Eruv - Jewish Law and Tradition Regarding eruv

Jewish Law and Tradition Regarding eruv

According to tradition, the eruv must be made of walls or doorways at least ten tefachim in height, or approximately 1 m (40 inches). In public areas where it is impractical to put up walls, doorways are constructed out of wire and posts. It is these doorways, which often serve no practical purpose, that are what is usually referred to as an eruv.

If the properties enclosed are owned by more than one person, then all the properties must be combined by the acquisition or rental of some right to the properties, and the designation of a meal that is shared by all property owners. The designation of the meal is called an eruv chatzeiros (combining of courtyards) and it is from this that the term eruv is derived.

A community eruv refers to the legal aggregation or "mixture" under Jewish religious property law of separate parcels of property meeting certain requirements into a single parcel held in common by all the holders of the original parcels, which enables Jews who observe the traditional rules concerning Shabbat to carry children and belongings anywhere within the jointly held property without transgressing the prohibition against carrying a burden across a property line on Jewish Sabbath. The legal aggregation is set up to have effect on Shabbat and Yom Kippur only; on all other days, including Yom Tov, ordinary property ownership applies. A valid aggregation has a number of requirements including an agreement among the property-holders and an aggregation ritual.

One of the requirements of a valid aggregation is that all the parcels must lie within a chatzer, or walled courtyard. For this reason, this type of aggregation is more properly known as an eruv chatzerot (Hebrew: ערוב חצרות‎), an "aggregation of courtyards," to distinguish it from other types of rabbinically-ordained mixture procedures that also have the name eruv.

In modern times, when housing is not typically organized into walled courtyards, rabbinic interpretation has permitted this requirement to be met by creating a continuous wall or fence, real or symbolic, surrounding the area to be aggregated. The fence is required to have certain properties and consist of structural elements such as walls or doorframes. When the fence is symbolic, the structural elements are often symbolic "doorframes" made of wire, with two vertical wires (often connected to utility poles) and one horizontal wire on top connecting them (often using utility wires). The use of symbolic elements permits an eruv to make use of utility poles and the like to enclose an entire neighborhood of a modern city within the legal aggregation. In contemporary Jewish discourse, "an eruv" frequently refers to this symbolic "fence" that creates and denotes the boundaries of a symbolic "walled courtyard" in which a halakhicly (from "halakha," meaning the body of Jewish law) valid property aggregation can take place, rather than to the aggregation or legal status of the properties.