Saul Zehnwirth was teaching his first grade class at the Stoliner Yeshiva in Borough Park on a recent Friday when his cell phone rang. A member of Zehnwirth’s chasidic community was being held in the Brooklyn House of Detention on $8,000 bail. Zehnwirth gathered aides to watch his class and dashed off to take up an emergency collection.“Are you the only schlepper in town?” a superior asked with displeasure. “Why do they always call you?”On his way out, Zehnwirth answered, “If you’d like, I’ll stay here and teach, and you go and raise the bail.”With his boss’s blessing, the Stoliner chasid raced from one busy synagogue to the other with the zeal of a cop on a criminal chase. “It doesn’t really take too much convincing,” he recalled at a recent gathering in Borough Park.“Everyone knows what a big mitzvah it is to ransom a Jew.” The problem is that not everyone can afford a large contribution, so that, in this case, he had to intensify his efforts to arrange the prisoner’s release before Shabbat.“I could have gone home and put my feet up on the table and eaten gefilte fish,” he says, “but until I raised the last penny, I couldn’t rest. I couldn’t just leave the guy in jail over Shabbos.”Yet even though Zehnwirth presented the money — 10 percent is required in cash — in ample time, he says he incurred abuse at the jail house. “They treat you like dirt when you come to pay bail,” he relates. After he passed the money through the tiny opening of a cage, the attendant informed him it will take several hours to “process the case.” “I’d rather sit in the Bronx Zoo all my life than in the Brooklyn House of Detention one day,” he muses about the atmosphere in the facility.Shortly thereafter, Zehnwirth retained a prestigious law firm to represent the defendant, agreeing to pay a $25,000 retainer. “I signed my name without batting an eyelash, not knowing where, or if, I would obtain the money.” But he knows from experience that when he explains the urgency of the matter to his fellow Jews, they “come across,” some even donating as much as $1,000.There are no statistics on chasidic crime, although several recent cases — including last week’s indictment of alleged designer-drug smugglers charged with using chasidic couriers — suggest an increase.Law enforcement authorities generally extol chasidic communities as overwhelmingly law abiding, with a few high-profile exceptions. Zehnwirth won’t comment on how often he’s seen chasidic suspects held, or the charges that led to arrests. But it is clear it happens often enough to keep Zehnwirth busy.Although he feels this is his calling — albeit a volunteer one; he charges no fee — he is ambivalent about being away from teaching, and from home, so often. His constant preoccupation with pidyone shevuyim, or ransoming the captured, weighs heavily on his conscience and, if not for his family’s indulgence, could easily impinge on his home life. “My wife Leah is very tolerant,” he says. “Frankly, I don’t understand how she tolerates me.”His children not only condone but encourage his extracurricular career. To them, pidyone shevuyim conjures up the rich imagery of tales they hear regularly in the yeshiva. They listen with baited breath to the stories of the great disasters, such as the Chmielnicki massacres of the 17th century, when the majority of the Jewish captives were ransomed by the Jewish communities in the Ottoman empire. They know heroic tales of great Jewish sages who trudged for months by foot from town to town in bone-chilling weather to ransom indigent innkeepers and their loved ones, who were languishing in underground dungeons for failing to pay rent. And they cringe at the modern-day echoes of the past, stories about certain Jews who were seized by the Nazis, placed in concentration camps and finally released when Jewish individuals or groups shelled out exorbitant sums.The moral and religious obligation to ransom a fellow Jew takes precedence over charity to the poor, according to the Talmud, they learn.So they accept their father’s absence, while he spares no time or money to perform the mitzvah that he believes bestows a special blessing upon his head and upon his household.“Every time a chance to do good comes your way,” Zehnwirth always teaches his children, “grab it, because, most likely, it was earmarked to save you from who-knows-what.”Ironically, when Zehnwirth isn’t springing people from jail, he’s putting other people in — as a member of the Shomrim volunteer anti-crime patrol in Borough Park. Those he aids the police in apprehending, however, are predominantly non-Jewish.In a city where crime rates have plummeted, Shomrim is kept busy around the clock. Volunteers, many of whom have been trained in karate, carry walkie-talkies and cellular phones, and patrol selected neighborhoods in their private cars, which are equipped with lights and sirens. Whether at home or at work, they stand poised to respond to a local crime and to apprehend a suspect.“I can tell what a hoodlum is up to as soon as I lay eyes on him,” says Zehnwirth. “I know if he’s going for a pocketbook or a car radio, if he’s planning to mug or punch a Jew.” To Zehnwirth, getting suspects into jail is as important as getting them out. He cites one occasion when he was pursuing a potential perpetrator. “He was going from one apartment house to another, trying to get in. We knew he was up to no good.” As the Shomrim cars squealed to a halt, one member casually followed the suspect. The others would wait five or six minutes before rushing in. “We can’t jump him right away, because he hasn’t done anything yet,” Zehnwirth explains.By midnight, the malefactor was still darting from one block to another. Zehnwirth got a message on his radio that the man had entered the sixth house past the corner on the block where Zehnwirth lives. He realized that was his house. The patrol group stormed in with flashlights. “When he ran out of my kitchen, we ambushed him and got him arrested.” What was remarkable, says Zehnwirth, is that his wife and children were fast asleep upstairs and totally unaware of the scenario below.“That they were protected proves there’s reward for good deeds, but I don’t know if they were mine or theirs. I feel this is my lot in life,” he says, shrugging his shoulders complacently. “How can I turn my back on all these golden opportunities that keep coming my way?”
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