Police are investigating the vandalism of the Tottenham eruv in the early hours of last Friday morning.

CCTV footage showed a man with a beard and a black Chasidic hat appearing to use a long implement to tamper with the wire between two of the poles marking the eruv boundary.

The video was posted on the site of the Orthodox blogger IfYouTickleUs.

If the wire is pulled down or cut, it invalidates the symbolic boundary marker.

The Met said that North Area Police were investigating “an allegation of racially and religiously motivated criminal damage that is alleged to have occurred in January 2021 in Clapton Common N16”. No arrests have been made.

A similar attack on the eruv was similarly caught on CCTV in the early hours of December 25.

Enclosing parts of Stamford Hill, the Tottenham eruv was a major development for the strictly Orthodox community, whose religious establishment had previously resisted calls for an eruv.

But the Union of Orthodox Hebrew Congregations finally came round to the idea in summer, approving a measure which brought relief, particularly to young families, during the restrictions of lockdown, enabling parents to go out for a stroll with a buggy on Shabbat.

The eruv was mostly bounded by natural borders - a railway line, a park and a river - leaving the need for only a few symbolic gateways, composed of poles linked with wire, to designate the rest of the boundary. 

Yet the new religious feature has not met universal approval within all parts of the Charedi community.