The Hasidic Mother, the Iranian Visitor, and a Shabbat Surprise

I went to Brooklyn looking for cafés and long walks. Instead, I found myself in a stranger’s kitchen.

By Elham Golkhandan

Brooklyn had become unfinished business.

On an earlier visit to New York, I had walked across the Brooklyn Bridge. But crossing a bridge, I had decided, did not count as getting to know a borough.

I wanted tree-lined streets, old brick buildings, independent bookstores, and cafés where people could spend an unreasonable amount of time over one cup of coffee.

Especially that last part.

So when I had a few days of vacation in October 2026, I drove from Toronto to New York with a clear intention: this time, I would give Brooklyn the attention it deserved.

After visiting DUMBO and admiring the Manhattan Bridge, I headed toward South Williamsburg and Lee Avenue.

My café plans soon encountered a small scheduling problem.

It was Shabbat.

Most shops were closed. Families walked along the sidewalks with children in tow. The neighborhood seemed to move at a different pace from the New York I had come to expect.

I slowed down too.

Then a Hasidic Jewish woman approached me with a child and asked whether I could help with something in her home.

Something involving a stove.

When you drive hundreds of miles to New York, you prepare for traffic, expensive coffee, and the possibility that finding parking will become your principal occupation.

You do not prepare to be recruited into someone’s kitchen.

My first instinct was hesitation.

I was traveling alone. A stranger was asking me to enter her home. Every lesson about personal safety suddenly demanded my attention.

But I also knew that observant Jews refrain from certain activities involving fire and electricity during Shabbat. That helped me understand why she might be asking a passerby for assistance, although I did not know the religious details of her situation.

She offered to leave the door open.

That helped too.

So I agreed.

A few moments later, I was standing in the kitchen of a Hasidic family in Williamsburg.

She needed help with the stove. I turned off the gas flame.

And just like that, my Brooklyn itinerary acquired an unexpected entry:

Temporary Shabbat Kitchen Assistant.

During our brief conversation, I mentioned that I was Iranian.

The word seemed to carry more weight for me than it did for her.

For me, it brought the awareness of having grown up under a government that had spent decades promoting hostility toward Israel. I wondered what she might associate with the country I had just named.

Her response, as I experienced it, was much simpler. I was the person who had agreed to help.

Perhaps I had arrived carrying a geopolitical introduction when all she needed was someone to turn off a stove.

She thanked me and offered me a kosher snack.

That small gesture stayed with me because it was so ordinary: help offered, help received, something to eat in return.

During those few minutes, we did not discuss Israel.

We did not discuss Iran’s government.

We discussed a stove.

If someone had described the scene to me earlier that day—an Iranian woman visiting a Hasidic family’s kitchen in Brooklyn—I might have expected a complicated conversation.

Instead, there was a practical request, a moment of hesitation, an open door, and a thank-you.

I cannot say what she thought about my nationality. We did not know each other well enough for that. But I knew what the encounter had changed in my own afternoon. A community I had been observing from the sidewalk had briefly become a home I had entered, with a mother, a child, and a small problem I could solve.

As an Iranian, I do not experience my country’s rulers as the authors of my identity. Their hostility does not express what I feel toward Jewish people, and I do not want it to determine whom I can approach with curiosity or kindness.

Still, knowing that intellectually is different from finding yourself in a stranger’s kitchen, discovering that the introduction you had worried about does not interrupt the simple business of helping.

The woman had trusted me enough to ask.

I had trusted her enough to step inside.

Neither of us needed to turn the encounter into a statement. Its meaning came to me afterward.

I had come to Williamsburg curious about a community. I left with a memory of an actual person where, before, there had mostly been expectations about a neighborhood I wanted to understand.

I had gone to Williamsburg hoping to spend time somewhere unfamiliar, away from the usual tourist route.

In that sense, the visit had gone remarkably well.

The café portion was less successful.

But somewhere between the sidewalk and that kitchen, Brooklyn had stopped being unfinished business. It had become a story I would bring home.

The coffee could wait.