Cyclist demands change after he was struck by wire strung across Milwaukee road by Orthodox Jewish group

A cyclist is demanding change after a wire strung across Lincoln Memorial Drive by an Orthodox Jewish group 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 abide by any changes Milwaukee County officials dictate about the placement of the wire. It is 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 Orthodox Jewish residents’ Shabbat restrictions. It’s a response to a Torah law that prohibits carrying items outside a private space such as a home on Saturdays. The perimeter acts as a symbolic boundary that extends the “home” to the broader neighborhood, allowing Orthodox families to push strollers, walk dogs and carry bags.

Still, Ronald Ekker, the cyclist who was injured, argues the thin wires pose a “public safety risk” if they fall.

“Public safety should take precedent whatever anybody’s religious belief” is, Ekker said.

Ekker said he was riding his electric bike down a hill on Lincoln Memorial Drive near the Linnwood Water Treatment Plant on Sept. 18, reaching up to 25 mph, when a wire snagged around his neck. It was attached on one end to a light post and had detached from another anchor on the other side of the four-lane road.

So when he ran into it, the entire roughly 60 feet of wire skated across his neck, he said, leaving marks on the front, side and back of his neck.

“It happened so fast, you couldn’t really see it because it’s so thin,” Ekker said. “Quite frankly, I thought I was going to be decapitated.”

Ekker didn’t know about the eruv and believed for days it was a booby trap or prank of some kind. He spoke to local TV news stations about the wire without knowing it was placed there for religious reasons.

Lein called Ekker to personally apologize, and Ekker accepted his apology, but he was not swayed from his belief that thin, nearly invisible wires such as the one that injured him are “beyond common sense.”

More: A new eruv that is going up in the North Shore will ease Shabbat restrictions for Orthodox Jews

Wire perimeter encompasses 5 square miles across east side, Shorewood, Whitefish Bay

The eruv strung around the east side was put up over the course of several years and completed in 2023, according to the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle. The segment of wire that Ekker encountered had been up for three years, Lein said.

Lein guesses that a large truck carrying equipment to the road construction zone at the corner of Lincoln Memorial and Lake drives hit the wire and caused it to fall. Typically large trucks don’t drive in that area, he said.

“It was really a freak accident,” Lein said. “We’re not in control over everything, unfortunately.”

This is the third time an eruv wire has fallen across roads on the east side in recent years, Lein said. In the other two cases, a truck and a tree branch were to blame.

“Anytime there’s a break in the cable anywhere, it gets repaired immediately,” Lein said. He added that a crew of people checks the eruv weekly to ensure it is intact, since a broken boundary would mean Orthodox residents couldn’t move around outside on Shabbat.

The east side eruv encompasses 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 Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood.

Since the land where Ekker was injured is managed by Milwaukee County, Lein said county attorneys are determining whether a wire over the road poses too much of a liability. If it does, and they ask him to move it, he will, he said.

“We will definitely make any effort to mitigate any of those possibilities for injury,” he said.

Sophie Carson is a general assignment reporter 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 on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: After fallen wire injures cyclist, Orthodox Jewish group apologizes