Hasidic Deputy Bridges Two Worlds

The Rockland County Police Academy had never seen anything like it.

“A guy walks in with a bowler hat on, a beard, a coat coming down to his knees,” says Sheriff James Kralik. “He looks like something out of ‘Fiddler on the Roof.’ ”

It was Shlomo Koenig, now Deputy Shlomo Koenig, perhaps the only Hasidic police officer in the nation.

“Even in Israel they don’t have anything like this,” says Koenig, his auburn beard and sidelocks sprawling out under his wide-brimmed Smokey hat.

Koenig, 35, who runs a business that makes plastic shopping bags, had long been an unofficial liaison between the Sheriff’s Department and Rockland County’s growing but insular Orthodox Jewish community. He served as a Yiddish translator or explained the customs of one group to the other.

For example, a driver who abandons his car on the highway and begins walking on the shoulder might look suspicious to an officer. But it might just be an Orthodox Jew, late getting home on a Friday and forbidden to drive after sunset.

Or an officer might take offense if a Hasidic woman refuses to take a speeding ticket handed to her. Such contact between the sexes is forbidden--and deputies now put the ticket down so the woman can pick it up.

Thirteen percent of the county’s 275,000 people are Orthodox Jews, including Hasidic and other ultra-Orthodox sects, and that percentage is growing because of high birth rates and overcrowding in Brooklyn, about an hour’s drive away.

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Rockland’s Orthodox Jews to some degree live outside the modern world. They don’t send their children to public schools, they avoid television, they wear simple dark clothes like those of their ancestors in 18th century Poland, and they have formed their own villages, away from larger towns.

There is distrust between police and the Hasidim.

“We’ve been brought up in countries where the government was not our friend, not working with the community but against it,” says the American-born Koenig. “The way we sustained ourselves has been by living in our own small world.”

As Kralik puts it: “In most countries, the policemen were burning their homes. They had no reason to trust us.”

It was at the sheriff’s suggestion that Koenig applied to the academy. He took 600 hours of training, graduated last year with good grades and donned the tan uniform and silver star of the Rockland force, which has about 65 full-time officers and several part-time ones like Koenig.

“It took a lot of courage,” Kralik says. “He really showed some interest in it, and that was in itself a wonderment.”

At the academy, certain arrangements had to be made. Saturday classes were out for Koenig because of the Jewish Sabbath. Some of his fellow recruits shared their notes with him.

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Then there was the beard. Beards are forbidden by the department. Not having one is forbidden to Hasidic Jews. Koenig got a waiver.

He also got a shooting award. Carrying a gun presents no ethical problem for Koenig. As for using it, he says: “You’re not

allowed to murder, but self-defense is not murder.”

Koenig has helped draft guidelines for his fellow officers in dealing with his community. Getting a description of a mugger, for example, can be difficult if the victim isn’t familiar with secular clothing.

A witness might say the mugger wore blue pants, but if asked whether they were blue jeans, “chances are you’re going to get a yes, even though there’s a 99% chance the person doesn’t really know what jeans are,” Koenig says. “They say yes because people don’t want to be caught not understanding.

“So we’ve tried to come up with a description-type sheet explaining jeans, slacks, trousers and fashions like hairstyles.”

Then there’s the language problem. Many of Rockland’s Hasidic Jews do not speak English well and few police officers know Yiddish.

Koenig is putting together a collection of useful phrases:

“Vas is dan numen?” (What’s your name?)

“Is ales in ordernung?” (Are you all right?)

“Vi azoi hot er oizgesen?” (What did he look like?)

In a sense, Koenig says, his job is part of his religion--a mitzvah, or good deed.

“I’m a Jew first, a police officer second,” he says. “I still try to live on my own in my smaller world. I try to do my studying, my praying, the religious education of my kids. I also try to be a sheriff. I have to be able to work with society and I try to do that.”