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Shabbas Goy on Duty
Abu Ali is a taxi driver every other day.
On Friday evening he opens up a small plastic storage shed a rabbi bought for him and he hangs his sign in Hebrew: “Goy for Shabbas.”
Goy is a sometimes-derogatory Yiddish word for non-Jew. Shabbas is the Jewish Sabbath.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews follow a strict interpretation of the Torah, which forbids working during the Sabbath, including turning on a light, making a telephone call or driving. The Jewish Sabbath runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday.
Abu Ali, who is from the village of Beit Safafa outside Jerusalem, didn’t want to give his full name because he doesn’t report his income as a shabbas goy to tax authorities.
He charges 30 shekels, or about $9, for house calls. Most common, he said, is turning on or off lights, including refrigerator lights that families forget to unscrew. Once a boy turned on a faucet and his father asked Abu Ali to turn it off.
He charges 100 shekels, or about $30, for taking women in labor to the hospital, a service he performs on average one to three times a Sabbath.
Last Sabbath, he said he made $300. Others are less lucrative. He serves a relatively small community because, with the exception of health emergencies, ultra-Orthodox Jews do not use telephones during the Sabbath, so they must walk to his small office, opposite a supermarket in the West Jerusalem neighborhood of Romema.
He puts a siren on his car and a sign in the window that reads: “Shabbas Goy on Duty” to avoid neighborhood residents from throwing stones at his car for violating the sanctity of the Sabbath by driving.
Other shabbas goys in Israel are Russian or Filipino. Abu Ali says he doesn’t know of any other Muslim shabbas goys. He is a religious Muslim — he wears a skullcap and a beard — which he says the ultra-Orthodox community appreciates because they are also socially conservative and they expect he will respect the ultra-Orthodox women.
“It creates a good relationship,” he said. “They know it’s a way of making a living and that’s what’s important. The whole Jewish-Arab question isn’t relevant.”
Ultra-Orthodox Jews are also forbidden to pay money on the Sabbath — also considered work — so they usually pay Abu Ali later in the week by putting money in envelopes into a slot on his storage shed.
Someone shirked her payment just once in three years, he said.
Abu Ali, who learned Hebrew working for 25 years as a bus driver in Israel, said he wasn’t sure his weekend job would pave the way to greater Arab-Jewish understanding. He said he hadn’t developed any friendships within the closed ultra-Orthodox community.
“On a weekday, I’m nothing to them,” he said. “But on Shabbat, I’m like an angel.”
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