What prompted the Manhattan Mincha Map project?
Making my way to the subway on a late winter morning in 1999, I picked up a copy of “Torah Times” from a plastic dispenser on the corner of Kingston Avenue and Eastern Parkway. “Torah Times” is the self-declared “largest Jewish weekly shoppers’ guide” selling anything and everything from gefilte fish to sneakers. Half-heartedly flipping through it, I stumbled on eight pages of listings devoted to “The Manhattan Mincha Map.” Together, they provide a directory of all the places in Manhattan where Jewish men may come to recite Mincha –the afternoon prayer- with a minyan, the required quorum of ten. Some of the locales are synagogues or houses of study. But most are actual workplaces: pizza parlors, shipping offices, printing shops, jewelry shops, and so on. As I pored over the information, visions of people praying amidst boxes of electronics, or reams of cloth and stacks of paper, flooded my imagination. I felt a thrill of anticipation, knowing that some day I would visit these places wh
