A Crowded Ride Home
All images by Michael Pina.
By Summer Myatt
Last week, photographer Michael Pina stumbled upon an alarming scene on his bike ride home. In the Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of South Williamsburg, hundreds of people had gathered on public street corners near the East River’s edge. None of them were wearing masks, and maybe even more shockingly, not one of the three NYPD officers who were on the scene was enforcing the citywide mask mandate. Pina approached an officer to ask how a gathering like this was permitted. “One officer responded saying that the event was a private event. I told him we are in a pandemic and don't they think this is irresponsible? The officer only shook his head in the affirmative and shrugged his shoulders,” Pina says of his encounter.
For a police force so occupied with public safety, the officers’ lack of enforcement of public health protocols that night may have proved otherwise. Not long ago, New York City was America’s epicenter of the global pandemic, and the Hasidic community has been undoubtedly hit harder than most. But at the height of the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur this month, mass religious gatherings made a comeback in the bustling, insular community.
Hasidic communities, especially in New York City, have a historic distrust of secular authorities and local government, preferring instead to take cues from religious leaders of their own. However, the aspects of their communities that characterize them as vibrant, tight-knit neighborhoods have also led to their heightened susceptibility to coronavirus. When Pina approached a man at the gathering, he asked, “Why is no one wearing a mask? We are in a pandemic and we have 200,000 dead Americans in this country. He said, ‘Do you see any dead people here?’”
That night, Pina found himself questioning why the gathering was permitted at all, given the risk it posed both to individuals within the crowd and to neighboring residents and passersby. Governor Cuomo, now famous for his daily coronavirus briefings and informational slideshows, has been very vocal in his pleas for citizens to cooperate in wearing masks and respecting social distancing guidelines. NYPD officers have spent months patrolling parks and high-density areas, giving out tickets and fines to those not wearing masks or complying with guidelines.
Pina was bewildered by the inaction of the officers and the permittance of this event, and he set out to capture the bizarre coexistence of two seemingly opposing forces. The result is a beautiful yet sort of disturbing documentation of a community fiercely clinging to its identity and a police force who seems to have lost theirs.
