Free Interview With a Jewish Vampire by Erica Manfred

did you leave Woodstock?” I asked, wondering why anyone would come back to this dreary neighborhood when he could live in the beautiful Catskills.
    “ Family problems, don’t ask! Plus there was a war for the local Jews. A rival Chabad rabbi in Kingston a few miles away had more money and support. Between him and the Woodstock Jewish Congregation folk singing rabbi, no one came to my services. I’m a musician too, but I play rap music.”
    “ What???” The day was getting stranger.
    “ You didn’t know there were Hasidic rappers, did you?” he laughed. “I play back-up for Matishayu, the famous Jewish reggae rapper. He was on Letterman a while ago.”
    “ No, I didn’t know.” Hey, if there were Hasidic vampires, why not Hasidic rappers.
    The first stop was the balcony of the Lubavitch synagogue where we were segregated by Plexiglas from the two hundred or so long-bearded Jewish men swaying wildly and davvening off-key. It turns out the Plexiglas was the mehitza , the barrier that separated the women from the men below. When it came to sexism even Muslim fundamentalists don’t have much on Hasidic Jews. At least Orthodox Jewish women don’t have to wear veils, but they do have to cover their heads. In olden times they wore kerchiefs but today most of them wear wigs, which makes no sense at all in an era where wigs are sexier than real hair.
    The next stop was fun--a matzoh bakery where they were making shmura matzoh that was kosher for Passover. In the obsessive-compulsive tradition of Kosher food the matzoh has to be made in less than eighteen minutes so the dough won’t rise, not even one millimeter.
    “ Try not to get in the way,” Yisroel instructed us as the group stepped from the freezing sidewalk into a loud, hot, dizzying flurry of activity. Twenty-five women in kerchiefs stood side by side at a paper-covered table furiously rolling dough into flat round blobs that were then tossed to another table where a four-man team punctured them with tiny holes, lined them up on wooden poles and handed them to a baker who slid them into a coal- burning oven for precisely twenty seconds. The workers greeted each batch with shouts in Yiddish and bursts of applause. We got to taste the matzoh which, though slightly burnt, was a lot better than Manischevitz.
    The next stop was a tiny living room where a wizened old man was painstakingly penning a Torah scroll with a quill on parchment. I was fascinated by his artistry. Our guide explained it took a year to make these scrolls and synagogues all over the world ordered them.
    We wound up at the visitors center at the Rebbe’s headquarters. Rebbe Menachem Schneerson had been the spiritual leader of the Chabad movement until he had the temerity to die in 1994 without naming a successor, which occasioned a huge battle between two factions of Lubuvitchers. I had no idea who won. A lot of Lubuvitchers thought he was the messiah, even after he died. I wondered how that would jibe with the second coming of Christ according to the fundamentalist Christians. I could imagine the spirits of Schneerson and Jerry Falwell battling it out during the Rapture. Who would get into heaven and who would have to convert? I’d put my money on the Rebbe.
    On the way to the deli for lunch, which was included with the tour, Karen shouted out, “That’s it. That’s the place where the scholars only studied after dark. I’m sure of it.”
    We were on St. Marks Avenue. She pointed out a nondescript brownstone with blackout curtains on the upstairs windows.
    “ Who lives there?” she asked our guide.
    “ That building is cursed,” our guide said in a low voice.
    “ Who cursed it?” I asked him, hoping to get some useful information.
    “ There are rumors of some strange goings-on there,” he stroked his beard thoughtfully, raised his eyebrows and nodded in a scholarly way. “Local Kabbalists tell stories about estries who fly and subsist on blood, especially the blood of children.