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This year, the Waterbury Jewish community turns 10. That's by one count... Jews started migrating to the Brass City in the mid-19th century, when manufacturing jobs were plentiful. But 150 years later, the last remaining Reform and Conservative synagogues had been sold to churches, and only one Orthodox congregation, B'nai Shalom Synagogue, was left.

More accurately, this month, the new Waterbury Orthodox Jewish community celebrates its 10th anniversary. It may be the only instance of a planned Jewish community in the U.S.

"We developed an Orthodox community where there was no existing community," says Rabbi Yehuda Brecher, who, along with his wife, Yocheved, was one of the community's nine original families. "The concept of enhancing communities exists in numerous towns and cities across the U.S. The residents might want a little extra, so they bring in a yeshiva or a kollel or more young families. But to move to a community where you could count the number of Orthodox Jews on one hand - that's unique."

What has become a thriving Jewish area owes its existence to Rabbi Judah Harris of B'nai Shalom, who over the years had watched Jews leave Waterbury, and had seen the synagogues close. Finally, in 1999, he couldn't find a weekday minyan for a congregant sitting shiva. He decided to rebuild the Jewish community. The key, he thought, was to bring a yeshiva to the city as a draw for young people.

"Throughout the history of America, if there's no strong education or family life or social life for the younger crowd, they start moving out," says Rabbi Ahron Kaufman, a founder of the community and Rosh Yeshivah - or Dean - of its yeshivah. "In every shul and Jewish organization, we focus on the old regime, and while they deserve it, if we don't open up to the younger generation, they move to places where opportunity and friends are."

Harris knew that Waterbury had to attract a new wave of Jewish migration, and that required a focus on education and children. "Every organization called him a dreamer," Kaufman says. "They said, 'People won't come from New York to Connecticut, especially to Waterbury.'"
That is, until the dreamer approached Torah Umesorah, the national society of Orthodox day schools and yeshivot, and the organization put the word out. Kaufman was teaching at a yeshiva in Far Rockaway, Long Island.

"I fell into it," he says. "It was a dream of mine to help my students. I saw them growing and as they got married, they had no place to go. I thought, 'What can I do for them?' Rabbi Harris and I got to the same solution from two different points."

By May 2000, Harris had recruited three philanthropists and enough teachers, young couples, and students to make the move. For the yeshiva, his group was offered a lease by the Waterbury Development Corporation for several buildings on UConn's Hillside campus when the university relocated to an old theater downtown. They bought more than 70 houses in the surrounding area, and bought back Beth El Synagogue from the church that was about to move in.

In August, nine families and 30 high school-age boys moved to Waterbury, from Orthodox communities in New York and New Jersey, and some returning from yeshivot in Israel. The Yeshiva K'tana elementary school enrolled 10 students.

Rabbi Yehuda Brecher was studying in the post-graduate kollel of Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin in Brooklyn, N.Y. when the director told the older students about "a great idea." One made the two-hour drive to Waterbury and verified that it was not only a viable community but, as Brecher says, "schleppable to New York."

http://www.jewishledger.com/articles/2010/05/05/news/on_the_cover/news01.txt