above: Jerusalem city Eruv map below: Remnant Eruv posts from the ‘Eruv Wars’ in Jerusalem, near Mount Herzl
Most my time in the first years of my research on the Eruv focused on Eruvin of Jewish communities in the Diaspora throughout North America. And time and time again, the resourcefulness was a means of survival for the Eruv and reflects the stories of those communities. It was only years later when working on a grant overseas that a new view of the Eruv appeared on my radar. I arrived at the same desert hills that Sophie Calle has photographed, and I stood in Jerusalem seeing the Eruv that bordered the Holy City. Like that first photograph, I found posts standing alone against the yellow rock and meandering hills with a clear and evident wire spanning across the crisp sky to another post. The Eruv was certainly on display in ways that I had never experienced in North America, its edge more evident. Its prominence in the landscape was confusing to me because the Eruv had always been so humble in my previous encounters. Here, it stood out, ambiguous but prominent. It still has an appearance of urban refuse in many ways – like something left over that was never collected. In Jerusalem, these boundaries are an unclear and confusing meandering of lines and posts and wires. Many strings cut; many Eruv boundaries incomplete... I had trouble tracing the line that would surround a community. In a series of conversations, I was informed of a few things. The first, is that Jerusalem has one large Eruv that is coordinated by the city and rabbinic authorities and surrounds the city in almost its entirety. The second, is that many communities do not trust the completeness of this boundary and have built, and keep building, new boundaries that overlap and multiply in order to maintain religious law. And lastly, that these Eruvin I had first stumbled upon in Jerusalem were a form of rogue community Eruvin (for which a small number exist).
on site review 38: borders, lines, breaks and breaches 52
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