Laboring to Meet Letter of the Law

It is shortly before dusk when Romy Cernea arrives at the religious school where he spends each Friday night, and the tranquillity of the Jewish Sabbath is spreading across the neighborhood of Bayit Vagan.

A last bus swings along Rabbi Frank Street and two small boys wearing skullcaps and side curls dash squealing into a nearby apartment as Cernea gathers the modern tools of his ancient trade: a borrowed cell phone, the keys to a battered white Subaru and several large plastic signs.

He attaches one placard to the school’s metal fence, another to the car’s windshield and sets a third upright on a chair outside the classroom that serves as his weekend headquarters. Written in Hebrew block letters alongside pictures of Sabbath candles, each clearly states the Romanian worker’s significance to this quiet community in southwest Jerusalem.

“Goy shel Shabbat,” the signs say.

An Orthodox Christian and former police officer, the 35-year-old Cernea is the “Sabbath Gentile” of Bayit Vagan, hired by the religious neighborhood to switch on lights, turn off stoves and perform other, mostly minor, tasks that observant Jews are forbidden to carry out during the weekly Sabbath.

Cernea’s role in the community is institutionalized. He has scheduled weekly chores and sleeps on a cot in the elementary school in order to respond to residents’ needs throughout the Sabbath, which lasts from sundown Friday to just after sundown Saturday.

But his weekly sojourn in Bayit Vagan also is part of a colorful, complex tradition in Judaism dating to ancient Babylonia, in which non-Jews, acting in carefully defined ways, may assist religious Jews on the Sabbath.

Jewish law, or Halakha, prohibits observant Jews from carrying out 39 categories of work on the holy day, from writing to lighting a fire to operating machinery. However, they can accept help under certain conditions from a willing Gentile.

Navigating just how to do that in ways acceptable to the rabbinical authorities is “one of the greatest complexities in Judaism,” said Rabbi Emmanuel Feldman, 72, who retired as leader of an Atlanta synagogue and now lives in Bayit Vagan. “Every Sabbath, you’ve got so many top rabbis around here who are busy trying to help people figure out when it’s OK” to call a Sabbath Gentile.

The dependence on Sabbath Gentiles also presents some challenges to the Israeli government. The nation, some secular Israelis point out, was established in 1948 on the premise of Jewish self-reliance. The idea of a Jew needing help from a non-Jew at any time is an uncomfortable, even embarrassing, relic of the Jews’ long history of exile, they argue.

“In a very modern Israeli context, it sounds odd,” said Moshe Halbertal, a professor of Jewish thought at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. “Modern Zionist Israelis believe in independence, in self-sufficiency on all levels, and this seems very strange to them.”

But nearly 50% of Israeli Jews categorize themselves as “traditional,” religious or very religious, according to various polls. And for many of them, the occasional assistance of a Sabbath Gentile is a necessity.

Enshrined in Yiddish folklore with the figure of the shabbes goy, the non-Jewish Sabbath helper shows up in modern art and literature as well. In author Pete Hamill’s 1997 novel, “Snow in August,” for instance, the main character is an 11-year-old Irish American boy who becomes the designated Gentile for a middle-aged rabbi, an immigrant from wartime Europe.

And as befits an age-old custom, there are several legendary Sabbath Gentiles, and the tales of their assistance have been passed down from one generation to another. James Cagney and Elvis Presley were said to have helped out neighbors with Sabbath tasks as they grew up in mixed U.S. communities.

A Practice Born of Necessity

The idea of using non-Jews to help Jews on the Sabbath grew out of necessity in medieval times, as economies became more complex and Jewish merchants suffered under the restrictions of the holy day, said Menachem Friedman, a sociology professor at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv.

“Rabbis were forced to figure out a way to legalize it, to make it kosher under the restrictions of the Sabbath,” Friedman said.

In modern-day Israel, the old tradition provides work for immigrants such as Cernea and for Israeli Arabs, especially college students employed in religious hospitals and other Jewish or public institutions on the Sabbath. They answer telephones, keep written records and turn machinery on and off for Jewish patients or staff members.

Some, such as Nazmi Abdul Rahman, 34, who works at a Jewish retirement home in Jerusalem, have become so skilled at responding to requests--and at keeping within the boundaries of Jewish law--that they have achieved a measure of renown in their communities. Rahman, whose father worked as a Sabbath Gentile, often is called upon to help the home’s neighbors with their Sabbath challenges too.

Rahman, for example, knows that unless the situation is an emergency, religious Jews must ask him for help only indirectly. In some cases, he can repair something if it is for the benefit of a person who is ill. “If the water heater is broken, for a sick person, I can fix it, but for a healthy person, I cannot,” he explained.

“He knows the laws, all the rules,” Hedva, a resident of the Neve Simcha retirement home, said of Rahman. “He is almost Jewish by now.”

But woe be to the Sabbath Gentile who does turn out to be a Jew.

Rabbi Aharon Feldman, the brother of Emmanuel Feldman, tells the story of an Arab helper who made the mistake of confiding to one of his clients that his mother was Jewish. Under religious law, that made him a Jew as well.

“Unfortunately, they had to fire him,” Feldman said.

The government also makes use of Sabbath Gentiles, although not for every type of labor that must take place on holy days.

Under a sweeping “life-preserving” exception to the rules, now codified in civil law, the government allows police officers, soldiers and others in crucial jobs to work on the Sabbath. But it employs non-Jews--usually Russian immigrants or Israeli Druze--for less urgent jobs, including those of inspectors who enforce the prohibition against Jews working.

The inspectors visit businesses that are open on the Sabbath, checking identity cards to ensure that only non-Jews are at work. In recent years, more merchants have tried to avoid the restrictions, urging employees to refuse to yield their identity cards and sometimes incurring fines totaling thousands of dollars a day for remaining open.

Some Israelis hope that technological innovations, which already have reduced the need for Sabbath Gentiles, may end the practice one day. Timed devices allow lamps and appliances to turn on or off during the Sabbath. Other approved mechanisms allow public elevators to stop at each floor, enabling observant Jews to use them without pressing a button.

But some of the most strictly observant--including many of the ultra-Orthodox Jews known in Hebrew as haredim--do not accept the use of timers and other devices and continue to rely on helpers.

Hospital Adjusts to Be in Compliance

At Shaare Zedek Medical Center, a modern religious hospital in Jerusalem, the administration tries to navigate a course between medical concerns and the sensitivities of observant Jews.

For example, elevators used primarily by the public run on a slow, automatic schedule each Sabbath; those used mainly by the staff and patients in need of urgent care operate normally. Other equipment operates on holy days by means of a slightly delayed circuit, so that the person turning it on is not technically making it connect, according to religious authorities.

“We are very proud of the fact that Shaare Zedek, an ultramodern hospital, can be operated on the Sabbath in a way that goes hand-in-hand with ancient Jewish law, without compromising the level of medical care,” said Dr. Jonathan Halevy, the director general.

Halevy noted that the hospital’s mainly Jewish medical staff works regular shifts on the Sabbath and that pikuah nefesh, the life-preserving exception in Jewish law to the Sabbath restrictions, perhaps applies nowhere more truly than in a medical facility. The law allows doctors and nurses tremendous leeway in their jobs, he said.

But the hospital also employs 80 Sabbath Gentiles who work in shifts each Friday evening and Saturday to assist patients and staff in nonemergency tasks.

In Bnei Brak, a strictly religious community near Tel Aviv, a Jewish charitable organization employs three Arab doctors and an Arab driver to provide medical care to the residents each Sabbath. The men work from a small clinic just inside the barricades that residents use to keep people from driving through the community during the Sabbath. But the Arabs are allowed to pass through, driving the clinic’s ambulance.

Dr. Tayseer Mohammed, 42, a native of the Israeli Arab town of Umm al Fahm, has treated people in Bnei Brak nearly every weekend for the last 12 years. Most of the injuries or illnesses are minor, he said. Sometimes, the patient simply needs him to break the seal on a medicine bottle, a task that falls under the category of “tearing,” among those prohibited.

“We are still learning what is allowed and what isn’t, for them and for us,” Mohammed said. But he said reaction to their presence has been positive, and the three doctors have been asked to work part time at the clinic during the week.

Idle Hands Make for a Boring Shift

Back in Bayit Vagan, Cernea, who arrived in Israel eight months ago for a second stint here as a foreign worker, said his greatest challenge as a Sabbath Gentile is the boredom that sets in when there’s little to do. He much prefers busy shifts: driving residents to the hospital, making urgent plumbing or electrical repairs or doing small but necessary chores like disconnecting the light that comes on when a refrigerator door is opened. If the light is connected, the appliance cannot be used during the Sabbath.

Cernea said he was recruited by the neighborhood’s previous Gentile, a fellow Romanian, and then spent four weekends in the community learning the streets and the relevant Sabbath laws before beginning his duties six months ago. He is paid about $75 a week, far more than the $60 monthly salary he received as a police officer in a suburb of Bucharest, the Romanian capital.

A few minutes later, Cernea was following Yoni Pozen back through the neighborhood. “It’s a classic case where a Sabbath Gentile can help,” Pozen said of his family’s problem, a blown circuit that had turned off electricity to the refrigerator.

Suddenly, Pozen struck his forehead, laughing. “I forgot! We have the classic Sabbath Gentile story.”

Two years earlier, the Pozens’ third child, Shulamit, was born in the back seat of a Sabbath helper’s car as they were racing to the hospital. Later, as Yoni walked home--aware that Sabbath restrictions would not allow him to accept a ride once the life-saving situation was over--the helper passed him on the street and stopped the car, congratulating him again and urging him to get in.

“He was arguing Jewish law with me,” Pozen said, grinning. “It was great.”

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Batsheva Sobelman of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.