Tel Aviv – Being an Orthodox Religious Bar Owner in ‘Sin City’

Tel Aviv – On the corner of Derech Yaffo and Simtat Hashuk streets, in a bar-café at the end of a dim passageway, five friends sit around a table filled with delicacies and talk business.

This is not a unique site in the Tel Avivian landscape on a Saturday night, and yet something seems a bit odd. Three of the group members look like typical Tel Avivian party goers. The other two are the ones who attract attention: One is dressed in black, with a black hat on his head and a long beard. The other wears a Borsalino hat like a 1930s gangster over a face adorned with a thick beard and fringed garments peeking from under his coat.

From time to time they are approached by one of the café visitors, who shakes their hands or whispers something in their ears. Girls approach them from time to time too.

In Tel Aviv of 2011, the ultra-Orthodox world is still perceived as closed and isolated, fearful of any peek into secularism. But David Malach and Eitan Gurion, two Chabadniks who are among the café owners, are undeterred. In the past two years they have opened a number of bars in Tel Aviv with their three secular partners.

“We are revolutionaries, just like Rabbi Lubavitcher,” laughs Malach. “We observe 36 mitzvot just like any other haredi, but we look at things differently. That’s why we had no problem opening bars and cafés of all places.”

Today the five serve as the owners and co-managers of Café Adar, where we meet, as well as Salon Berlin, a bar and clothing store, and Haprozdor, which is far from being a mega-bar in Tel Avivian terms, but is still a well-known and highly regarded place among the city’s party goers – a dense and gloomy space where dozens of people are crowded.

What do two Chabadniks have to do with such a place? According to Malach, this is a necessary connection.

“Friction between religious and secular exists anywhere in the country, but not in Tel Aviv,” he smiles. “The guys sitting here have no idea what’s going on in the news, just like haredim. What we have here is two ends connecting.”

“We are not open on Fridays and Saturdays and on holidays, we only sell kosher food and on Passover we remove the leavened bread and don’t sell beer,” Malach explains how the business works. “Apart from that, everything is acceptable.”

Read full article at Ynet News