Life
Life among the curtain twitchers of Stamford Hill
As a long-time resident of Stamford Hill, Gaby Koppel is a seasoned observer of the local Charedi community and its non-Jewish neighbours
May 27, 2021 10:48
As a long-time resident of Stamford Hill, Gaby Koppel is a seasoned observer of the local Charedi community and its non-Jewish neighbours
May 27, 2021 10:48The house next door to ours has gone on the market and I’m pretty sure that every other resident of our attractive Hackney crescent has responded in the same way: will the new owners be like us?
Whenever I mention that I live in Stamford Hill people assume that we’re completely surrounded by Charedi families. But the truth is that the lovely enclave we’ve inhabited for 30 years has a comfortable balance between Orthodox households and others. Our neighbours have included just the kind of Boho mix of demographic and ethnicity you’d expect anywhere in Hackney including a soap star, doctors, business people, a hedge fund manager, a trade unionist, a builder and a scattering of academics.
Mixed in with them is an equal number of typically large frum families, who boast several teachers and a carpet layer. In summer the street is alive until late at night with the sounds of children playing. Having no screens to distract them, Charedi kids play outdoors whenever the weather is good — at best that creates a rather wholesome, old-fashioned communal atmosphere, but there is a down side. In the absence of parental supervision, the volume of noise the kids generate can be an irritant — not to mention the frequent damage inflicted on parked cars by bikes and toys.
Being Jewish but not Charedi means that while on Purim the mishloach manot pile up on the front porch, we are in the back garden having cocktails over the garden wall with our mates next door, a Welsh doctor and her retired IT professional husband. We’re close to my Satmar rabbi cousin and after three decades in the area have many other friends, especially Lubavitch families who are generous with their hospitality as a matter of principle. Then two years ago my husband produced and appeared in a BBC television documentary about a group of local Charedi families moving to Canvey which cemented many bonds as well as reinforcing the impression that we understand both sides.
When we moved in, two young couples were very welcoming, bringing gifts for our new-born and inviting us over on festivals and Shabbats. I remember my then little daughter’s shock when she spotted the gorgeous long locks she’d admired on one of the mothers now sitting on the bannister post.
‘It’s not real, Mummy!’ she whispered loud enough for everybody to hear and we all laughed.
There are plenty more positives. Rose, a successful publisher and ghost writer originally from Ireland reaches out to her neighbours with warmth and curiosity. Observing that the children are often at a loose end, she’s drawn many of them into helping grow vegetables in pots at the front of her house.
Interpersonal contacts have always been superficially cordial. But nowadays there is an increasing nervousness on the non-Jewish side that the delicate balance will be upset, and never more so than the year when lockdown made all of us into curtain twitchers.
Last year at Succot a family near us had a party to celebrate the arrival of a new baby. From nine till midnight I watched people going in and out without masks or social distancing at a time when the “rule of six” in England meant large indoor social gatherings were banned.
“People are being fined up and down the country for less,” commented one neighbour on our group Whatsapp, “such behaviour impacts us all.” Others agreed saying “Get them fined. Maybe they will abide by the law then. It’s not negotiable, it’s the law.” Nothing was said directly , but resentment rankled. Though the Whatsapp group is open to all it has no Charedi members.
The death of our dear friend Rabbi Avrohom Pinter quite early in the pandemic came as a terrible shock. Twenty-one years earlier he had been sandak to my son, holding the baby during his brit milah. Avrohom contracted the virus after going door to door pleading with people to behave more responsibly. His death didn’t seem to make much difference, nor did that of another local rabbi with whom my husband was studying, despite the outpouring of grief. It wasn’t until an illegal wedding party made the national news that the imperative seemed to sink in, and even now observance of Covid guidelines is patchy.
Parking and planning are also areas of huge contention, with illegal schools popping up across Stamford Hill. Children are ferried to them by rattling mini buses driven erratically along the narrow roads and stopping in random spots to cause obstructions. We already have one shtiebl in our road which doubles up as a yeshivah during the week and seems to accommodate an eyebrow-raising number of young men, while the houses on our side back on to a further row of schools — some of them legal, others less so.
Sadly, concern for the architectural heritage of the borough isn’t a value shared by many of our Charedi neighbours, a point on which Avrohom Pinter and I amicably agreed to differ. In the past, an attitude that puts practicality before aesthetics gave rise to clumps of unsightly and often ramshackle roof extensions thrown up to accommodate large numbers of children. In neighbouring south Haringey whole streets of period properties have been disfigured.
Soon after we arrived one neighbour was forced to dismantle an extension he didn’t have planning permission for, as Hackney Council awoke to the problem and began cracking down. Thanks to that, our crescent is still largely original making it very much sought after by property hunters. But the council and the organisation Planning Watch run by our neighbour Jane have to be constantly vigilant. As I write this, a flurry of emails has resulted in an official jumping into a car to enforce a Tree Preservation Order in the face of a Charedi with a mechanical digger at his disposal.
The good news is that the house next door to ours has been bought by a Charedi family, not a school or shtiebl — or so I am assured by a cousin of the middle man who brokered the deal. That’s life Stamford Hill style. In an area where one of the roads is famously called West Bank, maybe a certain amount of tension is just part of the scenery.
