Free Republic

On a windy Monday night, Pete’s Candy Store—a bar in Williamsburg with a railcar-shaped performance space in the back—is crammed to capacity with the thin and the bearded. Almost no one is drinking. The mood is pregame, expectant and nervous. We’re at one of the oddest New York City powwows in recent memory: a panel designed to quell a metastasizing dispute between bicyclists and Hasidic Jews. Except no Hasids are present. For a moment, it looks like the bicyclists will have to debate themselves. At immediate issue is the Bedford Avenue bike lane. It’s the longest in Brooklyn and runs...

<p>October 30, 2003 -- A holy war between two feuding Brooklyn Hasidic groups erupted outside a religious school in Williamsburg yesterday as more than 150 students tried to storm the building, which had been closed by a rival faction.</p> <p>The school for recently married men, known as a kolel, was closed for the second straight day yesterday morning when the students arrived and were met by security guards and German shepherds.</p>

<p>September 7, 2003 -- A bitter border battle between Orthodox Jews in Williamsburg over an eruv - symbolic walls that enable them to carry objects or wheel baby strollers outside their homes on the Sabbath - has escalated into an all-out holy war.</p>