Getting Started

Technically, Rabbi Paretzky’s eiruv career started about 33 years ago, when he was a boy of just five or six years old playing with K’nex and LEGO.

“I was that kid wowing all my friends with my structures and designs,” he says. “My parents even dedicated an entire room in our home to allow me to build to my heart’s content.”

In that little space, he remembers, he built all sorts of creations, ranging from clubhouses to roller coasters. But it wasn’t until his teenage years that his construction aptitude was channeled into the sugya of eiruvin. Growing up in Edison, New Jersey, he was a student in the (now-defunct) Moshe Aaron Yeshiva High School of South River, New Jersey. One Friday morning, Rabbi Aryeh Adler, a rebbi in the yeshivah, offered Mordechai the opportunity to join him as he inspected the local eiruv that afternoon. Mordechai enjoyed the rides and went along several times after that, listening wide-eyed as his rebbi pointed out the various halachic and practical considerations of inspecting eiruvin — and he started looking closely at the eiruvin everywhere he went from then on. Later that year, when his yeshivah rented a large campus for a Shabbos away, the high school bochur even built an eiruv.

After graduating high school, Mordechai was off to Israel’s Kerem B’Yavneh yeshivah before returning to the United States and enrolling in Beis Medrash L’Talmud in Queens, also known as Lander College for Men (“Lander’s”). Mordechai spent four years in the yeshivah, during which he earned semichah, as well as a degree in business management.

In 2010, the newly minted Rabbi Paretzky married Ruthie Goldstein of Skokie, Illinois, and the couple settled in Baltimore, Maryland, where Rabbi Paretzky joined Ner Yisroel’s kollel. After three years, they moved to Chicago, where Mordechai planned to join his father-in-law, Berton I. Goldstein, as a full-time employee in his accounting firm.

“That lasted for about 35 seconds,” Ruthie says with a laugh.

Rabbi Paretzky is still with the firm, advising clients on taxes and insurance matters, but at least a third of his year is spent on the road engaged in his side hustle.

Talmud and Topography

It began rather benignly after moving to Chicago in 2013, when Rabbi Shimon Zehnwirth, a principal of the day school in Buffalo Grove (45 minutes northwest of Chicago’s frum community), reached out to Rabbi Paretzky. He mentioned that Rabbi Micha Shotkin, a renowned eiruv expert from Passaic, New Jersey, was coming to Buffalo Grove to inspect and repair the eiruv, which had been down for some time. Intrigued by eiruvin as he was, Rabbi Paretzky decided to shadow Rabbi Shotkin.

It was passul; many of the original poles had shifted over time to the extent that they were no longer attached to the strings, and some poles and wires were completely missing, Rabbi Paretzky recalls.

Rabbi Shotkin spent the better part of a week in Buffalo Grove to fix the outdated eiruv, but he couldn’t stay long enough to complete the job, so Rabbi Paretzky happily signed up. The next Sunday, he borrowed a utility bucket truck from someone in the community, packed up some tools, a spool of fishing string, and a ladder, and made the 45-minute drive from Skokie to Buffalo Grove. After installing just one hook, he was, well, hooked.

“I’ve always been handy, and I’ve always been interested in the areas where theoretical halachah and practical living meet,” he says. “Building an eiruv was a perfect project for my skill set and interests.”

He also had the good fortune of living in Chicago, home to Rabbi Shlomo Francis, who, together with Rabbi Yonason Glenner (another local) had recently released their groundbreaking sefer, The Laws of an Eruv: A comprehensive review of the laws of Eruvin and their practical applications (Israel Book Shop, 2013). The book, which was a product of Rabbis Francis and Glenner’s years-long chavrusashaft in the Chicago Community Kollel, was revolutionary in both its breadth and the computer-generated color diagrams throughout, and Rabbi Paretzky would head over to the kollel at nights to consult with Rabbi Francis. Come Sundays, Rabbi Paretzky would put the halachos into action, the svaras of the sefer materializing into strings on the street.

“I learned a tremendous of amount of yedios in halachah from those mini learning sessions,” he recalls. “Actualizing everything I learned also helped me understand the more practical aspects of eiruv-building.”

Rabbi Paretzky discovered which materials proved most durable and practical for building a long-lasting outdoor structure subject to the elements, apathetic cable workers (who regularly cut down lechis attached to telephone poles in order to run new cable lines), and human-inflicted damage such as car accidents.

The Buffalo Grove eiruv project took three years of (mostly) Sundays to finish — not because of its complexity or size, but because Rabbi Paretzky was insistent on building the most ideal eiruv he could, constantly refining and revising his handiwork.

“One important thing I learned from the Buffalo Grove experience was that in eiruvin, it pays to have a growth mindset.  I’m constantly looking for ways to improve my technique and find better materials and tools to do the best possible job. It’s ongoing, self-imposed professional development,” he says.

His hard work paid off; when Rabbi Paretzky invited Rabbi Francis to inspect the eiruv together with Rabbi Shmuel Fuerst, a musmach of Rav Moshe Feinstein ztz”l and one of Chicago’s most respected, senior poskim, they gave their glowing approval.

Now that Rabbi Paretzky had his first city eiruv under his (construction) belt, the next one wasn’t long in the coming. Community members in Saint Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, had concerns about the local eiruv, and they called Rabbi Francis for guidance. Rabbi Francis, in turn, dispatched Rabbi Paretzky. When he nailed that, he came back to Chicago, where the city’s rabbanim asked him to take on an official position as the administrator of the local eiruv. The post entailed organizing and educating eiruv checkers, conducting quarterly checks on the entire eiruv (including once a year with the rav hamachshir, Rabbi Yona Reiss), and fixing any problems identified.

In 2017, Rabbi Paretzky attended the Agudah’s Midwest Rabbanim Conference, a major annual get-together for rabbanim in the Midwest. There, Rabbi Francis introduced him to several out-of-town rabbanim as a hilchos eiruvin expert with hands-on experience. Rabbi Paretzky was shaken when one of the attendees, a respected out-of-town rav, approached him and asked him to fly out to his city and asses the eiruv.

“Here was a community that was relying on the eiruv Shabbos after Shabbos, and the community’s own leadership wasn’t even aware of the status of their eiruv, whether or not it was kosher!” he says.

The eiruv was indeed due for a major overhaul, so Rabbi Paretzky rebuilt it over the next few months.

“But the whole concept of a community-wide eiruv being relied on without being given the proper attention was harrowing,” he remembers.

Rabbi Paretzky sensed that the incident wasn’t an isolated one.

“The eiruv has become so part and parcel of our community life that people simply assume all is fine with it,” he says. “But eiruvin are simply too complex to be complacent about them. Just like we realize that kashrus mashgichim shifted from simple ingredient-checkers to trained, sophisticated professionals, we have to realize that a modern, community-wide eiruv isn’t the same as in the shtetl of old. To rely on an eiruv week after week requires a collective effort that we can’t take for granted.”

In 2018, Rabbi Fuerst urged Rabbi Paretzky to take his message to the national stage, securing him a keynote slot at the Agudah Midwest Rabbanim Conference. He personally introduced Rabbi Paretzky, urging the assembled rabbanim to take his message seriously.

Rabbi Paretzky was nervous. This was his elevator pitch, the short time he had to make a convincing argument for changing the landscape of shemiras Shabbos.

“Baruch Hashem, the rabbanim were receptive to what I had to share, and asked me to redo most of their eiruvin,” he remembers.

He pauses, as if choosing his words carefully.

“The fact that they invite me down is to their credit. Every community rav wants a kosher eiruv, but it’s often out of their wheelhouse to ensure that it actually happens. Eiruvin are a huge time investment, and the halachos are not included in the average semichah program. It’s just not in the job description of community rabbanim to oversee the eiruv in a meaningful way.”

Drawing the Plans

A year in, after seeing multiple eiruvin, Rabbi Paretzky developed a protocol for building or repairing an eiruv. First, he gives us the basic halachic overview: “On a Shabbos, we can carry only in a reshus hayachid (i.e., a halachically enclosed area), which we can create using mechitzos (i.e., walls or fences), halachic doorways, or a combination of both.”

With that basic framework in place, Rabbi Paretzky eases us into the practical part of getting it done.

“Obviously, to put up your own mechitzos and tzuros hapesach to surround a ten-mile area — the average eiruv size — is prohibitive in terms of expense and work,” he says. Instead, the key to building such a large eiruv is to use existing infrastructure and minimize the physical work that has to be put in.

The “existing infrastructure” Rabbi Paretzky is referring to can be highways, river banks, railroad tracks, fences, steep slopes, walls, bridges, or overpasses, all of which can potentially serve as natural mechitzos. The great mid-19th century invention of utility poles, a feature of all landscapes in the developed world, has also proven invaluable, as these poles can be adapted to form a tzuras hapesach. (Rabbi Paretzky bleakly points out that in an effort to increase aesthetic appeal, local governments have been burying the electrical wiring underground, which, in his words, would be “somewhat disastrous” for eiruvin.)

When a community reaches out to Rabbi Paretzky about putting in an eiruv, he starts by asking for the outermost boundaries of the area they need covered.  Then he opens Google Map’s satellite view mode and inserts four addresses — the northern, southern, eastern, and western outer limits — to get a general overview of the area.

After putting in the first address and toggling the settings to “street view,” Rabbi Paretzky sits back comfortably on a worn leather chair in his makeshift home office, slippers and all, and cruises along the route, deftly navigating the streets by hitting the arrows on his trusty keyboard. More often than not, his wife and kids coming along for the virtual ride, and together they note every eiruv-related object along the way. He makes detailed calculations, figuring exactly what he’ll need to transform the fences and utility poles into halachically valid mechitzos and tzuros hapesach, turning an area into a reshus hayachid.

“This is the reason Hashem created Google Maps,” he says, laughing.

For all of Google’s prowess though, the tech giant still isn’t perfect — which Rabbi Paretzky found out the hard way when he sent the coordinates of the boundaries he was planning on enclosing to a city engineer, who duly informed him there were no such coordinates on the city’s certified survey of the area.

By now he’s picked up on certain eiruv cues, even when Google may not display them.

“If there’s a highway in the area, there’s almost certainly going to be a fence somewhere nearby,” he says, noting that federal, and often state, law mandates a fence when a highway exceeds a certain volume of cars or is located in a “noise-sensitive area” (such as in the vicinity of a school or hospital).

“When I was dealing with the eiruv in Columbus,” Rabbi Paretzky recounts, “there was a highway in the vicinity. Although there was no fence in the online images, I marked the fence down as part of my eiruv plan. When I got there, I parked my truck on the shoulder of the highway and went hiking into the grassy, forest area abutting the highway.”

About 40 feet in, Rabbi Paretzky noticed the fence — which had been nearly buried since it was first installed by the Ohio Department of Transportation about 40 years earlier, when the highway was constructed. The fence had a handful of breaks caused by accidents from decades prior. He was also in for a surprise: Apparently, he wasn’t the only one who wanted to use it.

“There was a homeless encampment utilizing portions of the fence, and they had built a tunnel underneath parts of it, which can be problematic. And some sections were ripped down completely. But it was still better than installing something from scratch!”

After his virtual site visit, Rabbi Paretzky draws up a proposal.

“We look to optimize,” he says. “Walls are always best, so even if it means going a little bit out of our immediate area, we look to see if there’s some fencing that’s maybe a bit farther out.”

Once he has a proposed eiruv plan, Rabbi Paretzky sends it off to his contacts in the community. He’ll ask them if they’ve taken all the local shuls into account, and if there’s a hospital, pharmacy, or hotel nearby that should ideally be included.

He also often assists the local community in securing necessary permits and permissions. Some cities are more particular than others; negotiations, city council meetings, and lawyers can all play a part in obtaining the go-ahead from the local municipality. On the homeowner level, a knock on the door (and a bottle of beer) usually gains the right to placing poles on private property.

After the requisite back and forth, Rabbi Paretzky counts the poles and orders materials from a specialized utility pole company out in Wisconsin, which sends a freight shipment to the city. Then he packs his personal belongings, reflective gear, a pair of Timberland PRO Sawhorse 6-inch Composite Safety Toe construction boots, and a stack of seforim, and boards a plane.

In Real Time

On a beautiful Tuesday morning a solid 35 degrees warmer than New Jersey’s frigid winter weather, I meet Rabbi Paretzky in Tampa, Florida. He’s spent several months poring over surveys and maps as he charted out the plan for the city’s premier eiruv. Finally, together with his trusted partner, Rabbi Boruch Gore, they’re ready to execute the plan. (Rabbi Gore has collaborated with Rabbi Paretzky on dozens of eiruvin since meeting him in 2017.) I arrive in time to see the two rabbis at their first stop, alighting from one of the three utility bucket trucks that Rabbi Paretzky has purchased in the last five years for his eiruv work (the other two are in Chicago and Louisville, Kentucky, respectively). It’s emblazoned with an “MP Logistics LLC” magnet — (the MP presumably for Mordechai Paretzky) and has all the trappings of a standard utility truck making its rounds.

Once we’re settled around the first pole, Rabbi Paretzky points out the most basic halachic issue with telephone poles for eiruv use: The wires are fastened to the pole with a bracket or clamp that is attached to the wood approximately 20 to 25 feet above ground level. That design ensures that the wires transmit communication signals, but is problematic for an eiruv.

“The halachah is that to make a valid tzuras hapesach, the koreh (horizontal beam) needs to be placed directly above the lechis (vertical posts),” explains Rabbi Gore. “But on every utility pole in America, the koreh is affixed to the lechi, but not above it.”

But Rabbi Paretzky has a solution: about 300 U-guards, sitting in the bed of his truck.

“We’re going to reverse create this tzuras hapesach,” he says. “There is already the existing koreh, now we’re going to install the lechi underneath it.”

He’s barely finished his sentence before he jumps into the bucket (quite a feat, as it’s 36-inches deep with no door), and uses the gears to maneuver himself up to height of the wire, at which point he installs the U-guard to act as a lechi. He then extracts a small metal hook that he installs into the pole, pulls the phone wires into the hook to make sure they are directly above the lechi — and viola — half of the first tzuras hapesach in Tampa, Florida, is now in place!

As Rabbi Paretzky is drilling above, Rabbi Gore points out a practical consideration that they’ve learned to take into account when installing the lechi. “We specifically install them on the side of the pole facing the street to make it easier for eiruv checkers who will come weekly once the eiruv is set up, so they can check it from the road without even exiting their vehicles,” he explains.

As soon as Rabbi Paretzky’s U-guard is in place, Rabbi Gore picks up right where he left off and installs another one on the bottom connecting the two. But if before the focus was getting the upper U-guard directly under the telephone wires, Rabbi Gore’s is making sure his is firmly grounded.

He looks up, one knee on the ground, and explains that technically, a lechi does not need to physically connect to the koreh on top. The halachic principle of gud asik (see Succah and Eiruvin) allows us to consider, in ArtScroll’s words, “a vertical partition continuing upward indefinitely, even if it physically stops at a certain height.” (For example, if there is a wall or post that is at least ten tefachim high, we halachically consider it as if it extends upward indefinitely.)

So even a U-guard extending halfway up the telephone pole would be halachically acceptable as it would have the status of extending up until the koreh. But given the inevitability of the poles shifting, they’d rather play it safe when doing the initial installation.

When he hears us discussing gud asik, Rabbi Paretzky chimes in with a story.

“I once got a call on Erev Shabbos a few minutes before Minchah from a rav, who told me that one of the poles on the eiruv was down and there was no time to install anything. And it wasn’t just any Shabbos. There was supposed to be a bris in shul that week, and the parents had to carry the baby to shul!”

Thinking quickly, Rabbi Paretzky instructed the rav to place a tall garbage can under the telephone pole in question, thus facilitating — through gud asik — a valid lechi, allowing the bris to go on as planned, providing the rav with a solution — and a new mother with relief.

Now, with the first pole in place, the rabbis survey the scene. The telephone wires they were relying on to form a tzuras hapesach continue across over the avenue, but the pole there has a tree growing alongside it, making it hard to install the lechi. Moreover, it’s right near a busy school, and they’d rather have it in a calmer street with less foot traffic to make it easier on the eiruv inspectors, who will come around every Friday, and on the eiruv fixer, who steps up when one of the poles inevitably needs repair.

Time for Plan B. They identify another pole across the street that they feel comfortable using. The only problem here is that the wires from the first pole aren’t connected to this one, and thus there is no tzuras hapesach. But Rabbi Paretzky comes equipped; in fact his truck resembles a Maseches Eiruvin on wheels. He opens a drawer, revealing three spools of commercial string, each one a different material, strength, and durability.

“Many American poskim prefer heavy string, which provides more durability,” he explains. “While the sagging can be an issue, we try to compensate by making it as tight as possible, but not too tight because then it will be easier for the wire to snap. It’s hard to find middle ground.”

After installing the lechis on the second pole, he puts up an eye to run the string through. The only issue is that the string is still attached to the first pole with the spool, so Rabbi Gore has to bring it to Rabbi Paretzky, who is waiting high atop his bucket at the second pole to insert it. But the string will be dragged across the street as Rabbi Gore runs it over to Rabbi Paretzky — and it might get run over by a passing car.

This means that for the first time since joining the dynamic duo this morning, Mishpacha’s reporter can be helpful. Rabbi Paretzky hands me an octagonal stop sign — and for the longest, most frightening 35 seconds of my journalistic career, I stand in the middle of the intersection and unauthorizedly halt the cars. A mean white Mercedes SUV comes to a stop, as does a gray Nissan Maxima, and behind them a rattling landscaping pickup truck with a trailer in tow. I watch Rabbi Gore pass the string, waiting desperately for the signal to end my unwitting traffic-cop stint. After what seems like eternity, he gives me a thumbs up. Without a second glance, I lower my stop sign, get off the street, and happily resume my position as an observer.

Occupational Hazards

I follow Rabbis Paretzky and Gore for the rest of the day, though thankfully they don’t need me to stop traffic again. Each pole presents its own challenges and the good rabbis tackle them with halachic insight and construction innovation. One utility pole, located in a hurricane zone (this is Florida after all), is concrete instead of the typical wood, and Rabbi Paretzky has to switch his standard drill for a concrete-boring one. Another pole has a thick palm tree growing into it. For lack of alternative, he deftly removes the offending branches with chainsaw. Yet a third pole is bent, necessitating the installation of not only the U-guard but also the insertion of small cables along the way to ensure that the lechi is indeed under the koreh. (Most utility poles fall beyond the purview of regulatory schemes, as utility companies need free reign to construct, remove, and modify poles as need be.) Later in the day, Rabbis Paretzky and Gore stop to examine a small river running under a street they had discovered via satellite image when surveying the area prior to their visit.

“A river can be a problem for an eiruv because an eiruv needs a continuous enclosure — through the walls, fences, and tzuros hapesach — and a river might break the continuity of this enclosure, rendering the whole eiruv passul,” explains Rabbi Paretzky.

“If the river has steep banks at least ten tefachim high, it’s a mechitzah on its own,” he says, slipping into Gemara singsong, “but if the banks are gradual or low, they leave a gap in the eiruv.”

He finds a break in the small boundary guarding people from heading down to the river, brushes past the “Hazard” sign, and maneuvers down the slope where he can measure the steepness of the bank. When he climbs back up, he gets back in the truck and drives off to check out a fence running alongside a housing development to see if it can be utilized for the eiruv or if they will have to insert yet more tzuros hapesach alongside it.

Rabbi Paretzky determines he will have to install one pole where the fence stops for the development’s driveway. A truck cabinet reveals a shelf of spray paint in every color imaginable, and Rabbi Gore demonstrates his painting skills by camouflaging the installed pole to match the red of the fence a few inches behind it, while spray painting the top green to blend in with the growing tree.

It’s been a long, long day of cumbersome, tiring work, but now that the sun is beginning to set, we settle down to chat in the truck. The truck’s interior resembles what is presumably typical of a utility bucket truck this size, sans the seforim on the dashboard. There are coffee cups, piles of maps and surveys, an extra reflective vest, an old pair of dusty work gloves — and a box of Prednisone. When I look at it questioningly, Rabbi Paretzky laughs.

“At least once a year, I end up on Prednisone because I get poison ivy. It’s an occupational hazard of bushwhacking through forests in various cities to clear space for the eiruv,” he explains.

That isn’t the only occupational hazard he’s faced. He tells me about the time he was chased by two ferocious dogs while scootering along a housing development as he inspected a fence in Houston, Texas. (He and the assistant rabbi with him abandoned the scooters and jumped the fence of a nearby, thankfully enclosed, parking lot, until the canines went off in search of less agile victims.)

He had another rather unfriendly encounter with man’s best friend in St. Louis, Missouri, when he was hiking in the forest behind a row of mansions with large, manicured estates, looking for a fence, when he noticed two watchdogs charging at him. Thinking quickly, Rabbi Paretzky realized that the dogs probably wore collars that prevent them from exiting a property. He proceeded to run farther into the forest, and 15 seconds later, he was relieved when his intuition proved correct.

Another time, he was in his blow-up pontoon in Chicago’s North Shore Channel, trying to measure the depth of the river bank, when the other man in his boat noted a clump of sand hovering at the waterline in the shape of what seemed to be two human feet. They steered the boat closer — and found a corpse. Rabbi Paretzky rowed to the nearest dock and headed into the closest Starbucks, where he found two of Chicago’s finest sitting and sipping the famous Arabica brew. He informed them of his discovery and watched the two make a dash for their squad car before slipping away, not wanting to draw unnecessary attention to his eiruv work.

But it isn’t all evading ferocious dogs and eerie discoveries. Rabbi Paretzky also has his happier tales to share. In 2021, while installing an eiruv in Atlanta, he discovered a strong, tall fence that ran alongside a major portion of the area he wanted to enclose. He would have had to add on just two poles, one on each end, to connect it to the remainder of the eiruv. Normally, he would simply knock on the door, put on a nice smile, and request permission to add the poles — which homeowners are usually happy to grant. But something about this fence gave him pause. He looked up the property details and discovered the reason for the foreboding, impregnable fence —the building was the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He wasn’t going to mess with the government agency tasked with protecting the public’s health — certainly not in 2021, when the good folks at the CDC were still taking full coronavirus precautions. Still, the fence was too good to let go, and he decided to give it a shot.

Fortuitously, Rabbi Dov Foxbrunner, the assistant rav of Congregation Beth Jacob in Atlanta, knew a doctor who had a contact with the CDC’s HR department. In short order, Rabbi Paretzky was contacted by the CDC’s Vice President of Real Estate, a secular Jew who was happy to help. He invited Rabbis Foxbrunner and Paretzky down for a tour, and drove them around the campus in his golf cart, making sure they had everything they needed and expediting the legal process.

“I deal extensively with land use attorneys and planning and zoning board officials all over the country,” says Rabbi Paretzky. “This was by far the smoothest cooperation I had in obtaining permission to use and install what I need.”

Not Making the Grade

Having traveled around the country and worked on dozens of eiruvin to date, Rabbi Paretzky has seen enough to assert that the state of eiruvin in America is not where it could be.

“You see how many calculations go into each section of the eiruv and how many moving parts you need to be aware of. Even if we can install the most ideal eiruv, who is inspecting it every week to make sure that no lechis were removed, or that the wires are still hanging, or that the poles are positioned where they need to be?” he asks.

Any eiruv, says Rabbi Paretzky, can easily be comprised of more than 1,000 components. And even if set up properly, there’s no guarantee it will stay that way.

“Each component relies on the mercy of the elements, with storms, sun rays, and telecommunication companies working against them,” he says.

Parts rust and erode, cable wires are altered, tree branches grow, and slowly and almost imperceptibly, segments of the eiruv are no longer kosher.

“Most problems can be caught and corrected by local checkers and inspectors, but some can be detected only with professional tools and training,” he cautions.

These issues can remain undetected for years, tragically resulting in ongoing, unknowing chillul Shabbos for entire cities.

Hoping to upgrade the kashrus of eiruvin throughout America, Rabbi Paretzky and Rabbi Gore established the National Eruv Initiative, an organization that trains local eiruv checkers and establishes systems for regular maintenance. They’re working on developing educational and practical initiatives that will assist communities across the United States.

Drawing on an unusual visual aid, Rabbi Paretzky pulls out a photo of a decidedly non-mehudar esrog. While technically it’s kosher, between its somewhat deformed shape and the proliferation of brown bletlach on its surface, it’s obvious that it would make esrog-hunters recoil. Rabbi Paretzky uses the photo to emphasize his point.

“This esrog is technically fit to be used for the mitzvah of daled minim. So why don’t you know anyone who wants to use an esrog like this? Even if it meets the most basic requirements for a kosher esrog, it doesn’t have the chashivus this mitzvah deserves.

“Many community eiruvin are barely equivalent to that ten-dollar esrog. Sure, they were built mehadrin. But one car crash, two storms, and three cable adjustments later, they are relying on significant kulahs and doubtful heterim to ensure the shemiras Shabbos of an entire community!”

He remembers going with Rabbi Francis to check a highway fence that constituted part of a community eiruv. The terrain was rough, full of brush and thorns, and the half-mile walk took the men four hours. But it was time well spent. They discovered that approximately 70 feet of the fence was missing.

“There was fencing in the beginning and fencing again at the end, and people didn’t bother making sure that each portion of the fence was actually intact. And this is an eiruv that had ostensibly been inspected and certified!” he says.

He’s careful not to blame anybody, but the story clearly weighs on him.

“Did the checkers actually look and go to every part of the eiruv, or did they simply assume the entire fence was standing without spending the time and energy to verify?”

Discoveries like this fuel Rabbi Paretzky’s devotion to shaking people out of their complacency, heightening awareness of the complexities of eiruvin and the manpower needed to maintain them at halachically acceptable standards.

It is imperative, he says, for checkers to have a schedule for inspecting the entire eiruv, including sturdy fences, walls, and other permanent structures that comprise parts of the eiruv. Regular, thorough checking is the only way to ensure that each and every link remains uncompromised — because in a bustling metropolitan area, links can weaken quickly and unexpectedly.

“A ninety-nine percent mehudar eiruv is still a hundred percent passul!” Rabbi Paretzky says. “An eiruv is only as kosher as its weakest link.”

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1057)