Introduction

The Fern Hollow Bridge collapsed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the pre-dawn hours of Friday January 28, 2022. The structure had carried Forbes Avenue across a steeply sloped stream valley on the eastern edge of Frick Park. Constructed in 1901 and replaced in 1973, the Fern Hollow Bridge and Forbes Avenue comprised a large segment of the Pittsburgh eruv’s northern boundary. Stone walls, some laid by masons and another the sheer face of a steep hill, carried the boundary to the bridge’s approaches. Then, using metal poles and then light poles along the bridge’s spans, the eruv boundary crossed from west to east. When the bridge fell that cold winter morning, Pittsburgh residents lost critical transportation and spiritual infrastructure.

Pittsburgh has had an eruv since 1986. The Pittsburgh eruv originally wrapped around the city’s Squirrel Hill neighborhood, an area with many synagogues, Jewish day schools, and stores catering to Pittsburgh’s large Jewish community. Later expansions added several nearby neighborhoods and institutions serving Jews, including universities (Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, Carlow University, and Chatham College) and several hospitals. The Fern Hollow Bridge is located in an expansion area added in the early 1990s. Currently, the Pittsburgh eruv covers 6.7 square miles with an approximate 16-mile perimeter.

A city marked by three rivers, many stream valleys, and steep topography, Pittsburgh has 446 bridges in its city limits. Though the investigation into the cause of the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse is ongoing, preliminary assessments point to deferred maintenance and a significantly deteriorated substructure. A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigation in the months after the collapse revealed that the Fern Hollow Bridge was one of many in the city and region rated poor and potentially dangerous.

It took less than a year for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation to design and rebuild the Fern Hollow Bridge. Just before it reopened, I reported on the eruv and the bridge collapse for NEXTpittsburgh, a local online news outlet. This post expands on that reporting.

What is an Eruv?

Eruv is the Hebrew shorthand for mixed spatial domains. It comes from eruv chatzerot, Hebrew for “mingled courtyards.” Jewish religious laws strictly limit the activities of observant Jews during the 25-hour Sabbath and on certain holidays. During these periods, Jews may not carry things between spatial domains, drive, or engage in activities that may be described as work. In pre-modern times, these limitations were easily observed and adapted to. As populations dispersed from household clusters and villages grew into cities, Jews adapted by creating eruvs to extend domestic domains where carrying is possible.

An eruv requires an unbroken boundary to be intact or kosher. The earliest eruvs relied on actual domestic courtyard walls and medieval city walls for their boundaries. In the nineteenth century, eruvs began using ultity and transportation infrastructure. The first eruv in the United States was built in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1894. It relied on telegraph poles and wires and the banks of the Mississippi River for its boundary. The first eruv erected in New York City in 1905 also used poles and wires as well as parts of an elevated train line.

By the late twentieth century, urban and suburban eruvs were incorporating freeway sound walls and guard rails, and highway overpasses. Creative eruv designers began extending eruv boundaries through woodlands, using string attached to trees as key boundary elements. Rabbis and lay members of congregations around the world work closely with transportation and parks departments as well as telecommunications and electricity utilities to design and maintain their eruvs.

Once an eruv boundary is laid out, arrangements are made with local municipalities to “rent” the space used. Typically this involves a nominal payment to a city or county and the issuance of a proclamation or contract with a congregation or eruv organization. Finally, because food is an integral part of the laws of eruv, a box of matzoh is stored in a central location. The Va’ad Harabonim of Pittsburgh oversees the eruv and rents its space from the City of Pittsburgh. Member congregations circulate box of matzoh among themselves to fulfill the food obligation.

Once completed, eruvs become essential infrastructure enabling observant Jews to carry prayer books and food and for young families to push strollers at times when religious laws otherwise prohibit such activities. They are, as Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center, says, inclusivity features. “It allows more people to participate in communal life and in synagogue life,” Lidji explained in a December 2022 interview.

Lidji has been collecting stories about Jewish life in Pittsburgh since 2011. Though Pittsburgh’s eruv hasn’t entered the discourses on Jewish history in the city, it is an ever-present part of observant Jews’ lives. “If you look at the culture of the neighborhood, of Squirrel Hill, it’s had some pretty immediate … consequences,” Lidji said. “If you see people pushing strollers on Shabbat, that is something that feels very natural to people in Squirrel Hill today but before the eruv, that wouldn’t have happened.”

On October 27, 2018, a gunman entered the Tree of Life synagogue building and killed 11 members of the three congregations that used the building. Lidji and Beth Kissileff, the wife of Rabbi Jonathan Perlman, a survivor who was inside the building, edited a volume of narratives recounting that day and its aftermath. The Pittsburgh eruv figures prominently in Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy.

“The man who murdered eleven Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue was obsessed with borders,” writes Kevin Haworth. “At some point, early on the morning of October 27, 2018, this man drove under a wire and was inside the Pittsburgh eruv.”

Unlike eruvs in other places, the Tree of Life massacre imbued Pittsburgh’s eruv with new meanings. It underscores the bonds of community and expands the ways in which the city’s Jews engage among themselves and with their religious institutions.

Boundary Vigilance

Soon after the Fern Hollow Bridge collapse, word spread quickly throughout Pittsburgh. Rabbi Shimon Silver, the supervising rabbi responsible for keeping the eruv kosher, went to the site with a friend, a police chaplain, who was able to get him behind the police lines to the collapse site.

“As soon as I heard it collapsed, I realized that this is our eruv. I was on that bridge the day before checking it, the afternoon before,” Silver told me in a December 2022 interview for a local Pittsburgh news site. “So immediately, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Is the eruv going to be down for Shabbos?”

Until ceding his eruv checking duties in late 2022, Silver was one of several rabbis checking the Pittsburgh eruv boundaries. They split the territory up and ensure that all of the checking is completed by mid-day Thursdays to ensure that any necessary repairs are completed before sunset Friday. Most weeks, there are minor repairs due to inclement weather or cars crashing into utility poles. Each eruv checker carries a simply repair kit in their trunks: a hammer, extra string, metal staples, and segments of plastic u-channels used to construct the lechis, the uprights, attached to utility poles and other objects where string and wires cross.

Whenever a break is encountered, the checker takes a photograph and initiates a WhatsApp conversation that includes the details of the break and proposed fixes. The photos are geotagged providing a precise location for each event.

“So it’s a group of all the rabbis,” eruv checker Rabbi Eli Wilansky told me the day in December 2022 that I accompanied him on his rounds. “All the people who are in charge so if there’s an issue, everybody knows about it if they see the chat.”

During that day’s circuit Wilansky made several minor repairs himself. He also found two others that required an intervention by the eruv’s maintainer. Chaim Cowen is a licensed electrician who owns his own business. The local utilities that own the physical infrastructure require the eruv to use a licensed contractor.

“They send me a list of what those issues are and I go through and fix them,” Cowen explained in an interview. “That can vary from something really small that only takes a half hour for me to go over there and fix the little piece of cracked half-inch molding that goes down one side of the pole. Or, it could be a lot more involved where one of the larger strings comes down and I need two bucket trucks.”

The Fern Hollow Bridge collapse was an entirely new situation for all of the people involved with the eruv. It took a lot of coordination and collaboration with government agencies and construction workers who had never before heard of the eruv. “It’s cool to see contractors who are working on the million dollar project of building bridges and they’re still willing to come and help the eruv,” Cowen explained.

As he worked his way around the Fern Hollow Bridge work site west of the bridge, construction workers approached him as if they were old friends. Wilansky called out to the site supervisor, “Looks good. What’s the ETA? How much longer do I have to see you?”

“When are you going to get back on your permit to cross the bridge or what do you do there? How are you working that one,” the contractor replied.

On the east side, a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation officials approached Wilansky’s car. “Everything looking good,” he asked. Wilansky replied, “So far, so good.”

The bridge site is but one of many challenges to Pittsburgh’s eruv checkers. “Pittsburgh is actually a very unique eruv in a lot of ways because we use a lot of the hillsides and bridges and stuff to get to close off certain areas,” Cowen said. Wilansky’s route includes what could only be described as the mundane elements of eruv architecture and engineering, light poles, cemetery walls, and fences. The steep hillsides, shear rock faces, and the portion of the boundary that parallels the freeway leading from the Pennsylvania Turnpike into downtown Pittsburgh distinguish the city from the other cities and suburbs where I have documented eruvs.

The Future

A new bridge carrying Forbes Avenue across the Frick Park ravine won’t end the challenges to Pittsburgh’s eruv managers. “We have a lot of bridges in the eruv. This isn’t the only one,” says Silver. There are bridges over streams as well as bridges over railroad tracks and bus rapid transit lines. Many of them require major repair and rehabilitation work.

There are several bridge replacement projects on the horizon, Silver explains. “I got the call about the Duck Hollow Bridge, I got it from one of the contractors who hadn’t even taken the job yet. They were just bidding on it and they met me down there and it turns out — we did have to work around it. It was a big deal.”

The same is true for major redevelopment projects in the city. One brownfield reclamation project required major earthmoving activities near the Squirrel Hill Tunnel that takes the Parkway East under Squirrel Hill. “When they were working on the Nine Mile Run project, they degraded the slope,” Silver says. “They built three access ramps and the access ramps were too gentle for our eruv.”

Like the contractors working on the Fern Hollow Bridge site, Silver worked closely with them to construct temporary eruv boundaries. In a city as distinctive as Pittsburgh, with its bridges, topography, and ambitious plans to reclaim industrial wastelands, it’s an ongoing process where sacred traditions intersect with modern technology, engineering, and planning.

©2023 D.S. Rotenstein

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