"In many neighborhoods, a store owner might shrug off such a call. But on
Lee Avenue, the commercial spine of Hasidic Williamsburg, the warning
carried an implied threat — comply with community standards or be
shunned. It is a potent threat in a neighborhood where shadowy,
sometimes self-appointed modesty squads use social and economic leverage
to enforce conformity.
The owner wrestled with the request for a day or two, but decided to
follow it. “We can sell it without mannequins, so we might as well do
what the public wants,” the owner told the manager, who asked not to be
identified because of fear of reprisals for talking.
In the close-knit world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, community members
know the modesty rules as well as Wall Street bankers who show up for
work in a Brooks Brothers suit. Women wear long skirts and long-sleeved,
high-necked blouses on the street; men do not wear Bermuda shorts in
summer. Schools prescribe the color and thickness of girls’ stockings.
The rules are spoken and unspoken, enforced by social pressure but also,
in ways that some find increasingly disturbing, by the modesty
committees. Their power is evident in the fact that of the half dozen
women’s clothing stores along Lee Avenue, only one features mannequins,
and those are relatively shapeless, fully clothed torsos.
The groups have long been a part of daily life in the ultra-Orthodox
communities that dot Brooklyn and other corners of the Jewish world. But
they sprang into public view with the trial of Nechemya Weberman,
a prominent member of the Satmar Hasidim in Brooklyn, who last week was
sentenced to 103 years in prison after being convicted of sexually
abusing a young girl sent to him for counseling.
Mr. Weberman, an unlicensed therapist, testified during his trial that
boys and girls — though not his accuser — were regularly referred to him
by a Hasidic modesty committee concerned about what it viewed as
inappropriate attire and behavior.
The details were startling: a witness for Mr. Weberman’s defense, Baila Gluck,
testified that masked men representing a modesty committee in the
Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel, N.Y., 50 miles northwest of New York
City, broke into her bedroom about seven years ago and confiscated her
cellphone."
