Saturday, May 11, 2019
Quest for suburban lifestyle pushes Hasidic frontier farther from KJ
Joseph Waldman was one of the first settlers in 1976 in a small enclave that would soon become the Village of Kiryas Joel, an upstate outpost for Satmar Hasidic families seeking a peaceful refuge from the congestion of Brooklyn.
Forty-three years later, Kiryas Joel is a densely populated community of 24,000 or more, and Waldman and his family have relocated again, this time to neighboring Woodbury.
Waldman and his wife, Sarah, bought a house last year on Schunnemunk Road in the Country Crossing development, following five of their daughters who already had moved to the same quiet neighborhood. He proudly showed a reporter the picturesque view of Schunnemunk Mountain from his kitchen during a recent visit, and recalled the sense of tranquility he enjoyed as a Satmar pioneer in rural Monroe decades ago.
“Moving here is exactly the same feeling that we had moving here from the city 43 years ago and building that new house,” Waldman said.
The Waldmans are part of a steady flow of Satmar families migrating to the towns abutting Kiryas Joel, where they can get a single-family house with a yard and privacy for the same price as a condo in the crowded village. The trend started in 2015 during a tense conflict over efforts to expand Kiryas Joel and has continued in its aftermath, with couples and investors from Kiryas Joel and Brooklyn now having bought hundreds of houses in Monroe, Blooming Grove and Woodbury over the last four years, according to Orange County property records.
The most striking example is South Blooming Grove, where at least 387 homes, or 44 percent of all single-family houses in the village, have changed hands. In neighboring Woodbury, Hasidic families have settled in neighborhoods like the Waldmans’, where about 70 homes have changed hands, and Woodbury Junction, where about 100 houses and lots have been sold since a Brooklyn developer bought the stalled 451-home project in 2016 and resumed construction.
New complexes are being built or planned in Monroe, Blooming Grove and Chester as well, like the 181-home Smith Farm project taking shape on a hill off Route 17M in Monroe. One proposal still under review, the 600-home Clovewood project, could bring as many as 3,800 new people to South Blooming Grove, more than doubling the population of 3,200.
The home buy-ups and new construction have extended the frontier for Orange County’s Satmar community, which for decades had lived strictly in Kiryas Joel and adjacent neighborhoods close to the synagogues, religious schools, kosher stores, ritual baths and wedding halls that anchor Hasidic life. Now, school buses roll through Worley Heights in South Blooming Grove to take children to Kiryas Joel’s yeshivas, and Orthodox boundary markers known as eruvs line streets in Woodbury.
For a fast-growing community with large families and a constant need for more housing, new opportunities abound.
The suburban migration from Kiryas Joel represents a cultural shift for the Satmar Hasidim and raises new considerations for the towns experiencing or facing that influx. Though the transition has been ordinary in some respects, as routine as one family moving in to replace another, it has also triggered sporadic conflicts over development plans, eruvs and other issues, and has stoked anxiety among some about the future power of growing Hasidic voting blocs.
A ‘KJ without borders’
One late spring night in Kiryas Joel in 2015, attorney Steven Barshov took the microphone in the ballroom of a girls’ school to make his case to a crowd of about 600, Hasidic and non-Hasidic alike, about why it made sense for Kiryas Joel to annex 507 acres from the Town of Monroe. Barshov, representing the property owners who had petitioned for that border change, talked about the scarcity of building space in the Hasidic village and posed a leading question about its future population growth.
“So where are the people to go?” he asked. “Would you prefer that they be spread all around Orange County, which is -”
“Yes!” annexation opponents in the audience roared back before he could finish.
What has happened in the intervening four years is a little of both.
Kiryas Joel did get more land, having annexed 164 acres in 2016 and gained another 64 acres when it separated from Monroe to form the Town of Palm Tree at the beginning of this year. Several thousand new homes are planned or under construction within its expanded borders, including a 1,600-condo complex now being built on land along Nininger Road that was part of the village before the annexation.
Yet the Hasidim have continued buying homes in a widening area around Kiryas Joel, if not “all around Orange County,” as Barshov suggested, and developers have forged ahead with housing plans in neighboring towns.
Kiryas Joel leaders hope to stem that migration. The village’s weekly Hakiryah newspaper published a multi-page insert on April 19 that touted what it said were 5,521 total new housing units coming to Kiryas Joel/Palm Tree, and urged readers to buy homes there to take advantage of the low taxes and what will soon be a buyer’s market.
That prompted a response from another Yiddish-language weekly called Vochenshrift, which ran its own real estate section on May 3 to promote thousands of homes in neighboring towns in addition to the expected housing surge in Kiryas Joel. The introduction celebrated the enlarged area for the Satmar community, calling it “a KJ without borders, with spacious homes and endless possibilities to accommodate the growth of the big city of Kiryas Joel for present and future.”
David Myers, a history professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and co-author of a forthcoming book on Kiryas Joel, attributes the move to neighboring towns largely to the “density of life” in Kiryas Joel - several times greater than that of neighboring towns - and to the “impulse toward suburbanization,” a familiar gravitational pull for families living in cities.
“Not everybody wants to live in that dense, quasi-urban environment,” he said.
Myers also sees signs of an ongoing “crisis of authority” in the Satmar community since the death in 1979 of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the charismatic figure who founded the Satmar movement and led its survivors to the U.S. after the Holocaust. Teitelbaum envisioned his fledgling settlement in upstate Orange County as a self-sustaining shtetl, like those that thrived in eastern Europe before World War II, he said.
Today, that vision is evolving into a “shtetl and spokes,” with Satmar families living in neighborhoods radiating outward from the hub of Kiryas Joel. Reinforcing that pattern, Myers said, is the emergence of an upper-middle-class — affluent households that can afford expensive homes in new subdivisions like Woodbury Junction.
https://www.recordonline.com/news/20190511/quest-for-suburban-lifestyle-pushes-hasidic-frontier-farther-from-kj
Forty-three years later, Kiryas Joel is a densely populated community of 24,000 or more, and Waldman and his family have relocated again, this time to neighboring Woodbury.
Waldman and his wife, Sarah, bought a house last year on Schunnemunk Road in the Country Crossing development, following five of their daughters who already had moved to the same quiet neighborhood. He proudly showed a reporter the picturesque view of Schunnemunk Mountain from his kitchen during a recent visit, and recalled the sense of tranquility he enjoyed as a Satmar pioneer in rural Monroe decades ago.
“Moving here is exactly the same feeling that we had moving here from the city 43 years ago and building that new house,” Waldman said.
The Waldmans are part of a steady flow of Satmar families migrating to the towns abutting Kiryas Joel, where they can get a single-family house with a yard and privacy for the same price as a condo in the crowded village. The trend started in 2015 during a tense conflict over efforts to expand Kiryas Joel and has continued in its aftermath, with couples and investors from Kiryas Joel and Brooklyn now having bought hundreds of houses in Monroe, Blooming Grove and Woodbury over the last four years, according to Orange County property records.
The most striking example is South Blooming Grove, where at least 387 homes, or 44 percent of all single-family houses in the village, have changed hands. In neighboring Woodbury, Hasidic families have settled in neighborhoods like the Waldmans’, where about 70 homes have changed hands, and Woodbury Junction, where about 100 houses and lots have been sold since a Brooklyn developer bought the stalled 451-home project in 2016 and resumed construction.
New complexes are being built or planned in Monroe, Blooming Grove and Chester as well, like the 181-home Smith Farm project taking shape on a hill off Route 17M in Monroe. One proposal still under review, the 600-home Clovewood project, could bring as many as 3,800 new people to South Blooming Grove, more than doubling the population of 3,200.
The home buy-ups and new construction have extended the frontier for Orange County’s Satmar community, which for decades had lived strictly in Kiryas Joel and adjacent neighborhoods close to the synagogues, religious schools, kosher stores, ritual baths and wedding halls that anchor Hasidic life. Now, school buses roll through Worley Heights in South Blooming Grove to take children to Kiryas Joel’s yeshivas, and Orthodox boundary markers known as eruvs line streets in Woodbury.
For a fast-growing community with large families and a constant need for more housing, new opportunities abound.
The suburban migration from Kiryas Joel represents a cultural shift for the Satmar Hasidim and raises new considerations for the towns experiencing or facing that influx. Though the transition has been ordinary in some respects, as routine as one family moving in to replace another, it has also triggered sporadic conflicts over development plans, eruvs and other issues, and has stoked anxiety among some about the future power of growing Hasidic voting blocs.
A ‘KJ without borders’
One late spring night in Kiryas Joel in 2015, attorney Steven Barshov took the microphone in the ballroom of a girls’ school to make his case to a crowd of about 600, Hasidic and non-Hasidic alike, about why it made sense for Kiryas Joel to annex 507 acres from the Town of Monroe. Barshov, representing the property owners who had petitioned for that border change, talked about the scarcity of building space in the Hasidic village and posed a leading question about its future population growth.
“So where are the people to go?” he asked. “Would you prefer that they be spread all around Orange County, which is -”
“Yes!” annexation opponents in the audience roared back before he could finish.
What has happened in the intervening four years is a little of both.
Kiryas Joel did get more land, having annexed 164 acres in 2016 and gained another 64 acres when it separated from Monroe to form the Town of Palm Tree at the beginning of this year. Several thousand new homes are planned or under construction within its expanded borders, including a 1,600-condo complex now being built on land along Nininger Road that was part of the village before the annexation.
Yet the Hasidim have continued buying homes in a widening area around Kiryas Joel, if not “all around Orange County,” as Barshov suggested, and developers have forged ahead with housing plans in neighboring towns.
Kiryas Joel leaders hope to stem that migration. The village’s weekly Hakiryah newspaper published a multi-page insert on April 19 that touted what it said were 5,521 total new housing units coming to Kiryas Joel/Palm Tree, and urged readers to buy homes there to take advantage of the low taxes and what will soon be a buyer’s market.
That prompted a response from another Yiddish-language weekly called Vochenshrift, which ran its own real estate section on May 3 to promote thousands of homes in neighboring towns in addition to the expected housing surge in Kiryas Joel. The introduction celebrated the enlarged area for the Satmar community, calling it “a KJ without borders, with spacious homes and endless possibilities to accommodate the growth of the big city of Kiryas Joel for present and future.”
David Myers, a history professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and co-author of a forthcoming book on Kiryas Joel, attributes the move to neighboring towns largely to the “density of life” in Kiryas Joel - several times greater than that of neighboring towns - and to the “impulse toward suburbanization,” a familiar gravitational pull for families living in cities.
“Not everybody wants to live in that dense, quasi-urban environment,” he said.
Myers also sees signs of an ongoing “crisis of authority” in the Satmar community since the death in 1979 of Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the charismatic figure who founded the Satmar movement and led its survivors to the U.S. after the Holocaust. Teitelbaum envisioned his fledgling settlement in upstate Orange County as a self-sustaining shtetl, like those that thrived in eastern Europe before World War II, he said.
Today, that vision is evolving into a “shtetl and spokes,” with Satmar families living in neighborhoods radiating outward from the hub of Kiryas Joel. Reinforcing that pattern, Myers said, is the emergence of an upper-middle-class — affluent households that can afford expensive homes in new subdivisions like Woodbury Junction.
https://www.recordonline.com/news/20190511/quest-for-suburban-lifestyle-pushes-hasidic-frontier-farther-from-kj
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