The Man Who Mislaid His Coat At The Tish

The Bobov grand rebbe, Naftali Halberstam, died in New York on March 23. He was 74, and had no sons. The following night, Purim Eve, a thousand or more Bobov Hasidim gathered at the sect's main synagogue in Borough Park to break bread with their new leader, Benzion Halberstam, the 49-year-old half-brother of Naftali. As midnight approached, a handful of tourists, myself included, walked right into the shul uncontested to observe this bread-breaking, or tish, as it's called in Yiddish. But it isn't the tish I want to describe.

The way to the tish, which was held in the main sanctuary, was down a wide corridor lined on both sides with rack after rack of long black overcoats crammed onto nonremovable hotel hangers. There had to be a thousand or more of these hangers, each one bearing the long black form. Tossing his head in the direction of the coats, one of our fellow tourists posed a question. "How do they tell them apart?" he asked.

Nobody had an answer to that, but I for one took it on faith that the men have exceptional powers in this area. Just as a mother bat can pick out her baby on a cave ceiling crawling with thousands of other babies, so some highly evolved sixth sense guides each Hasid straight to his coat. This is how I framed it to myself, more or less.

We spent about 45 minutes at the tish, which was noisy with babble and amplified song. Two packed bleachers flanked the long table presided over by the new grand rebbe. (The literal meaning of tish is "table.") Because I was down on the floor the whole time, with many streimels blocking my view, I never actually glimpsed the man of the hour, only the venerating looks he inspired in the young men arrayed in the bleacher across from me.

Then we were back in the corridor. We were dawdling here when a Bobover appeared and made for a coat rack up toward the front. He was wearing the traditional bekeshe, or robe, a pair of black knee-breeches and long white hose. He had come from the tish with hurrying strides, and now began parting the jammed-in coats. I turned my attention back to my companions, and forgot about the Bobover for the next few moments.

When I glanced at him again, my eyes went wide. He was standing motionless, hands on hips, and frowning in consternation at the coats. Then a hand came up and he pulled at his beard, which showed up as auburn in the overhead light-auburn, glossy, and thick, like his streimel, the Shabbes and holiday headdress of the married man.

Sighing, he moved up the corridor to the next rack and repeated the business of parting the coats. But his heart wasn't in it, and he quickly gave it up. He stepped back and shot another look at the first rack, but he made no move toward it; he just stood and stared.

Was it possible I was wrong about exceptional powers, at least in this matter of finding one's coat?

The Bobover was frustrated, and embarrassed besides. Twice he half turned his head in our direction. He was a trim young man, maybe 25 or 30, with long springy side curls that never stopped bobbing. He had groomed himself with care on this holiday, and now he couldn't find his coat. It was embarrassing.

He soon fled the corridor, his side curls bouncing. He went in the direction from which he had come, through the rear double doors leading to the main sanctuary. None of us made any comments in his wake. Except for me, I don't think our group had even noticed him.

I made a discovery after he left. Each coat rack had a black number, a marker, stuck just above it on the gray marble wall. There were eight long racks altogether in the corridor-five on one side, three on the other-and the corresponding markers 1 through 8. Evidently, when putting one's coat on a hanger, one checked the number of the rack it was in.

These Bobover men were only human, it seemed. And even with this parking-lot system of locators, one did not always find one's coat, as the vanished Bobover had just made clear.

A few days later I called a young Satmar acquaintance named Zev, my go-to informant on Hasidishe ways. When I mentioned my visit to the Bobovs on Purim, and told him of the Bobover who couldn't find his coat, Zev said, "Oh, it's always like that. I'm the same way. You put your coat down, and the next moment you're looking for it."

Zev distinguished between everyday overcoats and ones called rezhevulkes. The latter, usually made of silk or polyester, are worn to the shul on Shabbes and holidays, and therefore it was probably these I had seen glutting the Bobover coat racks on Purim.

Heavy reliance is made on name tags. "When you buy your coat or rezhevulke at the store, they give you the option of putting your name on a label," Zev explained. "It's a whole spiel-name, phone number, address. If you don't have a label, you might have other people taking your coat, and you might not know whom to call. Sometimes you see notices: 'Somebody took my coat, I took yours.' Or: 'I took your streimel, you took mine.'"

Zev, despite being a Satmar Hasid, knows the main Bobov shul very well. Shaarei Zion of Bobov, to give the official name, is a prayer hub for all Borough Park's Hasidim, and Zev, who grew to young manhood in Borough Park, often stopped to daven at Shaarei Zion during the week. He confirmed my hunch that the numbers on the walls are meant to help people remember where their coats are.

It sounds so simple, even rudimentary. But according to Zev, who still visits the shul occasionally, the numbers are only a recent advance.

"Before that," he added, "everyone was just thinking, 'Did I put it in the first section? The second section?' The shul has been standing for 15 years. It's funny that it took them 15 years to finally realize to put in numbers."