The City Council of New York feigned this Tuesday with closing a Brooklyn borough synagogue if he again defies the rules to curb the coronavirus, after it came to light that the temple held a funeral for a rabbi with thousands in attendance.
As revealed by the newspaper The New York Post, up to 5,000 people gathered on Monday at the Yetev Lev D’Satmar synagogue, located in the Williamsburg neighborhood, one of the main ultra-Orthodox enclaves of the city.
In photographs published by the tabloid a large crowd of men can be seen in the vicinity of the temple, mostly without face masks and without observing any kind of distance.
The authorities had already vetoed the celebration of a wedding in that same synagogue in October, which was intended to have up to 10,000 people at the celebration.
Questioned at a press conference, the mayor, Bill de Blasio, assured on Tuesday that this latest episode is being investigated and that the city council will contact the leaders of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community to reiterate the need for the measures to be respected. combat covid-19, at a time when cases are rising again in New York.
“If we see that another situation is confirmed in which there is an inappropriate event in the same building, we are going to have to close it once and for all, something that nobody wants,” said De Blasio.
The mayor reiterated that large meetings of this type are a great concern and must respect the rules or not be held.
In addition to requiring the use of masks and respect for the distance between people, regulations in New York currently have limits on the capacity of religious temples, highs that were apparently broken at the funeral.
Since the start of the pandemic, the ultra-Orthodox community in New York has repeatedly challenged the guidelines, with some examples being another massive funeral during the spring and a wedding held last November with some 7,000 people.
After being hit hard during the first wave of the virus, several neighborhoods with a large presence of ultra-Orthodox registered a sharp increase in cases in September, which forced the authorities to impose additional measures in those areas.
De Blasio recalled that, in this case, the cooperation of the community was very good to increase the number of diagnostic tests and to stop outbreaks.
The United States exceeded 15 million infections on Tuesday confirmed covid-19 and already registers more than 284 thousand deaths from covid-19, according to the independent count from Johns Hopkins University.
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