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    Most New York tour guides will show you the holy trinity, Ellis Island, Empire State Building, Planet Hollywood. But Rabbi Beryl Epstein will show you a different kind of holy: Hasidic Crown Heights.

     Just as on any other tour, you pay your money and wear comfortable shoes. But instead of being herded through New York’s biggest landmarks, you end up in some of its smallest, including the living room of a bearded scribe calligraphing a Torah scroll.

     "I wish I could offer everybody a bit more comfortable accommodations," apologizes Rabbi Yehuda Clapman, taking a break from his painstaking task. About 25 people are peering at his handiwork: a perfect column of the Old Testament, inked with a feather quill on parchment he cured himself. Aside from guests, the rabbi’s small parlor is crammed with hundreds of religious books—and a fax. Talk about melding the old and the new!

     Well, yes, let’s, says Epstein, our tour guide. That’s what today’s tour is all about.

    Most people assume Hasidim are sort of like the Amish — but Jewish— he says. Nothing could be further from the truth. While his subgroup, the Lubavitcher Hasidim, do wear black hats, learn Yiddish and have as many children as G-d grants (10 is not uncommon), "We have one of the most frequented sites on the Internet," boasts Epstein. A free 800-number provides Jewish lectures daily. And the tours he’s been giving for the last 14 years are just another way the community is reaching out to anyone who’s interested.

     Today, a class of 18 NYU students from all over the world is gathered in a subterranean library of Jewish books to start the tour, just a couple of doors down from the Kingston St. stop of the No. 3 train.

     First, Epstein, a cheery Tennessee native who grew up Jewish but not very religious, gives a brief history of Hasidism: The sect was born about 200 years ago in Poland, when a holy man called by his followers the Baal Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name) feared the Jews were becoming a people divided. "You had almost a class system developing, or the scholarly Jews looking down on the average man," says Epstein. The Baal Shem Tov emphasized the joy of prayer, and how the humble man’s supplications were every bit as legit as the sage’s.

     Which is not to say the movement shuns study. Hasidic kids in Crown Heights begin their formal schooling at age 3, and by age 5 are studying seven hours a day.

     With a spring in his step, the rabbi rouses the group and leads them half a block down to the main synagogue.

     Congregation Lubavitch was led by Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the group’s spiritual leader, until his death three years ago. A plain rectangular building with benches the color of Band-Aids, the architecture is anything but impressive. No stained-glass windows, no fancy drapes.

     But peering down from the balcony, we see a room buzzing with dozens of men in big, black hats bent over their books, talking, arguing, waving their arms. Little boys dash through. Voices rise. While these men are fervently debating the holy books, it sounds for all the world like a poker game.

     "I’m stunned," says Irene Annus, 33, a student from Hungary.

     "Very amazing," agrees Ayako Uchida, 30, an English teacher from Japan.

     The tour moves next door to the visitors center at the Rebbe’s headquarters, which is filled with mementos of his worldwide crusade: Russian posters explaining how to light Sabbath candles, collection boxes inscribed in Spanish. While the movement does not seek to convert non-Jews, it is eager to get all Jews practicing their religion.

     From here we walk a couple of blocks to the scribe’s home, and then it’s back to a gift shop on the main drag. Baseball cards of the great rabbis, anyone?

     "It’s not Colonial Williamsburg," Epstein concludes. His community may look quaint, but it’s very much alive, as his tour (and all the baby carriages) prove. "A few years ago, we had a group from West Point here. I told them this is the West Point of Judaism" — where Jews are expected to go the extra mile.

     Fall in!

GLIMPSE OF JUDAISM OFFERED
    Tour Unravels a few mysteries of the culture

NEW YORK (AP) — On the floor of the synagogue, about 200 long-bearded Jewish men with white shawls atop their heads swayed to and fro as their ancient Hebrew prayers rose in a rhythmic hum.

     "Fascinating," murmured one of the visitors peering down from the balcony. The "shul" or synagogue was their first stop on a tour of the Hasidic Lubavitch community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

     Begun 10 years ago as a means to introduce the curious to ultra-orthodox Judaism, the Sunday tour has grown increasingly popular among Jews andgentiles alike, said Rabbi Beryl Epstein, 36, the tour guide.

     Over the years, the inquisitive have included reform Jewish congregations, college students, a group of Catholic nuns and a couple of West Point cadets, he said.

     For $10 a head, they get to see some highlights of orthodox observance, and hear explanations of what it means to be Hasidic, what makes food kosher, and why Jewishness is passed on through the mother.

     With a blend of Talmudic seriousness and borscht-belt humor, Epstein answers any and all questions about the 10,000-member community he likens to "a tiny European shtetle," or town.

     One tourist cupped her eyes to view the lower level through the smoked plexiglass that obscures the praying men’s view of the balcony, which is the women’s section of the shul.

     "Why to they all have such long beards?" she wanted to know.

      "Me? So I don’t have to tie my tie so tight," the rabbi joked. Then he explained that beards are considered holy to Hasidic Jews, citing a Biblical passage that forbids "touching a blade to the skin."

      On this day, Epstein’s tour group included 20 student actors from Boston’s Suffolk University. Their purpose was to prepare for a production of Anna Deveare Smith’s nationally acclaimed play. "Fires in the Mirror."

     The play is about the differing perspectives of a 1991 car crash in which a Lubavitch driver accidentally struck and killed a 7-year-old black boy. The death led to several days of rioting in Crown Heights and the fatal stabbing of a young rabbinic student.
      Marilyn Plotkins, the professor directing the play, said she cast the parts without regard to race or gender in the hope that her multicultural cast will be able to "point to the fact that racism is a global problem, not just a local problem. We can’t just look inside ourselves to understand it."

      Indeed, visiting Crown Heights is like straddling two centuries, if not two cultures. Hasidic men, wearing the traditional black suits and hats favored by their 18th-century Russian and Polish forebears, share the sidewalks with their African-American neighbors who dress in colorfully hip urban styles.

     During the outdoor part of the tour, one student remarked that the two groups don’t seem to acknowledge one another.

     Day-to-day there is generally an uneasy coexistence between the groups. some blacks and Jews have gotten together to try to improve understanding and communication between each other.

     Epstein maintained there are no tensions,. When he needs something in a pinch on a Friday t sundown, the beginning of the sabbath, Epstein said he runs out to a West Indian grocery store nearby that stocks kosher dry goods. The black proprietors always wish him "Good shabbos," he said.

     One stop on the tour looked like an abandoned store-front. "A very, very special matzoh is made here," Epstein announced. Matzoh is a flat, saltless cracker that is essential to the Jewish observance of Passover.

     Every step in making each 12-inch round matzoh is so guarded against leavening, he explained, that the entire process cannot exceed 18 minutes.

     "Try not to get in the way," he added as the group stepped from the quiet sidewalk into a loud, hot, dizzying flurry of activity that resembled a videotape stuck on fast-forward.
     Twenty-five women in kerchiefs stood side by side at a paper-covered table, furiously rolling blobs of dough into flat, round shapes. These discs were tossed to another table, where a four-man team punctured them with tiny holes and lined them up five across on 10-foot long wooden poles.

     In an adjoining room, a baker slid the dough into a coal-burning oven for precisely 20 seconds.

     The workers greeted each perfectly unleavened batch with shouts in Yiddish and bursts of applause. The factory operates from Hanukkah through Passover and ships its product, which costs $11.65 per pound, all over the world.

     After the tour, Tina Gaffney, a black woman who is playing five parts in the student production, called the experience "enlightening." "It’s powerful, gripping. You get a real inside view of the community."

     Esptein, who did not grow up in a religious household in his native Chattanooga, Tenn., said he became strongly aware of his Jewish heritage as a teen-ager and asked himself, "What am I doing to preserve it?"

     His answer was to join the Lubavitch community at age 18 and to start the tour, which he views as a complement of sorts to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

     "This tour is the living Judaism," he said.