“The arrival of Cofix is a very good thing for the Orthodox,” Asher said. “The Orthodox study religion and don’t work, so the only thing that matters is the price…. Orthodox don’t care about the taste, they care about how much they have to pay.”
Yitzhak Avrahami, 17, is among those who are grateful for Cofix, even though he spends more of his money at Shloimale.
“Part of me wants to support Cofix,” he said, “because if they close the prices will rise again.”
It’s not the art of drinking coffee that has pervaded Bnei Brak, but the desire for fast, cheap fuel between studying the Torah and praying. This isn’t Paris; no one sits for hours over a cup.
A collective of Bnei Brak’s rabbis have lashed out at this, issuing a signed leaflet and poster calling for a blanket ban on eating and drinking on the run — adding a spiritual dimension to the coffee and pastry price war.
According to the five signatories — Rabbis Yehuda Siliman, Moshe Shaul Klein, Sriel Rosenberg, Menachem Mendel HaCohen Shpern and Masoud Ben-Shimon — eating and drinking on the street is against the Torah.
“We have a duty to warn and alert the public to the phenomenon which has spread in our city: the cheap culture of eating while walking in the street,” the signed notice reads.
The notice condemns such consumption, and the placement of tables outside fast-food chains, equating it to “swindling the public into common behavior” and detracting from “self-respect and the respect of families.”
…Standing outside Shloimale, Rabbi Samuel Weiss said he agreed with the (widely ignored) rabbinic ban on the coffee spots.
“There is a Talmudic saying: He who eats food at market is like a dog,” he said.
