Yago Ruiz – Hasidim: A hidden community

Stamford Hill (London) is home to the largest community of Hasidic Jews of Ashkenazi descents in Europe. Approximately 40,000 people. In this London neighbourhood live their daily lives three of the main sects of the dozens that exist: Bobov (originally from Poland, but with its main headquarters in Brooklyn, USA), Belz (Ukraine) and Biala (Poland).

Black figures always walking back and forth with celerity. Yiddish and Hebrew banners. Dozens of children playing everywhere.

It could be the ultra-orthodox neighbourhood of Mea Shearim in Jerusalem.

Hassidim is an ongoing project about searching and learning from this hermetic and seemingly hostile community, but once it opens its doors to the outsider it is surprising and unexpected.

With special feasts and celebrations almost monthly, its life is shaped by the Torah and all the surrounding rules added over the centuries by the different sects. Everything that is done or not done is asked to the Rabbi, who, depending on the sect, will make some decisions or others. The Sabbath is the key moment of the week, everything turns around the Sabbath: clothing, liturgies, allowed and forbidden activities…

The surprising thing about this community is, despite appearances, they enjoy their lives in ways that are sometimes shocking to the outsider. Electronic music, energetic dancing, a rich and abundant social life… The traditional and conservative is sometimes overtaken by a bit of debauchery (permitted, of course) and open and interesting conversations.

Stamford Hill is a neighbourhood full of contrasts, and there are, as everywhere, rich and poor, powerful people and simple folk and countless layers and points of view.

My intention is to visit all these layers and to break the Western-derived cliché of a backward, heteropatriarchal cultural group, and to delve where no one else has done so by finding the real face of Hasidic Jews.