A cyclist is demanding change after a cable strung by an Orthodox Jewish group on Lincoln Memorial Drive fell and struck him in the neck.
Rabbi Yisroel Lein of Chabad of the East Side said the wire was repaired quickly and he will respect any changes dictated by Milwaukee County officials regarding the wire’s location. It’s part of a miles-long perimeter of cables around Milwaukee’s east side that Lein said is inspected weekly.
The eruv, as the perimeter is called, eases Shabbat restrictions on Orthodox Jewish residents. This is a response to a Torah law that prohibits carrying objects outside of a private space such as a home on Saturdays. The perimeter acts as a symbolic boundary that extends the “house” to the wider neighborhood, allowing Orthodox families to push strollers, walk their dogs, and carry bags.
Still, Ronald Ekker, the injured cyclist, says the thin wires pose a “public safety risk” if they fall.
“Public safety must come first, regardless of one’s religious beliefs,” Ekker said.
Ekker said he was riding his e-bike down a hill on Lincoln Memorial Drive near the Linnwood Water Treatment Plant on Sept. 18, reaching speeds of up to 25 mph, when a wire clipped hangs around his neck. It was attached at one end to a light pole and had come loose from another anchor on the other side of the four-lane road.
So when he hit it, the roughly 60 feet of wire went through his neck, he said, leaving marks on the front, sides and back of his neck.
“It happened so fast you couldn’t really see it because it was so thin,” Ekker said. “Honestly, I thought I was going to be decapitated.”
Ekker did not know the eruv and believed for days that it was a trap or prank of some kind. He told local TV stations about the wire without knowing it had been placed there for religious reasons.
Lein called Ekker to personally apologize, and Ekker accepted his apology, but he was not dissuaded from believing that fine, almost invisible threads, like the one that injured him, “go beyond common sense.”
More: New eruv underway on the North Shore will ease Shabbat restrictions for Orthodox Jews
The cabling perimeter spans 5 square miles on the east side, Shorewood and Whitefish Bay.
The eruv surrounding the east side was built over several years and completed in 2023, according to the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. The cable segment Ekker encountered had been in place for three years, Lein said.
Lein speculates that a large truck hauling equipment to the road construction zone at the corner of Lincoln Memorial and Lake driveways hit the wire and caused it to fall. Generally, large trucks do not travel in this area, he said.
“It was definitely a freak accident,” Lein said. “Unfortunately, we don’t control everything.”
This is the third time an eruv wire has fallen on east side roads in recent years, Lein said. In the other two cases, a truck and a tree branch were involved.
“Whenever there’s a break in the cable somewhere, it’s repaired immediately,” Lein said. He added that a team of people checks the eruv every week to make sure it is intact, because a broken border would mean Orthodox residents would not be able to move outside on Shabbat.
The east side eruv spans about 5 square miles, according to the Jewish Chronicle, and includes the upper east side, Shorewood and part of Whitefish Bay. There are also eruvs in Mequon, Bayside, Glendale and the Sherman Park neighborhood of Milwaukee.
Since the land where Ekker was injured is managed by Milwaukee County, Lein said county attorneys were determining whether a wire above the road posed too much liability. If it does and they ask him to move it, he will, he said.
“We will certainly do everything we can to mitigate the risk of injury,” he said.
Sophie Carson is a feature journalist who reports on religion and faith, immigrants and refugees and more. Contact her at scarson@gannett.com or 920-323-5758.
This article originally appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: After a fallen cable injures a cyclist, an Orthodox Jewish group apologizes.
