A Reminder of the Humanity Lost to the Pandemic

You needed no special tipoff to have prior notice of the Williamsburg Jewish community's latest act of alleged social treason and mass endangerment. At 10:40 a.m. on Dec. 7, the Twitter feed for the Zalman faction of the Satmar Hasidic movement announced that a major funeral would be held in Williamsburg at noon that day, less than two weeks after a picture of thousands huddled at a secretly organized indoor wedding in the Brooklyn neighborhood was splashed across two pages of the New York Post. The religion and ethnicity of the wrongdoers was unmistakable in the photograph, which depicted a crowded horizon of black hats and frock coats. These Hasids seemed to dwell in a different world than the rest of us, one in which both the coronavirus and its resulting obligations to one's fellow human beings simply didn’t matter. Who were these people to believe they were exempt from everyone else’s deadly crisis?