It’s a day like any other in Borough Park, Brooklyn. Yiddish-painted school buses go to-and-fro, and women tighten the tichels around their heads; every man is silhouetted by a pair of perfectly curled sideburns, and the local grocer has a two-for-one deal on blintzes. Tel-Aviv notwithstanding, the Big Apple is home to our planet’s largest Hasidic Jewish population. Yet, for being so quintessentially New York, Borough Park remains somewhat impenetrable to those outside its twenty-something block radius. “They just keep to themselves,” a woman tells us at a nearby bodega, “Listen, I been here for years. I see ’em every day, walking around all silent. How can you know a thing about ’em?”
Well, just ask Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, who’s the community’s magical little anomaly: a mensch who’s not only been inviting secular folks into his townhouse for over a decade, but letting them explore his personal taxidermy zoo, crowned “Torah Animal World.” As in, if it was on Noah’s Ark, it is now in Rabbi Shaul’s attic…
