Manchester already has the largest eruv in the UK. So why has Hale’s met resistance?

‘As soon as you start clamping down on ridiculous things like this, you start trapping everyone else’s liberties’

Dear readers — Last week, Trafford council approved a proposal to create an eruv in Hale, establishing a symbolic area in which Jewish people can move around freely on the Sabbath. This was a major win for the proposal’s backers, who have been trying for the past decade to establish an eruv in the area. The application promised to provide "numerous benefits for the Jewish residents, particularly the elderly, disabled, and families with young children... It would enable them to fully participate in Shabbat observance and lead meaningful and fulfilling lives". 

The proposal was passed despite hundreds of objections from local residents — a level of pushback that Manchester’s previously erected eruvs, including the UK’s largest, never faced. What’s behind so many locals’ vehement rejections this time, and do claims that the eruv will stoke intra-community division while only benefitting “seven or eight” people hold merit? When Ophira set out for Hale to find out, she spoke with a number of Jewish residents who think this has all been blown way out of proportion. 

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Your Mill briefing

🔍 An investigation has been launched at HMP Forest Bank after a prisoner was found dead in his cell on Tuesday. The Prisons and Probations Ombudsman will look at the events leading up to the death of the prisoner, 22-year-old Jake O’Brien. The death follows consistent issues at the prison — managed by private company Sodexo — in recent years, with the MEN reporting in 2023 that the prison struggles with relentless violence and that the prisoners “run the wings”. The government is reportedly planning not to renew Sodexo’s contracts when it runs out next January. 

🛫 The Times visited Aether, Manchester Airport’s new private terminal that was apparently clogged with artists visiting the city for last weekend’s MTV European Music Awards. The timing for the opening of a private terminal with no waiting times and private chauffeurs (for £90 on top of your ticket) might not be ideal, seeing the airport itself has just been voted the worst in the country. However the menu there is designed by Adam Reid, from The French, and at the launch night a few weeks ago he described how the rustic array of hams, piccalillies and bread and butter proves that “expensive doesn’t need to mean inaccessible”. So, at least there’s that.

❌ Finally: an update on our last Friday newsletter about American actor Hopwood DePree’s slowly dissolving dream to renovate and reclaim Hopwood Hall, his ancestral home in Rochdale. The council has pulled out of a deal to sell it to him, and now he has been banned from the grounds, and more recently from the grounds of the surrounding college, too. Julia Heap, Hopwood Hall College’s principal, has said DePree and his team “have no legal rights to come onto college land”. See our long read on the dispute here.

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Manchester already has the largest eruv in the UK. So why has Hale’s met resistance?

By Ophira Gottlieb

The general view from the Jewish community in and around Hale, South Manchester, seems to be that the new eruv is – or rather should be – a non-issue. 

Consisting of 52 street poles, spread out along a 12-mile route and connected to one another by thin wire, the eruv will create a symbolic boundary exempting those who live within it from a Jewish rule forbidding the carrying of items outside their homes on the Sabbath. The resulting perimeter won’t block anyone from entering or leaving, and it should make very little difference (if any at all) to the lives of the town’s non-Jewish residents.

And yet, a planning proposal approved by the council last week received nearly 1000 complaints, and prompted an onslaught of your usual small-town activism: angry flyering across the village, angry one-man protests outside Asda, and a Facebook group with a couple of hundred followers, dedicated mostly to infighting over what exactly it is they’re angry about with the occasional irrelevant interjection about mosques. And while it’s well-documented that the smaller and quainter the town, the more vitriolic the unnecessary spats (you should see the Facebook group against the Todmorden cycle lane), with two eruvs already in place around Manchester, one of them the largest in the UK, both of which were proposed and accepted with minimal fuss — why is it that there’s so much backlash this time?

Proposals for an eruv in Hale first reared their head over a decade ago, in 2014, with an initial plan involving 117 poles — more than double the amount in the new proposal. This too met with pushback. A meeting about the plans was attended by a then-unprecedented 300 members of the community, one of whom was quoted by Altrincham Today saying “what makes me sad is that you’re segregating your group from the rest of society”. The then-Rabbi of Hale synagogue was also quoted, saying that he can “hear loud and clear that the overwhelming view in the room is that you don’t want an eruv… we need to take that back to the drawing board.” 

10 years of drawing board alterations later, it seems that the very same complainants have returned.

Hale railway station. Photo: Ophira Gottlieb

Short for eruv hazerot, or ‘the mixing of dominions’, the purpose of an eruv is to blend the private domain with the public. Orthodox Jewish laws state that on the Sabbath (from Friday sundown and all of Saturday), among many other rules, Jews are forbidden from carrying anything at all outside the confines of their houses. ‘Anything at all’ includes, inconveniently, carrying prayer books to the synagogue, using a walking stick or a crutch, pushing a wheelchair or a pram, or carrying children. This inevitably prevents a certain small demographic of the community from attending synagogue on a Friday night, or doing much at all on a Saturday. So in order to do all of the aforementioned things anyway, an eruv is often erected in towns with a large Orthodox community, marking out an area that technically, by nature of symbolic enclosure, can be considered ‘indoors’. Typically, and in the case of every Manchester eruv, these consist of many-metre-high poles that are arranged along the confines of the boundary, connected by a nylon string, thicker than fishing line, thinner than telegraph wire.

Most of the major religions have been practising divine-loopholing since the fundamentalist Christians discovered premarital anal sex. Orthodox Jews are the experts on the matter, creating lifts that stop at every floor on Saturdays so that they don’t have to push any buttons. This sort of behaviour is arguably inherent to the nature of belief.

While eruvs themselves are a very old concept —  the term was coined as far back as the late second century, and even in the Bible the walls of the city of Jerusalem are considered to be an eruv by some religious scholars — eruvs in Britain are much newer. The UK’s first eruv was erected in 2003, a boundary 11 miles long around the Golders Green and Hampstead area of London. The second was in Edgware in 2006 and then Borehamwood in 2007. Then they came to Manchester. In 2014 the Manchester Community Eruv was built, a 13 mile long boundary that covers parts of Prestwich, Crumpsall, and Higher Broughton — to this day the largest in the UK — which has changed the lives of thousands of Jews living here for the better. In 2020 the green-light was given to Manchester’s second, smaller eruv in Cheadle. Both proposals were met with minimal fuss, and many people living in these areas today are very likely unaware of their existence. Until now, the only UK exception to the total and rightful ambivalence towards the eruvs was in 2017, when around 200 people complained to the council about one that was proposed in St John’s Wood — which went ahead anyway. The 900-and-something complaints to Trafford council for Hale’s eruv therefore represent a marked shift.