Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Havdalah Hustle’s Healthier Holiday

Two-day Yom Tovs are decadent enough, but double-day holidays that run into the Sabbath are nothing short of gluttonous. This fall, observant Jews are facing a series of three-day festivals that will surely result in marathon large meals, loosened pants and discarded belts. But one group of New Yorkers living on Manhattan’s Upper West Side compensates for excess eating with an aerobic event they call the Havdalah Hustle.

On the final day of a three-day eating-fest three years ago, frequent runner (and New York City Marathon trainee) Jeff Stier shared a meal with some friends who expressed a desire to work off the countless calories they’d consumed. “All the sitting around and eating gets kind of exhausting,” Stier said. “I couldn’t wait to go out for a run.” So he organized a jog around the Central Park reservoir that Saturday evening, a half-hour after sundown. Today, the group has expanded to include 30 members between the ages of 25 and 40 (though usually only four or five show up at a time), and the running takes place almost every week of the year.

Stier is never quite sure who from his extended network of friends will knock on his door on any given Saturday night, but usually he can bet on his “trusted adviser and most reliable runner,” Lazer Neiger. One time, the two even ran during one of the city’s worst blizzards.

While the runners change, the location remains the same: the reservoir, which covers 1.55 miles. The speed stays at what runners call a conversational pace. Nonexpert runners who “can keep up” with two laps around the reservoir are welcome. But iPods are shunned and socializing is encouraged. “We’ll often talk to each other about what’s going on that night and make plans to go out later,” Neiger said.

In keeping with the group’s name, the evening begins with the recitation of the Havdalah, the blessing that marks the end of the Sabbath and beginning of the new week. This always takes place on the expansive terrace of Stier’s garden apartment as his three pet turtles and Koi fish look on.

Stier says that he feels nothing short of secure when he runs with the group at night — a testament to the safeness of Central Park and of New York City in general these days.

Stier, who is also the associate director of the American Council on Science and Health, is a self-proclaimed “event coordinator,” and organizes a fair number of get-togethers in his free time. But he particularly enjoys promoting a healthy lifestyle within his own Modern Orthodox community, which celebrates the Sabbath with multi-course meals. “I’m always running outside,” said Stier, who lives right off Central Park, “and I’m glad that this group is getting more people from our community out exercising in the park, even if it’s at a rather ‘unorthodox’ time.”

Lucy Cohen Blatter is a freelance writer living in Manhattan.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.