. The community and the telephone company signed a contract and installed a telephone set in the community office. Every Friday, the commission had to make a phone call to check the integrity of the wire; in case of damage, the telephone set would not work (Fraenklowa, 1932, 5). However, the technological solution of the eruv could make it dangerous. In 1903, the eruv wire broke causing the tragic death of a man who became entangled in it and was electrocuted (Kurjer Lwowski, 1903, Nr. 189, 4). Despite the fact that the cord marking the eruv had been there for several years, the editorial staff of the newspaper that reported the event did not know its history.

Lviv's solution to the eruv problem became a precedent for other communities. In 1909, a congress of rabbis held in Warsaw submitted a request to the Governor General to allow the encircling of cities with wires (which had been banned in the Kingdom of Poland forty years before), referring to the Lviv case, where an eruv was created by the Telephone Society (Słowo, 1909, 2). It is important that by the early twentieth century the custom of encircling cities with an eruv had already declined in the large cities of Western Europe, for example in Germany, the reason for that being, in particular, the dissatisfaction of the community’s Christian part (Levy, 69).  

During the First World War, telephone wires used as eruvim could pose a danger to the Jewish communities of Poland, as the Russian army believed that these were secret telephone wires for espionage communication used by the Jews to communicate information to the Austrians (Der Morgen zshurnal, 1914, No. 4006, 1). This was part of the espionage mania and the Russian Empire's army accusations of the Jews of collaborating with the enemy.

In the interwar period, the eruv, along with other attributes of the Orthodox Jews like kosher meat and mikvah became the subject of discussion in the Jewish community of Lviv. Some of the administration members believed that, in times of economic crisis, it was not appropriate to spend large amounts of money on salaries for the supervisors of kosher food or the eruv. The maintenance of the hospital, the care of material monuments, in particular the cemetery, and even donations to the Zionist movement seemed to be more urgent problems (Chwila, 1933, Nr. 5278, 9). But for the Orthodox Jews, the question of the eruv remained relevant. In 1925, the directorate of public works of the Lviv Voivodeship asked the community whether the eruv was determined by ritual or just custom, as they received numerous requests from the Ternopil, Stanislaviv, and Lviv Voivodeships for the arrangement of eruvim. The Lviv community representatives replied that this was due to the ritual, and thus indispensable (Chwila, 1932, Nr. 4814, 6). The polarization of Jewish society and the strengthening of more radical tendencies led to the actualization of certain ritual issues.

In modern Orthodox Jewish communities, the problem of the eruv still remains relevant, with eruvim existing in some cities. One of the most famous eruvim, over a hundred years old, covers almost all of Manhattan and its integrity is checked every Thursday (Inscoe, 2017). As cities grow in size and new elements appear in space, the debate about the shape and types of eruvim continues.

• Giza Frenkel/Fraenklowa (1895-1984) — an ethnographer, a researcher of Jewish culture and art, who worked at the Institute of Ethnography in Lviv in the interwar period
• Isaak Ettinger (1827-1891) — a Galician rabbi, the chief rabbi of Lviv from 1888
• Joseph Saul Nathansohn (1808-1875) — a Galician rabbi, the chief rabbi of Lviv from 1857.

1. Giza Fraenklowa, "Pierwszy tramwaj we Lwowie i Ejruw", Chwila, 1932, Nr. 4814, s. 5.
2. Giza Fraenklowa, "Pierwszy tramwaj we Lwowie i Ejruw (Dokończenie)",  Chwila, 1932, Nr. 4815, s. 5.
3. "Kronika miejscowa", Słowo, 1909, R. 28, s. 2.
4. "Rada Gminy żyd. Stwierdziła, że skończyła swe urzędowanie", Chwila, 1933, Nr. 5278, s. 9.
5. "Zabity prądem elektrycznym", Kurjer Lwowski, 1903, Nr. 189, s. 4.
6. Robert Y. Behhofer, "The Non-Territoriality of an Eruv: Ritual Bearings in Jewish Urban Life", Journal of Architecture and Urbanism, 2017, Vol. 41, Nr. 3, 199–209.
7. Eleonora Bergman "The Rewir or Jewish district and the Eyruv", Studia Judaica, 2002, Vol. 5, Nr. 1(9), 85-97.
8. Michael Inscoe,  "The wire that transforms much of Manhattan into one big, symbolic home" , 2017.
9. Miriam Levy, Encounter with the Eruv: A Project Towards the City of Open Enclosure, MA thesis (MIT, 2000).
10. Adam Mintz, Halakhah in America: The History of City Eruvin, 1894-1962 (New York University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2011).
11. "Polyakn mesorn az der eruv vert benutst als telefon tsu ferraten rusland tsum keyzer" Der Morgen zshurnal, 1914, Nr. 4006.
12. Małgorzata Śliż, Galicyjscy Żydzi na drodze do równouprawnienia 1848-1914. Aspekt prawny procesu emancypacji ludności żydowskiej na terenie Galicji, Rozprawa doktorska (Uniwersytet Jagielloński, 2004).