Administrative Assistant to Spring Valley Mayor Jasmin, Aron Wieder addressing the press in Village Hall www.nytimes.com SPRING VALLEY, NY Spring Valley Village Hall sits in a drab strip mall along with Angel Nails, the Family Dollar discount store, the Caribbean Village restaurant and other modest businesses in this Rockland County village, which has a mix of Hasidic and other Orthodox Jews, Latinos and blacks. Haitians make up roughly half the population of more than 25000. So in terms of demographics, there was nothing out of the ordinary in the scene at Village Hall on Tuesday, with bearded Hasidic men in their long black coats and a largely black crowd of workers and volunteers scurrying around the lobby, which was filled with boxes of medicine, cotton balls and crutches, big black suitcases and an air of incessant activity. Still, disaster makes strange bedfellows. Hence the cast of characters in a community where the melting pot usually melts only so far and the Hasidim and the Haitians invariably find themselves in separate worlds or competing ones. Nevertheless, for a day, there was the Haitian mayor, Noramie F. Jasmin, and her Hasidic administrative assistant, Aron Wieder, directing traffic inside the cavernous lobby, the urgency of the moment looming larger than the cultural chasm that usually separates them. I would say theres no hate, but theres no interaction, said Lazer Gross, a retired businessman who was one of a group of Hasidic men who helped provide <b>...</b>
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