WESTHAMPTON BEACH, N.Y. — Every Saturday, Eugene Milanaik, a nurse anesthetist, walks more than five miles back and forth between his Orthodox synagogue and his weekend house on Dune Road. When it rains, he gets soaked, because he cannot carry an umbrella. When his 3-year-old grandson is in town, as he was last weekend, his wife must stay home, because she cannot push his stroller.

Life would be much easier, in Mr. Milanaik’s view, if Westhampton Beach would finally permit a series of narrow plastic strips, known in Hebrew as lechis, to be placed on the village’s utility poles. The strips would create an eruv, a ritual boundary that would allow those Orthodox Jews who do not push or carry things outside the home on the Sabbath to do so when within the eruv’s perimeter.

Eruvim are an arcane matter to most people, but they are not unusual: much of Manhattan lies within the boundaries of an eruv, as do scores of Orthodox communities around the country.

“If other towns have it, we should have it,” Mr. Milanaik, 68, said on Friday, after stashing a backpack filled with his Sabbath essentials — two prayer books and a prayer shawl — in a plastic bin at the Hampton Synagogue, so he would not need to carry them on the Sabbath. “I’m getting by without it, but it would be nice. It’s like being handicapped.”