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Despite Heavy Toll, Some Orthodox Flout Distancing Rules Worshippers seen defying their leaders’ warnings about the coronavirus. Hannah Dreyfus Staff Writer
Hundreds of Orthodox Jews gather in Borough Park on Sunday at the funeral of a rabbi who died from coronavirus. The outbreak is hitting charedi neighborhoods especially hard. GET T Y I MAGES
Chaplains Bear a Great Weight as ‘Bridge to Families’ On the front lines of a changing ‘ministry of presence.’ Stewart Ain Stewart Ain
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s doctors and nurses scurried past him, Rabbi Jason Kirschner, wearing an N95 respirator mask, stood outside the closed door of a Covid-19 patient at Mt. Sinai Hospital in Manhattan last week and recited prayers of healing. “I offered the prayers without going into the room — just standing outside so I can be as close as pos-
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sible,” he told The Jewish Week. “I try to provide whatever spiritual support I can give to our Jewish patients. By and large our patients who are on this unit are in flux and shortly after they come in they are sedated. But there have been times when I have been able to make genuine eye contact with Jewish patients who know who I am and know what I am doing and who get solace from my presence.” Rabbi Kirschner, a Conservative rabbi, who nor-
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ami Frankel, a nurse working at Maimonides Medical Center in the heart of Brooklyn’s charedi Orthodox enclave of Borough Park, saw her professional life overtaken by the coronavirus in a matter of days. “At first, I worked my regular shift and was floated to a corona floor to help out,” said Frankel, who works three to four 12-hour shifts a week. “By my next shift on my regular floor, the floor was converted to a corona floor.”
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Even for Frankel — a health care professional and member of the area’s expansive Orthodox Jewish community who had been warning family and friends to “social distance” for weeks — the “sudden, exponential shift” in Covid-19 cases came as a shock. Maimonides serves a diverse area where some 70 languages are spoken. But while data is difficult to come by amid a still-surging pandemic, tight-knit Orthodox communities across New York and New Jersey have been particularly hard hit by the virus, according to local medical professionals and community members. Data from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene published April 3 showed Borough Park and Crown Heights, home to large charedi Orthodox communities, among the neighborhoods with the highest case counts (those with anywhere between 409 and 1,245 cases) in the city. County investigators in Rockland County said most of their area’s cases are found in Spring Valley and Monsey, also home to large Orthodox Jewish communities. Orthodox newspapers are filled with death notices, including some for leading rabbis of several
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