If you asked most Sydneysiders about the thin wire fence that runs around several of the Eastern Suburbs, the majority would reply, “I have no idea what you’re talking about”.
I wasn’t aware of it either until recently when a Jewish friend mentioned the Sydney Eruv.
“What’s that?” I asked.
The Eruv, he explained, is a long fence that allows Jews to do certain things during Shabbat (the Jewish day of rest which falls every Friday to Saturday night) they otherwise wouldn’t be allowed to.
Rather than get into the nitty gritty of it all, my mate suggested I contact a friend of his, Rabbi Benjamin Elton, to explain it to me in detail.
“On Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, the Torah tells us we can’t carry objects in certain public areas,” the Chief Minister of the Great Synagogue told me.
“For example, you can’t have a set of keys in your pocket and walk out of your house onto the street, or from the street into your house,” Rabbi Elton said.
Obviously, not being able to do things like push a pram, use a walking stick or even carry tissues in your pocket for an entire 24-hour period once a week is pretty inconvenient, so Rabbis later agreed to make an exception.
“They said, ‘if you create a symbolic boundary around the area where you’re living, we’re not going to impose these extra restrictions,’” Rabbi Elton said.
That boundary is known as an Eruv.
“There are several Eruv in Sydney,” he continued. “The earliest goes back over 20 years, that’s in the Bondi area.”
The Eruv is marked by wire that is typically hung from power poles, and in some cases a high bank of earth can be used as an Eruv boundary as well.
“If you go down to Bondi Beach and look carefully, you’ll see certain posts with wires across them very close to the beach itself, they’re the most obvious ones,” Rabbi Elton said.
The Eruv has to be unbroken in order for it to be considered legitimate, so a Rabbi inspects it every single week to make sure that all the wires are intact.
There are also Eruv in Melbourne and Perth, as well as many cities overseas including Vancouver, Hong Kong, Venice and London.
The most expensive Eruv is around Manhattan Island in New York which costs an estimated $220,000 a year to maintain.