https://www.thedailybeast.com/new-yorks-hot-new-tour-is-visiting-ultra-orthodox-jews
New York’s Hot New Tour Is Visiting Ultra Orthodox Jews
“To many, the Hasidic world is shrouded in mystery and secrecy—well, not anymore.”
Shira Feder
Updated 08.10.19 10:08AM ET / Published 08.10.19 5:09AM ET
There are about five blocks of Crown Heights’ Kingston Avenue that serve as the nerve center for the Hasidic Jews that set up roots in the neighborhood in the ’40s. Every day Rabbi Yoni Katz walks down these blocks crowded with men wearing black hats and women wearing wigs, a crew of unlikely companions in tow. In the past, some of them have been Christian, some Muslim (from as far away as Qatar). One group was all Mormon journalism students from Brigham Young University. There’s also a steady trickle of Reform Jews who come to accompany Katz on this daily walk, knowing as little about the enclosed world of Hasidic Jewry as the Japanese tourists that walk with them.
Katz doesn’t get too many looks from residents as he walks. The residents of Crown Heights are used to visitors. And Katz has been bringing around visitors for a while, as part of his Airbnb experience tour of the Hasidic community in Crown Heights, where people pay $69 a person to go where few non-Jews have gone. For Katz, that’s a selling point. “To many, the Hasidic world is shrouded in mystery and secrecy—well, not anymore,” he writes in his Airbnb advertisement.
The tour begins with a half-hour introduction, in which Katz answers the question on everyone’s minds: Why in the world would the Hasidic community, with its reputation for being isolated and closed off, ever consent to one of these tours? “Crown Heights has never really been closed,” Katz told The Daily Beast. “It might look like it’s full of reclusive Hasidic Jews, but it’s open. It’s always been open to all different kinds of people.”
Katz gives the tours every day, whether the heat is blazing or the cold wind is rattling the trees. Sometimes his wife participates. Sometimes a couple of his seven children trot along. He estimates that he shows the hidden side of Crown Heights to about 50 people a week, on average. Although sometimes there are a hundred people a week and sometimes there are 12. But there’s rarely a day where Katz walks down Kingston Avenue unaccompanied.
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