Nestled in the scenic hills of Orange County, New York Kiryas Joel is a unique enclave that has rapidly gained prominence as a thriving Satmar Hasidic Jewish community this small municipality has become one of the fastest-growing communities in the United States and self-sustaining economy make it a fascinating subject for exploration To fully appreciate Kiryas Joel's significance one must delve into its demographic trends each contributing to this community's vibrant and unique portrait Kiryas Joel is remarkable for its explosive population growth the community's population surged more than 60% between 2010 and 2020 This growth is primarily fueled by the Satmar philosophy that promotes large families where it is common to see households with six or more children This dramatic increase in population has catalyzed significant housing expansion within Kiryas Joel Local officials have initiated several residential projects to accommodate this growth a housing complex specifically designed for large families highlights the community's commitment to creating suitable living conditions This complex includes dozens of apartment units featuring multi-bedroom layouts and communal spaces the rapid expansion has not come without controversy Kiryas Joel proposed annexing approximately 500 acres of neighboring land sparking debates among officials and residents from surrounding areas Critics voiced concerns about overcrowding and environmental impacts fearing that rapid growth could strain local resources Supporters argued that the annexation was necessary to facilitate adequate housing and infrastructure for a flourishing community This ongoing dialogue showcases how the municipality navigates the complexities of growth while staying true to its cultural values Education represents a cornerstone of life in Kiryas Joel. The community operates one of the country's largest private Yiddish-speaking school systems deeply rooted in the belief that education fosters spiritual and intellectual development The United Talmudical Academy offers an immersive curriculum focusing on religious texts and traditional teachings alongside secular subjects such as mathematics and science This dual approach ensures that students uphold their cultural heritage and acquire essential skills for future employment which is evident in the Kiryas Joel Village Union Free School District which specializes in providing tailored educational programs for children This district has gained national acclaim for its advocacy efforts it conducted specific funding campaigns targeting legislators and organized events where stakeholders—including parents and community members—shared testimonies about the impact of adequate funding on student success Kiryas Joel isn't only a community driven by cultural and educational values; it also showcases a robust economic landscape that emphasizes self-sufficiency This approach is evident in the numerous community-owned businesses that have flourished in the area providing essential goods and services tailored to residents' needs local supermarkets like Landau's Supermarket and Shlomies Grocery are renowned for their vast selections of kosher products becoming cherished fixtures in everyday life residents have organized community forums and town meetings to discuss pressing issues from housing to public safety The Kiryas Joel Community Council is vital in facilitating these discussions This level of political engagement exemplifies the community's commitment to proactive governance and the well-being of its residents instilling a sense of security and well-being Entrepreneurship is actively fostered within Kiryas Joel where young adults are encouraged to establish their own ventures such as the Kiryas Joel Chamber of Commerce offer resources and networking opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs Kiryas Joel's political landscape is vibrant and influential residents have consistently engaged in local and state politics to advocate for their unique needs and values Kiryas Joel has made significant strides in securing funding for infrastructure and educational initiatives through proactive dialogue with government officials Kiryas Joel successfully advocated for increased funding for its public school system allowing for better resources and facilities ultimately benefiting the entire community One notable moment in Kiryas Joel's political history was the 1994 Supreme Court case—Board of Education of Kiryas Joel Village School District v This case addressed the establishment of a school district that served only a religious community raising questions about church-state separation Although the court ruled against Kiryas Joel the city's leaders showcased resilience and adaptability by restructuring their educational system while adhering to legal requirements This event solidified Kiryas Joel's political presence and inspired residents to strengthen their advocacy efforts on issues affecting their way of life Kiryas Joel remains deeply committed to preserving its unique cultural heritage Its identity is enriched by traditions celebrated throughout the year a festival celebrating the end of the annual Torah reading cycle draw thousands of attendees who participate in processions and communal prayers Families come together to dance and celebrate Acts of kindness and mutual support are ingrained in Kiryas Joel's operations provide essential food packages to families facing financial difficulties These acts of charity exemplify a communal ethos reinforcing that caring for one another is a core value within Kiryas Joel should be on your radar due to its remarkable blend of rapid growth As one of the fastest-growing municipalities in the United States its unique demographic and strong familial ties contribute to a lively social fabric and political engagement further enhances its influence in regional affairs Kiryas Joel exemplifies how tradition can coexist with modern development making it a compelling model of resilience and adaptability Kiryas Joel stands poised to impact discussions on community photos and original descriptions © 2025 worldatlas.com The village of Woodbury has extended its moratorium on certain construction permits citing a need for more time to put a new well into service and determine whether the current water system can reasonably serve current and future property owners During the March 13 Woodbury Village Board meeting agreed to extend the moratorium for six months claiming that if the village was going to extend the moratorium there should be documentation of demand on the system and a schedule for putting wells in full service One Woodbury resident questioned whether the water shortages were because of surrounding neighborhoods tapping into the village’s water supply and wondered why they were able to develop so much who said he represents multiple water utilities throughout New York State explained that Woodbury’s water supply is not being siphoned off by other municipalities and that the capacity is based on the village’s ability to pump water out of the ground with its existing stations He also voiced his support for the moratorium extension The village of Woodbury is once again denying the village of Kiryas Joel’s request for an exemption from taxes on certain properties used for water supply purposes that are owned by Kiryas Joel but located within the village of Woodbury Mayor Andrew Giacomazza noted that the village board denied a similar request made a month ago claiming that the village of Kiryas Joel could have acquired property within its own village through negotiation or eminent domain to locate their water supply facilities but chose to let those lands be developed for residential and commercial purposes to benefit their tax base Freiband wondered why the village hasn’t met with Kiryas Joel to understand their claim and asked if there was potential for litigation which could cost the village more than the exemptions requested Village attorney Kelly Naughton responded that while the potential for litigation is always there the board has sufficient basis to deny the exemption She also said she would have to look into Freiband’s claim that another village was granted an exemption under identical circumstances Giacomazza shared that the village is expecting a $250,000 grant for the purpose of purchasing property at 231 and 271 Smith Clove Road for preservation of open space The resolution for the eventual purchase of the property listed the estimated property value at $445,000 It’s protecting open space and potentially creating something that the community as a whole can enjoy,” said Giacomazza Trustee Matthew Fabbro asked about maintenance of the property going forward to which Giacomazza responded that it would fall on the building and grounds and highway departments Freiband voiced his concerns about funding the acquisition before knowing the limitations of the property He questioned the appropriateness of using subdivision fees to support the project claiming that the village law stipulates that the money collected is to replace recreation areas that are already specified for each subdivision He further claimed that state law requires that these funds be used for playground and recreational services was not feasible at the Smith Clove property Naughton said that the parkland fees paid by subdivisions are not limited to creating or acquiring nearby parks and that they can support passive recreation While residents were encouraged by the addition of new parkland shared his concern about the amount of garbage and lack of care shown by certain property owners He asked if the village could set up a system for residents to report neglected properties that were impacting the quality of life for Woodbury Giacomazza responded that the village is currently in litigation with a property on Route 32 but that the issue isn’t limited to that one area He added that while the village can do what they can to fine and litigate offending properties they cannot be everywhere at once and called on the community to come together to help with cleanup efforts who at the village meeting repeated her previously shared concerns about current municipal officers serving on political committees Trustee Susan Fries-Ciriello shared that she has resigned from one she was serving on Referring to Lopez’s comments at the town board meeting and I said I don’t feel that I should be sitting [on this committee] and I honestly would encourage anyone else sitting on those committees that are elected officials they should resign as well.” the board passed a new law which would allow for food stands and ice cream stands to operate within the limited commercial zoning district of the village A 13-year-old driving a minivan fatally hit a Hudson Valley man with a minivan New York State Police confirmed an investigation into a fatal accident involving a 13-year-old in Orange County State Police continue to look into a tragic accident in Orange County that left a man dead For all the news that the Hudson Valley is sharing make sure to follow Hudson Valley Post on Facebook, download the Hudson Valley Post Mobile New York State Police troopers from the Monroe barracks responded to a report of a pedestrian struck by a vehicle in the village of Kiryas Joel in the town of Monroe According to the preliminary investigation a 13-year-old was backing a 2024 Honda Odyssey into the driveway of a home the unnamed 13-year-old rapidly accelerated striking the victim The victim was identified as 36-year-old Abraham Moskovits of Kiryas Joel Moskovits was removed from underneath the vehicle and was rushed to a hospital but couldn't be saved Popular Destination In New York State Is Crawling With Bed Bugs "Moskovits was extricated from underneath the vehicle EMS performed life-saving measures and Moskovits was transported to Good Samaritan Hospital in Rockland County where he ultimately succumbed to his injuries,' New York State Police stated in the press release Warning: 'Aggressive" Bear Destroys Home In Upstate New York, Returns A 13-year-old driving a minivan fatally hit a Hudson Valley man with a minivan.\nRead More For all the news that the Hudson Valley is sharing make sure to follow Hudson Valley Post on Facebook, download the Hudson Valley Post Mobile Popular Destination In New York State Is Crawling With Bed Bugs Warning: 'Aggressive" Bear Destroys Home In Upstate New York, Returns KIRYAS JOEL - A man was killed Tuesday night when he was struck by a minivan being parked by a 13-year-old at his residence State police said the collision happened just before 9 p.m a preliminary investigation found that a 13-year-old was backing a 2024 Honda Odyssey into the driveway of a residence While attempting to back the vehicle into a parking spot Moskovits was extricated from underneath the vehicle After an EMS crew performed life-saving measures at the scene Moskovits was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern Empire Center: How much are local superintendents paid? See Orange, Ulster, Sullivan County salaries State police said their investigation is continuing Mike Randall covers breaking news for the Times Herald-Record and the Poughkeepsie Journal By submitting the above I agree to the privacy policy and terms of use of JTA.org Lawler defeats Jones in New York congressional race that saw candidates spar over Israel Mike Lawler retained his seat in New York’s 17th Congressional District in a race that saw both candidates vie for the area’s large Jewish vote and spar over support for Israel The race was one of several swing districts in New York State that could sway control of the House Lawler defeated Democratic challenger Mondaire Jones in the district, which covers territory north of New York City in Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess and Westchester counties. With most of the vote counted, Lawler won around 52% of the vote while Lawler won the other areas of the district Lawler has forged close ties with the approximately 30,000 Orthodox Jewish voters in his district, frequently visiting their communities and meeting with their leading rabbis, at one point along with House Speaker Mike Johnson. He has also been vocally supportive of Israel and measures to combat antisemitism During the campaign, Jones also courted the pro-Israel and Jewish vote, and distanced himself from the party’s far left. Earlier this year, Jones endorsed George Latimer in his race against Jamaal Bowman a former Jones ally and member of the hardline left-wing “Squad,” who has harshly criticized Israel Jones said he turned against Bowman due to the “pain and anxiety” Bowman had caused to Jews with his remarks about Israel Jones and Bowman both served as progressive Democrats in neighboring districts and both won closely contested primaries in 2020, becoming the first Black men to represent Westchester County in Congress. Jones lost his seat in 2022 after redistricting. After Jones’ endorsement of Latimer, Lawler accused his opponent of “desperation and dishonesty,” though they appeared to be largely aligned on Israel policy Jones and Lawler are largely aligned on their rhetoric about Israel expressing support for the war against Hamas The two still traded jabs over the issue during the campaign. Lawler slammed Jones late last month for remarks about Israel returning to its 1967 borders, sending a text message to voters with the URL mondairehatesisrael.com Jones put out an ad attacking Lawler for his defense of Donald Trump after Trump said Jews would be partly responsible if he lost the election.The video ad showed Jewish constituents highlighting Jones’ support for the community and his opposition to the Squad Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican challenger Alison Esposito with around 56% of the vote The district north of New York City covers Orange County and parts of Dutchess and Ulster Counties and includes the Hudson Valley cities of Poughkeepsie Esposito attacked Ryan for voting “present” on a Republican congressional resolution that said anti-Zionism was antisemitism, and for accepting support from the far left accusing Ryan of having a “pro-Hamas stance on Israel.” Ryan drew the support of Hasidic leaders in the district many of whom are from the theologically non-Zionist Satmar movement in the town of Kiryas Joel Molinaro defeated Riley in a razor-thin vote Other Jewish and pro-Israel candidates in blue areas of New York defeated their Republican rivals as expected covering the Upper West Side and Upper East Side Jerrold Nadler trounced Republican Michael K Ritchie Torres kept his seat in the 15th Congressional District in the Bronx cruising to victory over Republican Miriam Flisser in the deep blue 16th District in the Bronx and Westchester Tom Suozzi, a pro-Israel Democrat in Long Island and Queens’ 3rd Congressional District, defeated Republican Michael LiPetri, winning around 51% of the vote. Suozzi won a closely watched race earlier this year in the district against Israeli-American Mazi Pilip after George Santos was expelled from Congress for massive lies about his life and background The New York Jewish Week brings you the stories behind the headlines, keeping you connected to Jewish life in New York. Help sustain the reporting you trust by donating today I accept the Privacy Policy was on his way for a high profile visit to Argentina Monday when he made a visit to JFK’s Chabad of the Airport directed by Rabbi Yossi Rapp The Satmar Rebbe was on a quick trip to inaugurate a new strictly Kosher meat plant with two famous Satmar Dayanim Harav Moshe Friedman of Boro Park and Harav Vosner of Monsey Visiting the Chabad of the Airport stand in JFK the entourage showed interest in the many activities provided there including the recent Sukkah arranged with permits at the airport and Chanukah Mivtzoim the Rabbi of the JFK International Synagogues met the Satmar Rebbe at the dedicated Shul in JFK Davening Maariv and providing meals for the guests Rabbi Elazar Raichik of Mikvah International was also on hand and showed pictures of the many Mikvaos build throughout the world to allow Jewish women to keep this important Mitzvah The Satmar Rebbe provided a special bracha to Rabbi Raichik saying that he should continue in his work as it says; “Ma Mikvah Metaher Yisroel” Completing his visit to Chabad of the Airport the Satmar Rebbe was escorted to his gate where he was presented with a recently printed Sefer of the Rebbe’s letters with advice given for health The Rebbe also spoke about his annual visit to Chabad of Palm Springs each Chof Daled Teves when is is spending time in the area Δdocument.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value" Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker a pedestrian was struck by a vehicle in the village of Kiryas Joel in the town of Monroe resulting in the death of36-year-old Abraham Moskovits according to State Police Troopers responded to the call at approximately 8:54 PM The investigation revealed that a 13-year-old was backing a 2024 Honda Odyssey into the driveway of a residence when the vehicle suddenly accelerated the 13-year-old lost control and struck Moskovits Emergency responders say they removed Moskovits and attempted life-saving procedures He was transported to Good Samaritan Hospital in Rockland County The Woodbury Village Planning Board’s review of a requested emergency access road in Kiryas Joel at the June 26 meeting prompted a discussion on whether such a road would truly be used for emergency purposes The village of Kiryas Joel is looking to build a gated emergency access road extending from Dinev Road and Frankfurt in the village of Palm Tree to connect Acres Road in the village of Woodbury The representative for the applicant explained that the road was needed as an alternative route for emergencies as there are often traffic problems at Dinev and Frankfurter roads The representative said the road will be gated but when it is not gated it will be open to the public nothing in the village of Woodbury code requires a public road to open all the time the board questioned the need for it to be wide enough for two-way traffic noting that a narrower road is sufficient for getting an emergency vehicle through the applicant and the board debated over the use of the road with the applicant commenting that it could be used to re-route traffic during an emergency noting that in the past events have prevented residents from accessing their homes Members of the board commented that this would mean every area would need access roads in the event of street closures Planning Board Chairperson Christopher Gerver citing his many years in emergency services while not having access to one’s home during an emergency is an inconvenience it is not the same as ensuring first responders are able to access an area when needed The board agreed that the application would need to be referred to the building inspector to see if he determines the access road as a public right of way and to the Zoning Board of Appeals for any potential variances The board also reviewed the application for a proposed 13-lot subdivision in Highland Mills The engineer for the planning board discussed the potential impact on wetlands on lot configuration as well as the deficit in sewer capacity The board discussed previous variances granted on the site and whether those had expired The members approved the motion to have the board serve as lead agency and authorized the planning board attorney to refer the project to the ZBA An applicant seeking to convert an existing single-family residence and shed located in Central Valley into a commercial building and warehouse who sought more specific answers to the purpose of the project Gerver asked what would be stored in the warehouse noting that the village needs to be aware of any flammable or combustible items The applicant was unable to answer as he did not yet know which businesses would be using the property the applicant was able to explain that the office and warehouse would work together The board asked for clarification on truck traffic patterns and expressed concern over the potential contamination of nearby water bodies the board engineer asked for a revised narrative providing more detail on sewer and water calculations The board reviewed plans to convert the former Savory Grill on Route 32 into a new restaurant called “Whoo’s.” The representative for the applicant explained that this restaurant would not require any changes to the exterior of the building the previous restaurant received certain variances that may no longer be permitted and that the review of the property deemed the lot deficient in size the engineer commented that the number of available parking spaces is less than what is required and this could also be a pre-existing condition that needs to be reviewed The board declared itself lead agency for the project and authorized the proposed plan to be referred to the building department for review of pre-existing non-conforming conditions the board authorized their attorney to refer the project to the ZBA for possible zoning variances Last Friday the Satmar Hasidic sect celebrated 45 years since the passing of the Grand Rebbe As part of the anniversary ceremony held by the Satmar Rebbe with the participation of thousands of Hasidim the Rebbe spoke about the difficult problem of housing prices in the local community has seen a drastic increase in apartment prices The price per square meter jumped from $1,800 five years ago to $6,000 today – an increase of about 400 percent the Rebbe established a special committee in collaboration with the city mayors a new municipal law was passed limiting apartment prices in new projects to $3,000 per square meter realizing that the implementation of the law would take time who is building a new neighborhood of about 2,000 apartments in the city and asked Klein to initiate a process of lowering prices the Rebbe declared that Klein agreed to the request and put 1,000 apartments on the market at a price equal to half the normal market price this project may cause Klein a loss of about a quarter of a billion Dollars The Satmar Rebbe R' Aharon of Kiryas Joel came through the JFK International Airport in New York on Monday night on his way to South America and had a meaningful exchange before boarding his flight. Full Story, Photos, Video The Satmar Rebbe R’ Aharon of Kiryas Joel came through the JFK International Airport in New York on Monday night on his way to Argentina and had a meaningful exchange before boarding his flight He was accompanied by Dayanim Rabbi Moshe Friedman where Chabad of the Airport coordinates Mivtzoim and outreach activities at the airport and was interested in hearing about the various activities of Chabad at JFK Director of Chabad at the Airport and Rabbi Shmuly Butler told the Satmar Rebbe about the recent Sukkah they had arranged to be built at the airport over Sukkos and how they had acquired the permits and the permission They also shared with him the plans for the upcoming Chanukah holiday to accommodate Jewish travelers at the airport as well The Satmar Rebbe then went to daven Maariv at The International Synagogue in Terminal 4 who directs the organization Mikvah International had a discussion with the Satmar Rebbe about various Mikvaos that he’s recently built The Satmar Rebbe was visibly impressed and gave him his blessing to continue to increase Tahara amongst Am Yisroel The Satmar Rebbe mentioned that he’s a descendant of the Alter Rebbe and they discussed what the Lubavitcher Rebbe discussed with his cousin who was also a descendant of the Alter Rebbe about the greatness of Yichus from a person’s mother He mentioned that every year on Chof Daled Teves where the Shliach Rabbi Yonason Denebeim makes a Farbrengen which he attends The Satmar Rebbe was on his way to South America to visit the Satmar community in Uruguay and to inspect a new plant for the Meal Mart meat company the Satmar Rebbe wished much success to all the activities of Chabad of the Airport a collection of the Rebbe’s letters of advice for health On the way to #Argentina Satmar Grand Rebbe Aron was seen praying at Kennedy Airport. Meanwhile, Rabbi Elozor Raichik, a world-renowned mikvah expert, engaged in a meaningful discussion about his latest projects with the Grand Rebbe. A beautiful moment of faith and collaboration! pic.twitter.com/lQUU0XXGZN — Satmar Headquarters (@HQSatmar) November 12, 2024 Sign up for the COLlive Daily News Roundup and never miss a story Δdocument.getElementById("ak_js_1").setAttribute("value",(new Date()).getTime()) Δdocument.getElementById("ak_js_2").setAttribute("value",(new Date()).getTime()) Get important news about your town as it happens Get the top stories from across our network Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from daily updates A Hudson Valley man was killed during a freak accident at his home.  A Hudson Valley man was killed when a juvenile backing an SUV into a driveway accelerated and hit the victim The incident occurred in Orange County at 8:55 p.m in the village of Kiryas Joel in the town of Monroe According to Trooper Steven Nevel of the New York State Police a preliminary investigation revealed that a 13-year-old was backing a 2024 Honda Odyssey into the driveway of a residence While attempting to back the vehicle into the spot and Moskovits was transported to Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern Become a member of THIRTEEN ($5 monthly or $60 annually) and get access to THIRTEEN Passport as our thanks for your support Members get extended access to PBS video on demand and more A documentary on PBS stations THIRTEEN and WLIW21 follows a tense existential conflict between townspeople in a commuter haven in Orange County 50 miles north of the George Washington Bridge but the area’s bigger lures are the Woodbury Commons shopping outlet and the Storm King Art Center This is where I grew up watching THIRTEEN. Sesame Street taught me that although people are different, we can all get along. But can we? The film City of Joel (2018) reveals the answer to that question by observing angry town hall meetings and difficult conversations on park benches and by sharing the voices of those trying to protect the futures they envision Map showing village of Kiryas Joel within Monroe and areas proposed for annexation The village of Kiryas Joel is part of the Town of Monroe and the film captures the age-old power struggle that arose there: the control of land and politics close-knit religious group of Satmar Hasidic Jews in Kiryas Joel seek more room for their rapidly growing population Monroe residents have unified to form an equally powerful bloc vote and oppose the Satmar’s plans to annex land This is not Wild, Wild Country though anyone who saw the Emmy Award-winning Netflix documentary series set in Oregon will recognize the “us” versus “them” aspect to this true story a population in a rather unremarkable area must come to terms with a cohesive community whose culture and way of life are very different It is the Satmars’ difference that gives Monroe residents a sense of unity The film’s edginess comes from witnessing a civic situation in which some feel the American system of democracy is being twisted We also watch people challenge each others’ sense of entitlement and rights from freedom of religion to reproductive choice Yiddish is the first language of the Hasidic community (City of Joel is a translation of the Kiryas Joel). The village’s ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect has its roots in Eastern Europe, where it was founded by Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (1887-1979) in 1905 After the devastating genocide of the Holocaust Teitelbaum sought more seclusion from the secular world for his followers This once rural area has become increasingly suburban By the time Jesse Sweet began filming City of Joel Kiryas Joel’s population had grown to 22,000 and was in dire need of more housing and other facilities The Satmars organize their lives to follow Jewish law in the Talmud Hasidic couples have as many children as possible “Every child born is a defeat to Hitler,” says Chaya Wieder a compelling Hasidic woman featured in the film more than 50% of the population of 22-square-mile Monroe were living on one square mile of overcrowded multi-family buildings The area meant to be an alternative to life in Brooklyn is crowded its county social services and the environment The 2010 Census revealed the Kiryas Joel tract to be the poorest area in all of the United States My family also moved to the area in the mid-1970s for a large house in a development four miles from the center of Kiryas Joel Because the Satmars use their own religious schools work for their own business and keep to themselves except rarely at a dentist or doctor’s waiting room and have children in the public school district of Monroe Woodbury who are most concerned as Kiryas Joel seeks to annex 500-plus acres for the village They are not only losing a largely bucolic landscape to high-density development; more significantly they worry that all elections and votes will be decided by a bloc that votes according to their religious leader’s guidance and is well documented in comments on local social media pages who otherwise avoid modern technology other than for business purposes Angry Monroe residents express frustration at the many children the Satmars have They criticize the community as filthy and much worse What fascinates me is the implied unfairness of democracy when a group decides to cast its vote as one Women have the right to bear or not bear children in this country and Hasidic couples are criticized for not being able to support their families through their personal income The Hasidic community has experienced the worst persecution imaginable – genocide – and wants to not only to restore their population Are the Monroe residents who express a desire to keep the quiet undeveloped area intact being unreasonable in the face of a multicultural country One can look up the result of these elections and lawsuits that determined the future of Kiryas Joel’s growth Residents of Kiryas Joel and Monroe speak eloquently for themselves They sold our home several years ago to a younger Hasidic family who were looking for room to grow Monroe town hall meeting to discuss Kiryas Joel annexation plan ©2025 WNET THIRTEEN is part of The WNET Group and is operated by WNET a non-profit organization exempt from federal income tax under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code friends of mine visited the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel “It was amazing,” one of them said of the streets and shops filled with men and women in traditional black clothing It was like visiting Eastern Europe a century ago.” least of all the Romanian city of Satu Mare A century ago it was bustling with secular culture who constituted three-quarters of the population a professor of law at the University of Southern California provide the definitive study of Kiryas Joel and its profound relevance for America and American Jewry well beyond the town’s 25,000 residents authors of “American Shtetl” Courtesy of aju.edu The authors of “American Shtetl” understand Kiryas Yoel not as an authentic Eastern European Jewish town but as a recreation of a mythic past built on uniquely American features: above all Part one describes the “past and present” of the city It opens with a detailed portrait of life in the village today: religious life Kiryas Joel is one of the poorest cities in the country suffering four times the national rate of poverty with over 93% of its residents on Medicaid It remains an extremely homogeneous community where religious or cultural deviance is punished The regular presence of violence in the village against those who reject the rebbe’s leadership – slashed tires and even death threats – constitutes a steady part of this story Though the town’s leadership always claimed it was the action of young “hotheads,” the authors make it clear that it was a “direct result” of the victims’ resistance to the leaders’ authority the “Ki sisa drusha,” openly instigated these attacks religious and political authority are deeply intertwined Beyond social consequences for defying rabbinic leadership the rebbe essentially appoints all local political office holders despite the technical compliance with democratic procedures Thus religious authorities wield both private and secular power The book jumps back to review the history of Satmar Hasidim – relative latecomers to the Hasidic world despite today constituting its largest faction – and their first rebbe, the late Joel Teitelbaum After losing his entire family in the Holocaust and escaping on the famous Kasztner train which spirited hundreds of Hungarian Jews to safety the anti-Zionist Teitelbaum failed to find a place in Palestine and ultimately settled in Williamsburg In Williamsburg, the Satmar Hasidim paradoxically attempted to create their own “fortress” of isolation through active engagement in urban politics – to a far greater extent than their prewar ancestors – as documented in last fall’s brilliant study of the community, “A Fortress in Brooklyn” They navigated the anti-poverty programs established by Lyndon Johnson built alliances with political elites in both parties worked alongside other minorities on local community boards and even developed robust and often violent neighborhood watch groups that like the Jewish Defense League and Black Panthers Nowhere does what the authors call the Satmers’ “unwitting assimilation” into America appear more obviously than in their decision to flee racially mixed Brooklyn to the suburbs to create a homogenous village of their own the “establishment of culturally – and racially – monolithic residential concentration in the suburbs” is the norm achieved through exclusionary zoning and other practices it was the ability of the community to purchase wide swaths of land which they then sold or rented exclusively to their own people that enabled the village to start and grow The book’s more substantial second part traces the staggering number of court cases coming out of Kiryas Joel since the 1980s in the context of major changes in American jurisprudence and political culture over those same decades The most famous is certainly the lawsuit brought by Louis Grumet executive director of the New York State School Boards Association against the creation of an exclusively Hasidic public school district in the village established with the support of political leaders of both parties which in a series of decisions moved from ambiguous opposition to broad support for the school The lawsuits hinged on a conflict of principles within the First Amendment between the prohibition of the state establishing a religion and the guarantee of freedom of religion an ongoing debate in America that has decidedly swung toward the latter position in recent years Kiryas Joel was not merely the beneficiary of the rise of conservative jurisprudence but constituted the most important judicial battle that changed the law in its favor even more of the lawsuits were purely internal affairs a result of a split among Satmar Hasidim in the aftermath of their rebbe’s death in 1979 with at least three different camps eventually operating in the Satmar community despite the strong traditional prohibition against turning to the secular courts along with their growing political and legal savvy reflects one of the most obvious aspects of their “unwitting assimilation.” Indeed the first lawsuits were filed by the most segregationist of the groups those who opposed the creation of the public school itself Satmar’s assimilation into America manifested in countless other areas too Add to this their defense and advocacy of disability rights manifest in growing numbers of women working outside the home as much for personal gratification as economic need Join the authors of “American Shtetl” for a virtual conversation with Forward Editor-in-Chief Jodi Rudoren on Wednesday, March 2 at 7:30 p.m. ET / 4:30 p.m. PT. Register here The book is framed from the beginning by noting the community’s political transformation in 2020 but by 2020 a staggering 99% of the village voted for Trump One might say that this reflects their move from a transactional mode of politics in which they support members of whichever party promise them the most immediate benefits in which they resemble many white Christian conservatives whose mantra of “religious liberty” they share the book demonstrates how this assimilation into America generally – and white conservative Christian culture in particular – had actually been developing for decades The foundation of Kiryas Joel coincided with the rise of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority That movement pushed the effort to promote Christian values in the public sphere against the earlier ethos of integration and liberal humanism an effort that began to bear fruit with the election of Ronald Reagan and has since transformed the American judiciary The Grumet case was about more than just that one public school as it “pit two competing visions of America against each other On one side stood the vision of America as a country dedicated to integration and inclusivity On the other side stood the vision of America as a Christian nation.” This is perhaps best symbolized by the fact that their most successful and well-known advocate has been Jay Sekulow a Messianic Jew and former Trump legal adviser who “fused Jewish belief and Christian evangelicalism.” both for American Jews and America writ large “It is also a community,” Myers and Stolzenberg write in conclusion “that serves as a revealing mirror of American society exposing deep roots and fissures in the animating ideas of this country.” Joshua Shanes is associate professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston An expert in modern Jewish political and cultural history (particularly Jewish nationalism and Orthodoxy) he currently lives in Chicago with his wife and six children I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward American Jews need independent news they can trust At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S rising antisemitism and polarized discourse This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up Copyright © 2025 The Forward Association New York City and Kiryas Joel are planning a 15-mile pipeline that could supply backup water when needed by Orange County municipalities that use the city's Catskill Aqueduct The new water main would run beside the aqueduct, from New Windsor in Orange County to Gardiner in Ulster County, and draw water from the city's Delaware Aqueduct. The two giant water tunnels cross paths in Gardiner as they carry 1.2 billon gallons each day from reservoirs in Ulster and Sullivan counties The planned pipeline would provide water whenever the Catskill Aqueduct is shut down for repairs Potential beneficiaries include the village of Kiryas Joel which has been building a separate 13.5-mile pipeline since 2013 to tap the aqueduct; and the city of Newburgh and town of New Windsor both of which already rely on the same aqueduct KJ pipeline: Construction resumes on water project as total cost rises to $94M Newburgh water: NY continues paying for aqueduct supply after lake contamination New housing: Families begin moving into 1,600-unit condo complex in KJ New York City has budgeted $5 million to cover the cost of the pipe designs which are expected to take about three years to complete But how much construction will cost and who will pay for it remains undetermined Any municipalities that plan to use the aqueduct bypass would likely share the construction cost which could also be funded with federal and state grants a spokesman for the city's Department of Environmental Protection How long it will take to install the pipe after the three-year design process also is unknown Timbers said similar projects have taken two to five years to complete which means the pipeline may not be built and ready for backup use until at least 2027 City officials presented the proposal last Thursday at a virtual meeting attended by representatives of several Orange County municipalities and county and state agencies "Having a backup water supply is critical because NYC needs to have its water system out of use for repairs and maintenance very often," Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin said by email. "Since Kiryas Joel will have all its water coming from the NYC system having a reliable backup plan is a top priority."  Szegedin argued the project would have the added benefit of easing strain on groundwater supplies in places where Kiryas Joel has wells avoiding potential competition with other private and municipal wells. It currently draws water in Monroe "Our wells in neighboring communities are a source of tension and litigation with the impacted communities," he said. "Therefore continuing to maintain and expand our groundwater supply is something that we need to avoid." The pipeline idea dates back more than a decade first suggested as a regional resource in reports by the Orange County Water Authority in 2010 and 2014 It would tap the Delaware Aqueduct in Ulster County through Shaft 4 a vertical tunnel that extends deep underground to the aqueduct And it would follow the path of the Catskill Aqueduct to Riley Road in New Windsor where New Windsor and Kiryas Joel have their aqueduct taps New York City already connected the two aqueducts at Shaft 4 to allow Delaware water to flow into the Catskill tunnel when the Catskill water is too silty That $21 million interconnection was completed in 2015 Both the city of Newburgh and New Windsor increased their use of the Catskill Aqueduct after the chemical PFAS tainted their own water supplies. Newburgh switched entirely to aqueduct water after contamination was found in Washington Lake in 2016. New Windsor found PFAS traces in its new wells in 2019 and now uses both the aqueduct and wells which were equipped with a state-purchased filter New Windsor Supervisor George Meyers said the planned backup line "definitely is a plus for the New Windsor residents because it gives us access to the Delaware." But he sees it as a long-term prospect that will likely take 10 years to complete and he opposes contributing to the construction cost Stewart Airport and the village of Cornwall-on-Hudson also have Catskill Aqueduct taps Cornwall-on-Hudson hasn't bought city water since 2020 because its own supplies were sufficient More than 70 communities and institutions in all in Ulster Putnam and Westchester counties draw water from New York City's water system using an average total of about 110 million gallons per day State law allows any municipality in counties crossed by the aqueducts to buy city water but each must keep an equal amount in wells or reservoirs to use when an aqueduct is shut down Chris McKenna covers government and politics for the Times Herald-Record and USA Today Network is free to remarry under Jewish law after four years of trying to divorce her husband Brooklyn-based activist Adina Sash received a phone call she had long awaited: Malky Berkowitz had finally received a “get,” or Jewish divorce contract For Sash, better known on Instagram as “Flatbush Girl,” the phone call also ended a six-month sex strike she had mounted on Berkowitz’s behalf Jewish law affords men the power to withhold ritual divorce from their wives with no recourse and Berkowitz’s estranged husband had refused to issue a get for four years Sash rallied Jewish women to withhold sex from their husbands on Friday nights known as “mitzvah night,” as well as following a period of ritual impurity during and after menstruation The goal was to recruit men as well as women to pressure Berkowitz’s estranged husband to divorce her “The case needed a lot of public visibility in order to sort of shake it awake and make everyone aware,” Sash told the the New York Jewish Week on Wednesday took on the solidarity with Malky and until she was free had made pledges to not have sexual relations Friday night “MALKY GOT A GETT,” read the text in her Wednesday post splashed over a photo of Sash and Berkowitz who lives in the Hasidic village of Kiryas Joel in New York’s Orange County A post shared by Adina Sash (@flatbushgirl) Sash and her supporters felt that refusing sex on Friday night was a natural way to protest for a victim of get refusal known in Hebrew as an “aguna,” or “chained woman.” But critics — including both men and women — worried that using sex as a pressure tactic was unhealthy Sash says she and the other advocates working on Berkowitz’s behalf aren’t sure exactly what changed her husband’s mind But she feels the campaign had a positive impact And it was only through the awareness of the abuse which created accountability that allowed the husband to wake up one day and actually feel that this was something he had to do for himself.” Sash’s Instagram post on Wednesday received hundreds of supportive comments including references to a blessing thanking God for freeing captives Others expressed well wishes and hope for similar results for other chained women widely considered the victims of spousal abuse “Mazel Tov on this occasion wonderful news let’s hope everyone else from Chava and on can get freed soon,” wrote one user Sash related that another get refuser she’s been pressuring someone who had criticized her in the past contacted her to congratulate her on helping obtain a get for Berkowitz Malky and Volvy Berkowitz were married in 2016, after having met in person for only 15 minutes. According to hospital records cited in New York Magazine a history of messianic delusions and multiple instances of hospitalizations Malky filed a legal complaint against him in a Rockland County court alleging that he physically assaulted her and was sexually inappropriate with their three-year-old daughter “Besides Volvy giving me a kdishen [sic] ring and getting me pregnant twice we never connected,” she wrote in a text message shared earlier this year with JTA “Good bye Volvy I never knew you and I’ll never know you.” “I got a spray tan so I can have an amazing mitzvah night with my husband,” she said America's Education News Source the Kiryas Joel school district opened its doors — and controversy has followed it ever since Not only did its creation spark a lengthy court battle over church-state separation that reached the U.S investigators have cited the district three times for conflicts of interest and other questionable financial practices the tiny district in New York’s Hudson Valley caters exclusively to families in the Satmar sect of Hasidic Jews who have children with disabilities It remains largely closed to public scrutiny school officials refused to address how the system of less than 500 students is spending nearly $94 million in federal pandemic aid designed to curb learning loss and other effects of one of the worst disruptions to education in American history To put that amount in perspective, in the last round of funding alone, the Kiryas Joel Village Union Free School District received over $95,000 per student — nearly 40 times the national average and more than double what New York schools spend on special education students.  Its use of those funds could raise eyebrows Documents The 74 obtained from the state reveal the district is investing over $12 million in upgrades to facilities owned by organizations affiliated with the religious group’s leadership The pandemic’s exceptional windfall calls out for a high level of transparency and accountability from a school system with little to no separation from a ruling religious community that has openly — and successfully — resisted government oversight.  But the district has avoided repeated requests from The 74 to address how it used the money Kiryas Joel officials have ignored a public records request filed under the state Freedom of Information Law and Superintendent Joel Petlin declined to answer questions by email The district also advised others not to talk to reporters about its COVID spending A contractor who made relief-funded improvements to a district-leased building provided some information to The 74 only to text a reporter the next day asking not to use any of it because “the school simply asked that we not share anything.” School systems in New York and nationwide are required to publicly post their stimulus spending plans online “[The district] is always an outlier in dollars received and in some of the way they do things,” said Brian Cechnicki executive director of the Association of School Business Officials of New York and the former director of education finance at the New York State Education Department When The New York Times raised issues about the district’s relief spending in February “The public would have been better served by a story that helps it understand this unique and truly special school district and community and celebrates the remarkable work being done here,” he said in a statement.  Petlin argued that the district’s use of federal funds was approved by the state education department said “There is a high volume of these types of reports that have to be approved and the department perennially doesn’t have the capacity to do fine-grained reviews of all 700ish districts.” Nonetheless, the state selected Kiryas Joel as one of about 16% of districts to receive its highest level of monitoring for relief spending on-site examination of documents and staff interviews The state has between January 2023 and June 2024 to complete the on-site visits; it’s unclear when Kiryas Joel’s will happen The results of that investigation — like nearly all information on local relief fund spending — won’t be easy for the public to access New York requires anyone seeking such data to submit open records requests That makes it tough to track how districts used the money to address even broad areas such as hiring staff or addressing learning loss.  New York’s approach contrasts with states like Indiana and New Hampshire which provide online portals where the public can keep up with how much districts have spent and in what categories New York’s lack of transparency has kept parents largely in the dark about whether the historic expenditure is having an impact “There’s no sharing of best practices. There’s nothing around evaluation. It’s a missed opportunity,” said Jeff Smink, deputy director at The Education Trust–New York “There needs to be more urgency around this.”  One reason for the state’s heightened scrutiny of Kiryas Joel might be the sheer amount of federal relief money it received — so much that Deputy Superintendent Josh Kamensky told the Times that it was “really hard to spend.” That amount —for a district with less than 500 students including preschoolers — was 12 times what the Ellenville Central School District to its north received for a district of over 12,000 students and more than five times what the 2,700-student nearby Monticello district received The mismatch in Kiryas Joel’s favor is rooted in the arcane machinery of federal spending which is weighted to support those living in poverty “We have no discretion to keep this money for our public school students and every federal dollar spent is approved by the NY State Education Department.” That law followed the traditional Title I formula that requires the district to provide “equitable services” for low-income children even though the vast majority of those students in Kiryas Joel attend private schools went to over 5,500 students in 21 yeshivas private Hasidic schools that strongly prioritize religious study over academics Petlin noted the district’s responsibility to provide those services “We have no discretion to keep this money for our public school students and every federal dollar spent is approved by the NY State Education Department,” he wrote But the second and third pandemic relief packages had no such requirement for private school students. Nonetheless, the funding formula continued to factor in the high level of poverty in the greater community including those students who don’t attend public schools That left more than $86 million for a district with few students the district benefits from having the kids in the private schools and no longer has to share it.” One of the nation’s foremost experts in school finance suggested federal officials should have adjusted the formula for the latter waves of funding to avoid an outcome some might view as perverse the district benefits from having the kids in the private schools and no longer has to share it,” said Marguerite Roza director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University Another reason for investigators’ increased focus on Kiryas Joel might be that it has run afoul of them before: The Times — in a series of articles on education at the yeshivas — raised new questions about the propriety of payments made to UTA of KJ with relief funds including $1.3 million in lease payments and another $288,000 to rent the organization’s swimming pool.  Two sons of school district board member Harry Polatsek — also on the board of UTA of KJ — have connections to the district One runs a bus company that received a $656,000 contract paid for with relief funds And the other is on staff as a teacher’s aide emergency medical technician and parent liaison Documents obtained from the state education department show the district is spending $1.1 million in relief funds on parent liaisons The relationship between the district and its landlord demonstrates “a habit of interpreting the law on their own terms and for their own benefit,” said Beatrice Weber executive director of Young Advocates for Fair Education a nonprofit seeking to improve secular education in New York’s Hasidic schools Many of the district’s big-ticket expenditures are upgrades to buildings it leases from UTA of KJ and its affiliates Petlin said any improvements “benefit our students But The 74 has found the district is spending over $12 million in improvements to the building it rents — re-doing the flooring installing an outdoor playground and building a temperature-controlled “bus shelter.”  Nearly $3 million went to Playlearn USA which specializes in classroom furnishings for students with disabilities The company is installing “sensory” features — such as a wall with flowing water and bubbles lit up by LED lights — at the school.  “The sound of the water with the lights and the bubbles in the wall are instantly relaxing,” said Shevy Schlesinger Many of the purchases include furniture and equipment that could be removed like swings or climbing walls But she acknowledged also making improvements to permanent structures like the floors and ceilings Kiryas Joel is not alone in renting, instead of owning, a school building. Mary Filardo, executive director of the 21st Century Schools Fund, a nonprofit focused on modernizing schools, cited a 2021 example in which the Newark Public Schools in New Jersey signed a 20-year $160 million lease with private developers to renovate a former hospital into a high school There’s nothing unusual about leasing a building and making improvements that you pay for,” she said “The duty to make it transparent is really high Even if there’s a little bit of abuse Another $5.6 million was allocated for employee “retention stipends” of $4,500 a year for three years The district has “around 500 staff,” according to J.P spokesman for the state education department He cited federal guidance allowing retention bonuses as a way to reopen schools and provide stability for students and staff But the state put the brakes on at least one planned expenditure It rejected the district’s initial plan to use relief funds to build a wellness center which covers New York City’s northwest suburbs The department declined to answer questions about any of the district’s purchases or whether it had concerns about potential conflicts of interest but said Kiryas Joel was selected for more aggressive monitoring based on risk.  Kristina Naplatarski, a spokeswoman for the state comptroller’s office, which conducted the 2017 audit and issued a report in March noting the urgency of spending COVID relief money to address learning loss declined to comment on the issue because they had not “recently audited the school district.” The district did spend $3,000 to hire a well-known Washington law firm that specializes in federal compliance and audit preparation as part of its COVID relief spending would not answer questions about the specific work the firm did for Kiryas Joel The 74’s reporting on Kiryas Joel is part of an ongoing effort to track how districts around the nation are spending $3.4 billion in COVID funds a member of the district’s staff confirmed that Petlin received The 74’s original open records request the deputy superintendent who prepared forms for the state related to the funds This isn’t the first time Petlin failed to comply with the Freedom of Information Law the Empire Center for New York State Policy sued the district after it didn’t turn over employee contracts as part of a public records request Petlin noted that the district’s financial condition had improved between 2013 and 2016 because it was maintaining adequate reserves Early in the pandemic, however, the state again listed the district as “susceptible to fiscal stress,” largely for its reliance on cash to pay monthly expenses and short-term debt.   The focus on the district’s relief spending comes amid renewed attention to the poor academic performance of students who attend private schools in the village and other ultra-Orthodox communities in New York state. A Times investigation found that students who attend yeshivas — many of whom also attend district public schools for remedial services — are failing to gain the foundations of a secular education with little ability to spell or do basic math said she knows parents in Kiryas Joel who worry that their children who attend yeshivas are not learning the skills necessary to be employed and function as adults “I have parents calling me from there crying and begging ‘What are you going to do about this?’” she said The creation of this most unusual school district just an hour north of New York City grew out of tensions with its neighbors Before Kiryas Joel created its own school system students who needed special education attended public schools in the neighboring Monroe-Woodbury Central School District.  “There is more than a fine line between the voluntary association that leads to a political community comprised of people who share a common religious faith and the forced separation that occurs when the government draws explicit political boundaries on the basis of peoples’ faith But conflicts arose when schools didn’t accommodate the Hasidic families’ religious practices — like wanting women bus drivers for girls and men for the boys would support its traditions and shelter students from ridicule.  New York Gov. Mario Cuomo signed legislation creating the district in 1989. Lou Grumet then-executive director of the state’s school board’s association sued on the grounds that it violated the constitutional separation of church and state former Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote: “There is more than a fine line between the voluntary association that leads to a political community comprised of people who share a common religious faith On behalf of the broader Satmar community, we extend our best wishes to our future Governor @KathyHochul. Lt. Governor Hochul is an honorable and capable woman, who is ready to serve on day one.We look forward to welcoming you back to Kiryas Joel as Governor! pic.twitter.com/gMHx4v6Pz8 But the political fight waged on. Because their residents vote as a bloc at the direction of their most senior religious leaders, Kiryas Joel and other ultra-Orthodox communities have traditionally wielded significant influence over New York politicians The Hasidic sects can both block legislation they deem unfavorable and cement support for causes they want championed After the Supreme Court defeat and subsequent legal battles New York lawmakers went through several rounds of legislation before they finally adopted a law that allowed Kiryas Joel’s one-of-a-kind school district to survive subsequent legal challenges.  the relationship between Kiryas Joel and Monroe-Woodbury is more “collegial,” according to Superintendent Elsie Rodriguez the two districts now have a reverse arrangement in which Monroe-Woodbury pays Kiryas Joel to serve 23 of its special education students Petlin, meanwhile, remains Kiryas Joel’s most outspoken advocate. In an op-ed on the school district’s 30th anniversary in 2020 he wrote: “We have proven that this educational experiment works contrary to the naysayers of yesterday and today.” Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter Linda Jacobson is a senior writer at The 74 Asher Lehrer-Small is a former staff reporter at The 74 He is currently a K-12 education reporter for the Houston Landing We want our stories to be shared as widely as possible — for free Please view The 74's republishing terms. By & This story first appeared at The 74, a nonprofit news site covering education. Sign up for free newsletters from The 74 to get more like this in your inbox f you’ve recently driven along Route 17 in Orange County some miles northwest of its intersection with the New York Thruway at Monroe you may have noticed a billboard with Hebrew lettering announcing It’s on my regular commute between Washington Heights and Ithaca I haven’t yet slowed down long enough to catch the smaller print but I’m pretty sure I know what the billboard announces It brings good news about housing developments for the families of Satmar and perhaps other allied groups of Hasidim pushed out by the high cost of housing in Williamsburg and by now even the dearth of available housing in the nearby new town of Palm Tree named for the late Satmar Rebbe Reb Yoel Teitlbaum And while the Hebrew script doubtless catches the eye of its intended audience perhaps intentionally aiming not to further arouse the anxiety and resentment of non-Hasidic neighbors at the threat to their once-bucolic and now classically suburban way of life You can see part of Palm Tree itself from Route 17 itself Until recently it was officially the village of Kiryas Joel and doubtless its residents still use that name The village itself grew in the 1980s out of a combination of Reb Yoelish’s vision of a place for his people free from the distractions and temptations of New York City and notions about appropriate zoning that clashed with those of other residents in the Town of Monroe Although I lived just across the East River from the Satmar “homeland” of Williamsburg for decades I knew little about Kiryas Joel until I became a law student in the late 1990s I read about the 1994 case that came before the United States Supreme Court challenging New York State legislation that created a new school district coextensive with the village itself The school district was designed to (and to this day does) serve only special education students Perhaps in part because I had a young “special” child myself I decided to write my law journal student “Note” about the case and I said to myself: “I’m an anthropologist I won’t write about Kiryas Joel without visiting the place and talking to people.” Williamsburg would have been a shorter commute and I thought of doing fieldwork there many years later when I had finally become a professor–but I fell in love with a Litvish-style yeshiva instead Two pairs of scholars—Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper for Williamsburg and Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers for Kiryas Joel—have now achieved what I never began Anyone interested in the future of Jews in diaspora (not only Hasidic Jews) should be grateful to them for what they’ve accomplished The two volumes complement each other wonderfully Deutsch and Casper focus on the development of Hasidic Williamsburg from the immediate post-World War II era to the present detailing the origins of Satmar Hasidus and Reb Yoelish’s early career in Europe but devote most of their time to the new settlement in Kiryas Joel Clearly both of these books were many years in the making offering impressively detailed documentation leaving plenty of room for the interplay of contingency and the larger structural issues of capital Both pairs of authors draw on interviews with key players Stolzenberg and Myers rely heavily on court papers while Deutsch and Casper copiously cite journalistic accounts dating to the times they describe frequently providing rich quotations that give the reader a strong sense of the temper of the times It may not be too much to say that these two books signal a second round of “Satmar  studies.” Half a century ago and more Solomon Poll wrote about The Hasidic Community of Williamsburg and Israel Rubin gave us Satmar: An Island in the City the focus was more on the maintenance of an internal economy and other strategies of communal boundary-making the mainstream Jewish agencies that have been concerned about intermarriage and declining birthrates seem to have drawn scant comfort from the growth of Hasidic populations in the United States Most studies of Hasidic communities that have been published in recent decades (with notable exceptions especially Ayala Fader’s Mitzvah Girls) focus on those departing or at the margins And most recent ethnography of US Hasidic communities such as Henry Goldschmidt’s insightful Race and Religion among the Chosen Peoples of Crown Heights No surprise in either case: people who’ve gone “off the derech,” in this respect like (lehavdil!) Chabad missionaries are easier to talk to than the Hasidim who are primarily concerned with the well-being and integrity of their own communities Fortress and American Shtetl amply document the internal preoccupation of Satmar Hasidim (and the other Hasidim of Williamsburg and Kiryas Joel) with their own communities But they also make it amply clear that these people are anything but “stuck in the eighteenth century” or “remarkable holdouts against modernity.” The trend to study hasidei de-ara “material Hasidim” rather than focusing exclusively on ideology or intellectual history was first named by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern and is identified with historiographers of European Hasidism such as Marcin Wodzinski or Glenn Dynner It is ably brought forward in time and closer in space in both of these books Given the rapid pace of change and the intense interaction between collective identity and capital in New York City Deutsch and Casper’s ability to produce a narrative that is coherent without being reductive is especially impressive housing tensions constitute a major running theme of both books from the struggle to have Hasidim (not all Jews!) recognized as an underprivileged minority entitled to their own share of newly-built Brooklyn public housing on to the recent expansion of Kiryas Joel and its transformation into Palm Tree the entanglement of education with the doctrine of separation of church and state probably gets the most sustained attention especially since it was the subject of the Supreme Court litigation mentioned above who otherwise do an admirable job of bringing the story up almost to the time of printing by including reflections on the Covid-19 crisis barely mention the recent controversy between the government of New York City and various yeshivas (in Williamsburg and elsewhere) about the allegedly inadequate teaching of secular subjects These books complement each other so remarkably well that it’s tempting to think of Fortress and American Shtetl as volumes 1 and 2 And of course the creation of Hasidic Williamsburg came before the settlement and organization of Kiryas Joel Yet the subject matter of the two books cannot be mapped out quite so neatly in time and space deal richly with the theme of the novelty of tradition—a theme already announced decades ago in the title of Egon Mayer’s book about the transformation of Jewish Boro Park From Suburb to Shtetl (1979)  It would be wrong to think of Hasidic Williamsburg as “the old” or of Kiryas Joel as “the new.” As Deutsch and Casper lucidly explain the expansion of Hasidic “territory” beyond Williamsburg has been part and parcel of the revitalization and gentrification of Brooklyn more generally And if Satmar and other Hasidim have become prominent in the real estate business that is partly because of capital they had accumulated earlier in local industrial enterprises and also because they remained in parts of Brooklyn when most of the “white” people (including other Jews) had left—and were therefore in a good situation to take advantage of the upturn while Kiryas Joel is obviously an expansion out of the urban stronghold it also represents in some measure an attempt to withdraw and maintain a level of purity supposedly associated with the ancestors Both books do a good job of presenting “the other side”—not only the legal and political arguments to me Louis Grumet only existed as the plaintiff in the Kiryas Joel litigation about the pivotal role of George Pataki in suggesting the creation of a special school district.) The book not only told me who he was and why he brought the suit but situated his opposition to the Kiryas Joel school board squarely in an American liberal and integrationist tradition that (at least until recent decades) was certainly shared by most non-traditionalist Jews in the United States Deutsch and Casper provide us not only with what Hasidic figures in Williamsburg said about their situation (at the time or in retrospect) but also with the arguments and reflections of their Puerto Rican neighbors deal centrally with the tension between traditionalism and dynamism between the desire to stick together and the pressing need for more space If there is an overriding goal for both books beyond but grounded in the precious documentation each provides it seems to be resisting a certain mystification associated with these Jewish “men in black” as a people apart the New York Times ran a piece on Hasidic Williamsburg with the headline “A Piece of Brooklyn Perhaps Lost to Time.”) Curiously neither quite escapes the pull of that very image: the covers of both books show an anonymous male Hasid in profile one on a Brooklyn street and one presumably in a Kiryas Joel parking lot both concentrate on the ways that these traditionalist Jews have become thoroughly “American.” To be sure (or almost sure—is there the rub?) Stolzenbeg & Myers’ title American Shtetl is accordingly ironic meant to illustrate not so much Kiryas Joel’s actual similarity to a place like Satu Mare as the Hasidic effort to recreate the imagined pious community of their ancestors this Americanization is displayed largely through a formidable and growing ability to work effectively with the secular powers that be in order to recreate the material conditions for sustaining anshey shlomeynu those powers might have been the courts or a local planning board; for Williamsburg it was often one city or federal agency or another But as Stolzenberg and Myers especially document Hasidic leaders in Europe already knew how to engage in what was then called shtadlones They make the further claim that in seeking to create a place of unity and purity out in the countryside the founders of Kiryas Joel were working in the distinctively American (settler-colonial!) tradition of building a “city on the hill.” And they point out correctly that whatever the East European shtetl was it was almost never an exclusively Jewish place I wonder whether what they call an ironic and unwitting form of assimilation to American norms isn’t better characterized as an agile adaptation of traditional diasporist accommodationism to changed circumstances I wonder whether the negotiations and tensions between Williamsburg Hasidim on one hand and on the other hand neighborhood organizations representing African American or Puerto Rican constituencies were “all that different” from the politics of Jews between Poles and Ukrainians in interwar Poland one can construct a fine-grained analysis (as both of these books admirably do) that clearly shows the novelty of the United States situation it remains unclear whether the drive to do so is this based on some underlying assumption that in Europe here’s so much more to ask about the dynamic traditionalism of these communities than could be contained in these two books and that’s why I hope they’re indeed the harbinger of a new wave of Satmar (or more generally Haredi) studies that face similar issues of traditionalism and consequent tension with mostly non-Jewish neighbors; Lakewood New Jersey is probably the most salient of those right now And still with respect to Williamsburg or Kiryas Joel there are classic anthropological questions that I’d love to know more about primary adherence to one or another Hasidic grouping do Zali families (those loyal to the Satmar scion who wound up controlling the Satmar properties in Williamsburg) commonly “intermarry” with Aharoni families (Aharon being the Satmar Rebbe in Kiryas Joel) how are those interfamilial tensions dealt with When one partner to a marriage is from Williamsburg and one is from Kiryas Joel is there any common expectation about where they will settle Beyond the real estate entrepreneurs and beyond the sophisticated techniques to secure Section 8 housing and other benefits how do Satmar and related Hasidic families earn a living Deutsch and Casper treat us to a photograph of a Hasidic woman sitting at a sewing machine in a Williamsburg textile factory What is she or her children doing for a living now I don’t know how many Hasidic readers these books will attract they should effectively remind those who do take the time to read them that these “traditionalist,” “ultra-Orthodox,” “Haredi” Jews are the reader’s contemporaries—and that you or I Stolzenberg and Myers—might want to take some time and effort to get to know them better Mann Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Cornell University KIRYAS JOEL - The rows of new apartment buildings taking shape on a hill overlooking Route 17 for the past four years have begun to hum with life families have been moving into the four- and five-story buildings completed so far in Veyoel Moshe Gardens a 1,600-unit condo complex on the edge of Kiryas Joel that is expected to house as many as 9,000 people on just 70 acres Separated from the rest of Kiryas Joel by County Route 105 the partly built complex is starting to look much like bustling neighborhoods in the rest of the Satmar Hasidic village A steady stream of school buses now navigate Austra Parkway and Beer Sheva Street to collect children each morning passing construction vehicles and workers hauling drywall and other materials into buildings About 500 homes are built or are nearly completed Public property records show that units have sold for $260,000 to $575,000 since February with most buyers coming from Kiryas Joel and Brooklyn likely indicating they were investors who would rent out the condos Progress: Almost 500 homes nearly done as construction continues on KJ complex Approved: Developer cleared to build 1,600-unit condo complex on 70 acres Trees down: Developer clears land for planned condo complex on edge of KJ The first residents of Veyoel Moshe Gardens must cross busy County Route 105 at a traffic signal to shop for groceries and other goods But the developer has added a commercial element to the plans to help make the huge complex virtually a city of its own synagogues and community rooms within walking distance for all Three of the 69 residential buildings have been replaced in the plans with a six-story building that is expected to hold a supermarket and other stores It will be situated in the middle of the development near what will be a second entrance to the community with a new traffic signal on Nininger Road "Instead of having people from this project needing to go to the center of the village to go do their purchasing and do their shopping they will do it in this building," said Joel Mann Having a commercial center residents can walk to will minimize new traffic and make Veyoel Moshe Gardens more of a self-contained community "Basically the concept is to have that this should be like a freestanding own city," he said Kiryas Joel is already Orange County's most populated municipality after growing by 63% in the last decade to 33,000 when the 2020 census was taken And the building of Veyoel Moshe Gardens and other large complexes in progress is set to push the population of the 1.4-square-mile village far beyond those of its nearest rivals which are much bigger in area but growing more slowly Veyoel Moshe Gardens alone is expected to approach or surpass the current populations of some entire municipalities in Orange the city of Port Jervis and the towns of Mount Hope and Wawayanda The plans anticipated the complex could house roughly 9,000 residents when completed Other developments in the worksA half-mile away in Kiryas Joel is the construction site for Acres Enclave a future complex of 543 condos that's expected to house about 3,000 people Both projects are being built by developer Akiva Klein who paid $100 million for the Veyoel Moshe Gardens site and $58 million for the 23 acres in Acres Enclave Other large housing projects underway or planned in Kiryas Joel include 482-unit Forest Edge 250-unit Golden Towers and 191-unit High End on Forest A crucial piece of these development plans is a long-running public works project: the 13.5-mile-long pipeline that Kiryas Joel has been building since 2013 to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct as a long-term water source has so far laid 10 miles of pipe across Woodbury and Monroe The village got a boost for its water supply this month when neighboring Woodbury approved a well that the state already had authorized Kiryas Joel to use almost a year earlier The well is connected to the aqueduct pipeline and is on a property where Kiryas Joel plans to build a treatment plant to filter the aqueduct water Growth in the village also has forced the need for wider sewer mains. Through an agreement with Orange County, the Veyoel Moshe Gardens developer paid $4.3 million to replace a pipe that carries wastewater through Monroe to the county-run treatment plant in Harriman which is shared by eight towns and villages MONROE - Kiryas Joel plans to create a shortcut to Route 17 for drivers headed to and from the village by building a road connection that would bypass a bottleneck in neighboring Monroe The new road segment would be built on a 22-acre land strip in Monroe that Kiryas Joel and the Ezras Choilim Health Center bought last month for $4.3 million contributed to the purchase because it is said to be considering building a new medical facility on part of that land The road is a piece of a longer parallel road that was conceived more than 15 years ago and shelved for lack of funding for the work That overall project was known as the Larkin Drive Extension and would stretch a mile and a half next to Route 17 across Monroe The initial one third of a mile that Kiryas Joel officials are now planning would run from Route 208 to Schunnemunk Street which leads to a bridge that crosses over Route 17 into Kiryas Joel Building that connection would siphon Kiryas Joel traffic from the clogged intersection of Schunnemunk and North Main Street in the Village of Monroe MORE: Orange seeks $30M grant for Monroe road project MORE: Plans in the works to extend Larkin Drive MORE: Kiryas Joel gets funding for road projects which has commissioned initial drawings of the road project, also plans to build a 350-space park-and-ride lot for its bus commuters on the 22-acre property No cost estimates for the road work or parking lot were available on Friday Property records indicate that Kiryas Joel the Town of Palm Tree - a separate municipality with the same borders as Kiryas Joel - and Ezras Choilim bought the land on Feb which listed a Rockland County law office as its address ABM had bought that property in 1998 for $30,000 Local and Orange County officials began planning the Larkin Drive extension in 2005 or earlier to relieve traffic in Kiryas Joel and Monroe and ease access to Kiryas Joel from Route 17 County officials began seeking federal funding for the project around 2009 but came up dry saying then they had applied for a $30 million grant that would fund the entire project including $5 million in needed land purchases Village of Monroe Mayor Neil Dwyer said Friday that the piece Kiryas Joel now plans to undertake would divert a huge volume of traffic from the overloaded intersection at North Main Street and Schunnemunk Street Drivers headed to and from Kiryas Joel would instead travel on the new road to reach Route 17 at the Route 208 interchange "It's going to be very significant," he said Traffic counts compiled by the Monroe Police Department in August 2019 and shared by Dwyer showed that nearly 50,000 vehicles traveled on Schunnemunk Street over a 10-day period that month as many as 600 vehicles passed in a single hour on that narrow KIRYAS JOEL - The first several hundred units are nearly finished in a condo complex that will eventually house more people than some entire towns in Orange County The 1,600-unit Veyoel Moshe Gardens project has been taking shape on a hillside overlooking Route 17 since 2018 filling part of a 70-acre peninsula of Kiryas Joel that used to be woods As many as 700 units in all are under construction and up to 500 are almost done the project's planner told the Times Herald-Record Several hurdles still must be cleared before any completed condos can be occupied One is the completion of a new sewer main that was needed to handle the increased wastewater which is piped through Monroe to a treatment plant in Harriman Workers had already installed the wider pipe in Monroe and were preparing to bore under Route 17 to connect it to mains on the Kiryas Joel side of the highway Water boost: Kiryas Joel gets OK for two new wells and buys land to seek another Housing boom: More than 3,600 homes being built or proposed in Kiryas Joel Approved: Kiryas Joel board OKs construction of 1,600-unit condo complex the Orange County official who oversees the county-run sewer system serving that area told the Times Herald-Record last week that the sewer work is expected to be done by Sept all borne by the developer of Veyoel Moshe Gardens workers must finish burying underground gas and electric lines pave roads and install two traffic signals at the project entrances on County Route 105 and Nininger Road The signal at Route 105 and Bakertown Road is set to be installed within a couple weeks Mann said the condos will range in size from 1,200 square feet to 2,800 square feet One of two planned synagogues is also under construction The project is the largest by far out of several that are being built in Kiryas Joel to meet housing demand in the ever-growing Satmar Hasidic community Planners estimated during the environmental review for Veyoel Moshe Gardens that it ultimately could house as many as 9,000 people or roughly one-third of the nearly 27,000 residents the village was estimated to have as of mid-2019 That would make the condo complex more populous than both the city of Port Jervis and the village of Monroe - each of which had an estimated 8,600 residents in 2019 - as well as seven towns in Orange Kiryas Joel recently got state approval for two new wells in Monroe and Woodbury that will enable it to serve the initial occupants of Veyoel Moshe Gardens removing what could have been another obstacle to their moving in The new wells boosted the village's overall water supply to 2.8 million gallons per day as an interim step while the village continues building a 13.5-mile pipeline to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct meant to secure a long-term water source for Kiryas Joel has been underway since 2013 and is more than halfway done Veyoel Moshe Gardens is being built on land that a businessman from Mount Kisco seized in a mortgage foreclosure in 1989 and held for nearly three decades allowing its value to soar as more of Kiryas Joel was developed and land grew scarce Orange County property records show Irving Bauer finally sold his 70 acres for $100 million to Kiryas Joel businessman Akiva Klein in 2019 after construction had already started on Veyoel Moshe Gardens. Klein is the developer of the project Other big housing projects under construction in Kiryas Joel include 543-unit Acres Point, 482-unit Forest Edge The completion of those projects will require larger pipes to be installed for the village's two sewer trunk lines The developers are expected to pay for that work as well KIRYAS JOEL - The wedding of one of the grand rebbe's grandchildren appeared to be on Monday after state officials ordered it canceled if those in attendance would not adhere to social distancing or face covering protocols.  Large groups of men gathered to pray outside and streamed in and out of Congregation Yetev Lev synagogue on Garfield Road late Monday afternoon and into the evening. The groups appeared to be smaller than 50 people at a time But many walking outside the synagogue and entering the building did not appear to wear face masks or shields.  State Department of Health officials did not respond to repeated requests for comment about whether it had sent state troopers to the wedding sites to verify if guests were wearing masks distancing and adhering to the 50-person limit required by the health commissioner's order They said in a statement Tuesday afternoon that they're trying to determine if the gatherings from the previous night had complied with the order “The order we issued on Monday morning was clear: social gatherings must follow strict protocols regarding capacity limits mask wearing and social distancing in order to help stop the spread of COVID-19," the statement read. "We are aware of reports that a gathering was held and are investigating whether there was adherence to the guidelines laid out in the order we will pursue all appropriate legal remedies.” Social-distancing and face-covering were two requirements spelled out in an order by state Health Commissioner Howard Zucker issued Sunday for the services to go on Receptions could go on if there were no more than 50 people present ORDER: State orders KJ synagogue cancel wedding unless social distancing, mask protocols are followed were expected to be in attendance at the services Monday and could serve as a source for COVID-19 to spread among attendees.  It came a day after a New York Post story ran on Saturday reporting that thousands of guests packed a Brooklyn synagogue earlier this month for the wedding of another grandchild of Satmar Grand Rebbe Aaron Teitelbaum the Hasidic leader who was set to preside over the Kiryas Joel wedding on Monday.  New York City Mayor Bill De Blasio announced Monday that the congregation that hosted the Brooklyn wedding will be fined $15,000 White curtains draped over the front of the Kiryas Joel synagogue blocked the view from the inside As the wind blew the sheets around for a few seconds at a time empty chairs and tables set up outside appeared to be behind them Chris McKenna contributed to this report.  A developer now building 482 homes on land Kiryas Joel annexed from Monroe has petitioned for the village to annex another 13 acres he owns Ziggy Brach asked last month to move his patch of woods off Seven Springs Road into Kiryas Joel where it would have access to water and sewer lines and zoning for multifamily homes instead of two-acre lots He needs the approval of three municipal boards – the town and village of Woodbury and Kiryas Joel – or the courts in the event of a split decision Brach had made a similar request almost a decade ago when the land next to his was part of the town of Monroe, not Kiryas Joel. That attempt fizzled in 2013 after both Woodburys voted against his petition, the Monroe board supported it, and the courts rejected Monroe's appeal Warehouse lawsuit: developer claims anti-Hasidic bias in rezoning dispute Past KJ annexation: Monroe board agrees to cede 164 acres to Kiryas Joel Cost sharing: Brach chips in for Monroe's legal fees in annexation dispute His new effort faces hurdles even before the three boards have met for the first time to discuss the petition Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin said Friday that his board may dismiss the petition at the outset for a technical flaw: It lacked a required certification of the land's value by the Woodbury assessor "the Kiryas Joel leadership is considering dismissing the annexation petition in its entirety," Szegedin said by email Even if that doesn't happen or if Brach resubmits the petition when the three boards will meet and which will lead the environmental review is also up in the air Woodbury Mayor Timothy Egan said Friday that Kiryas Joel rejected the Aug His board declared itself lead agency for the environmental review but that could lead to a protracted dispute if Kiryas Joel vies for the role forcing the state Department of Environmental Conservation to hear their arguments and choose a lead agency Egan said he was leery of the proposal on principle because of the potential loss of tax revenue because it would take taxable property off our tax rolls and put it in another's," he said A short distance from the proposed annexation site is a 24-acre property in Kiryas Joel where workers are erecting homes for Brach's Forest Ridge project That land used to be part of the town of Monroe and Brach had spent years before the Monroe Planning Board before getting approval for a 55-lot subdivision But those plans were scrapped after Kiryas Joel annexed his property and another 140 acres from Monroe in 2016 raising the land's development potential. Forest Edge became a 482-home project Brach declined on Friday to discuss his petition and his plans for the Woodbury parcel if Kiryas Joel annexes it His petition technically involves a fourth municipality: the town of Palm Tree which was formed in 2019 and has the same borders and governing board as Kiryas Joel Brach's request would alter both town and village borders so his property would be part of Kiryas Joel and Palm Tree Besides Forest Edge, Brach is also building the 181-home Smith Farm project in Monroe and holds a stake in the 600-home Clovewood proposal in South Blooming Grove Smith Farm is partly completed and occupied; Clovewood is pending before two village boards awaiting submission of a final environmental impact statement Brach also has been trying to build warehouses in New Windsor and recently filed a lawsuit alleging that the town officials had changed zoning to thwart those plans because of anti-Hasidic sentiment KIRYAS JOEL - A community that began in the 1970s with about a dozen families moving upstate from Brooklyn has grown to become Orange County's most populated municipality with around 33,000 residents as of a year ago Figures from the 2020 census released Thursday show that Kiryas Joel grew by a booming 63% in the last decade pushing its population past that of the cities of Middletown and Newburgh and of towns much larger than the 1.5-square-mile Hasidic village Kiryas Joel also vaulted ahead of other Hudson Valley population centers since the 2010 census surpassing the cities of Poughkeepsie and Kingston and the village of Spring Valley in Rockland County Kiryas Joel accounted for almost half of Orange County's population increase of more than 28,000 from 2010 to 2020 The county as a whole grew by 7.6% in that decade and had about 401,000 residents as of April 1 Big project: Almost 500 homes nearing completion in 1,600-unit condo complex Water quest: DEC approves new wells for KJ in Monroe, Woodbury Sewer needs: New KJ hookups on hold until bigger mains installed Kiryas Joel's steady growth is driven largely the customs of a community in which couples typically marry young settle close to home and raise large families More than 3,500 condominiums are being built or planned in the village's limited remaining space to help meet the constant housing demand.  That construction means the population will continue to climb by the thousands in the years ahead a 1,600-unit complex taking shape on a 70-acre peninsula of the village is expected to house as many as 9,000 people once completed The 2020 census provided the following counts for Orange County's most populous municipalities: Kiryas Joel Kiryas Joel was incorporated as a village within the town of Monroe in 1977 and named for Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum the founder and leader of the Satmar Hasidic movement who led the Satmar Hasidim to Brooklyn from Hungary decades earlier after the horrors of the Holocaust The densely populated village has been expanded three times through annexation, most recently with the addition of 164 acres in 2016 and then 62 acres in 2019 The 2019 annexation followed the creation of the town of Palm Tree which was formed to separate Kiryas Joel from the town of Monroe and has the same boundaries as Kiryas Joel Kiryas Joel has been building a 13.5-mile long pipeline for the last eight years to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct as a long-term water source for its ever-growing population It started laying the second half through Cornwall and New Windsor this year The most recent cost projection for the entire project was $94 million.  In addition to the rapid growth inside Kiryas Joel many families from the community - as well as Brooklyn - have flocked to neighboring Blooming Grove Woodbury and Monroe in the last several years in search of more suburban-style homes and quiet neighborhoods That out-migration is reflected in the state's enrollment data for nonpublic schools which shows that the number of children living outside Kiryas Joel and attending Hasidic schools in the area has grown by about 1,600 in the last five years.  (JTA) — The Hasidic community of Kiryas Joel in New York became what is said to be the first official haredi Orthodox town in the United States Kiryas Joel on Jan.1 became the town of Palm Tree when it officially split from the Town of Monroe located in New York’s Orange County, the Times Herald-Record reported on Saturday The new town is a town is made up of the 164 acres Kiryas Joel had annexed from Monroe and 56 additional acres Kiryas Joel’s roots date back to the mid-1970s when Hasidic Jews began settling in the area under the guidance of Satmar Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum Over 80 percent of Monroe voters in November 2017 backed a measure to make Kiryas Joel, a village of over 20,000 Yiddish-speaking Jews associated with the Satmar Hasidic sect, the state’s first new town in 35 years is an English translation of the Satmar rebbe’s surname Kiryas Joel has gotten a state permit for two new wells in Monroe and Woodbury and bought an undeveloped property next to Route 32 in Woodbury in hopes of securing more groundwater The village of 27,000 has been building a pipeline to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct since 2013 but still needs additional wells both to keep pace with growing water demand during the pipeline work and to boost Kiryas Joel's backup supply once the project is complete which were approved by the state Department of Environmental Conservation on May 10 increased Kiryas Joel's total water capacity by 10% to almost 2.8 million gallons per day Bypass sought: KJ pitches new pipeline path to avoid Five Corners Work resumes: KJ starts next stretch of $94M pipeline project Water plant: KJ plans filtration plant in Woodbury for aqueduct water the village secured its latest potential well site: an 11.6-acre wooded parcel along the pipeline route in Woodbury Kiryas Joel bought the property for $320,000 according to the deed transfer filed this week with the Orange County Clerk's Office The $94 million Catskill Aqueduct project is meant to provide Kiryas Joel with an abundant But New York City requires all upstate communities that draw water from its aqueducts to maintain backup supplies of equal volume to use whenever an aqueduct is shut down for repairs Kiryas Joel Administrator Gedalye Szegedin said by email on Wednesday that the village bought the Woodbury property to help meet that obligation: "We are hopeful one day to find water as a backup supply on this site and connect it to the pipeline running in front of this land." Kiryas Joel connected its first well to its partially completed pipeline in 2018 when construction reached a 10-acre parcel that the village had bought at the pipeline's midpoint on Route 32 in Cornwall The well at that site is now pumping up to 612,000 gallons per day to Kiryas Joel The recently permitted Woodbury well also will be connected to the pipeline allowed to produce up to 216,000 gallons per day, is located on a 30-acre parcel on Seven Springs Road where Kiryas Joel has a chlorination plant for well water and plans to build a filtration plant for the aqueduct water Kiryas Joel owns at least three other vacant properties on the pipeline's future path Two also fall on a slightly modified route the village has proposed to divert the pipe construction behind businesses on Route 32 and avoid the busy Five Corners intersection The newly permitted Monroe well is next to Route 17 and is allowed to produce up to 180,000 gallons per day. The state has let Kiryas Joel use that well in the past on an emergency basis to supplement its other sources Kiryas Joel had installed about 6.5 miles of its 13.5-mile aqueduct pipeline by 2018 It started laying the second half in March CORNWALL - Kiryas Joel on Monday began laying the next segment of a 13.5-mile pipeline it started eight years ago for its marathon quest to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct as a long-term water supply A New Jersey contractor is expected to spend about 13 months burying four miles of the transmission main beside Route 32 in Cornwall starting at a well field in the Mountainville area where the work left off two years ago Another three miles of pipeline must then be completed to reach New York City's water tunnel in New Windsor The village has applied to borrow $57.2 million from the state Environmental Facilities Corp the aqueduct tap and a filtration plant in Woodbury signaling another sharp cost escalation since the village's initial loan of $27.9 million MORE: KJ plans water treatment plant in Woodbury MORE: KJ seeks four new wells to boost water supply MORE: KJ pipeline cost estimate rises to $65 million The latest cost projection for the entire project is $94 million based on the $36.8 million the village had spent as of two years ago and the $57.2 million in additional borrowing The village so far has installed 6.5 miles of 24-inch-diameter transmission mains across Woodbury and tapped a well in Mountainville That bountiful new source - capable of furnishing 612,000 gallons of water per day - has expanded the groundwater supply for Kiryas Joel's growing population while the village continues its aqueduct project The next four miles of pipeline are scheduled to be completed by April 2022 The village has not laid out a timetable yet for the remaining 3.5 miles or said if the work will continue north on Route 32 or detour onto Holloran Road which would require the Town of Cornwall's permission Filtration plant in the worksThe village is also moving forward with plans to build a filtration plant on Seven Springs Road in Woodbury to treat the aqueduct water as it courses toward Kiryas Joel That facility and the aqueduct tap in New Windsor could be completed by December of 2022 based on the timetable an engineer for Kiryas Joel laid out at a Woodbury Planning Board meeting in January The plant will be built on a 30-acre parcel where Kiryas Joel now runs a small chlorination plant to disinfect the Mountainville well water Kiryas Joel is also awaiting a permit from the state Department of Environmental Conservation for four new wells to expand its groundwater reserves one is Monroe and one is in Woodbury – at the site of the future filtration plant Kiryas Joel's engineer said at the Woodbury meeting in January that all of the village's wells will be deactivated and used for backup purposes only once the aqueduct connection is completed New York City requires all upstate communities that tap its water tunnels to maintain a backup supply of equal volume for times when the aqueducts must be shut down for repairs In December, for example, the city's Department of Environmental Protection announced it had closed the Catskill Aqueduct for 70 days so that workers could replace century-old valves and repair leaks The 92-mile aqueduct transports water from the Ashokan Reservoir in Ulster County and supplies 40 percent of New York City's water Organizers of a five-year-long push to form another Hasidic village next to Kiryas Joel in Orange County won two more court decisions this week in support of their village petition An appeals court panel on Wednesday rejected separate legal challenges brought by the town of Monroe and Kiryas Joel after losing in state Supreme Court Both municipalities had posed objections that would have headed off a referendum on incorporating the proposed Village of Seven Springs in Monroe The two Appellate Division rulings means Monroe officials must finally take up the village petition submitted in 2019 - unless there is more court wrangling Monroe Supervisor Tony Cardone said Thursday that he and the other town board members must discuss whether to bring the case to the Court of Appeals Cardone must determine if the petition satisfies all legal requirements and either approve or reject it Approval would lead to a public hearing and then a vote by residents of the 1.9-square-mile area that would be incorporated most of whom live in Hasidic neighborhoods west of Kiryas Joel said Thursday that his clients were pleased with the "thoughtful and correct" decisions by the Brooklyn-based appeals court "We're looking forward to the town expeditiously processing the incorporation petition at this time," he said Back in court: A new Hasidic village in Monroe? Proposal debated in court after two years in limbo Land owners: Plenty at stake over proposed village How did the village formation effort get started?The village formation effort began in 2018 after an earlier court battle over expanding Kiryas Joel that left some property owners unhappy that their homes or land were excluded from the final deal The Satmar Hasidic village wound up annexing 220 acres from Monroe − less than half of the 507 acres in the annexation petition property owners filed in 2013 The Seven Springs proposal would create a new municipality with zoning control over most of the remaining unincorporated land in northern Monroe It would encompass an area larger than Kiryas Joel with large swaths of undeveloped land on both sides of Route 17 and include half of the Harriman Commons shopping center Just 295 voters lived in the village area when the petition was filed Kiryas Joel's administrator tried to pre-empt the Seven Springs petition by filing a petition to annex Monroe land that included some properties in the village petition But an Orange County judge ruled in 2019 that the village petition came first in spite of a bizarre sequence of events that included an assault and the stealing of the village petition as it was delivered to Monroe Town Hall Mugging: Probation for men who robbed Hasidic developer in Monroe The appeals court affirmed both that ruling and a second one in 2020 that rejected Cardone's objection to the Seven Springs petition Cardone had argued that the petitioners had technically failed to pay the $6,000 required filing fee despite submitting that amount for an earlier version of the petition Both cases sat in legal limbo in the Appellate Division for two years during the pandemic, which slowed court activity. They resurfaced in October when lawyers made back-to-back arguments for the two cases to a panel of judges, who were plainly skeptical about the petition objections Chris McKenna covers government and politics for the Journal News and USA Today Network The meeting took place last Friday in the Hudson Valley town Hakeem Jeffries and Pat Ryan meet with Satmar leaders in Kiryas Joel House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) met last Friday with the Grand Rebbe of Satmar Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum in Kiryas Joel, N.Y. The Hasidic community is a key voting bloc in Ryan’s district, which helped drive him to victory in the midterms “I thank the Grand Rebbe for hosting Congressman Pat Ryan and myself in Kiryas Joel We had a thoughtful and meaningful discussion on issues related to the education infrastructure and housing needs of this vibrant community,” Jeffries told JI “Congressman Ryan is working hard to make life better for the residents of Kiryas Joel and he continues to deliver real results for every single community he represents in the 18th Congressional District.” “It was a great honor to meet with the Grand Rebbe alongside Leader Jeffries where we discussed our crucial work on education and leveraging the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to improve roads I’ll keep fighting every day to deliver results for Kiryas Joel and every community in the Hudson Valley.” both Ryan and Jeffries wore kippot that were given out at the 2003 bar mitzvah of Daniel Torres Ryan’s deputy chief of staff and district director Copyright © 2025 · All Rights Reserved · Jewish Insider The politics and business news you need to stay up to date delivered each morning in a must-read newsletter Enter your email to gain access to our exclusive contentDon’t worry if you are already subscribed you won’t receive our newsletters twice The park is on 283 acres of unincorporated land and opened in the Satmar Hasidic enclave last year Media photos show that women and girls are confined to areas of the park with red benches while boys and men are confined to areas of the park with blue equipment Separate walking paths re-enforce the sex-segregation News reports indicate the park is supervised by the village’s religious leader Special funding was apparently provided by the village’s mayor “Public parks cannot segregate based on sex any more than they can on race or national origin,” said NYCLU Executive Director Donna Lieberman “New Yorkers have every right to know if this is happening here and if tax dollars are supporting something so blatantly unlawful.” the NYCLU and ACLU filed a Freedom of Information request for records pertaining to the purchase operation and maintenance of the park to determine if the park is indeed segregated and if it was financed with public funds NYCLU and ACLU attorneys appealed the denial failure to respond within 10 days constitutes a denial of the appeal the NYCLU and ACLU submitted news articles in which Kiryas Joel officials acknowledged both the existence of the park and the Committee on Modesty But village leaders responded to the information request by denying the park exists “The Village has no gender-segregated public park,” wrote village attorney Donald Nichol Village leaders also denied knowledge of any Committee on Modesty despite prominent signs at the park attesting to the committee’s authority “It’s the law for communities to keep basic financial records like the ones we requested,” said NYCLU Attorney Brooke Menschel “Kiryas Joel’s assertion that such records don’t exist is ludicrous.” Kiryas Joel has been subject to numerous legal challenges because of the excessive entanglement of religion in all aspects of village life A 1994 Supreme Court ruling cited an unconstitutional “fusion of governmental and religious functions” in Kiryas Joel a federal court struck down a village policy that prevented women from driving school buses in Kiryas Joel because the policy violated both the Establishment Clause and the Title VII ban on sex discrimination in employment “This is the first report of a sex-segregated public park in the United States so it’s important to learn how the park came to be,” said Daniel Mach director of the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief “We cannot allow religion to be used as a shield for government-sponsored segregation.” Joining Menschel and Mach on the case are Mariko Hirose KIRYAS JOEL — As many as 1,000 homes could be built on a corner of Kiryas Joel that abuts Woodbury in two projects that would be among the first housing developments to result from the village's annexation of 164 acres in 2016 A developer already has stripped the trees from a triangle of land at Bakertown and Acres roads part of a 25-acre property on which 543 housing units are awaiting the approval of Kiryas Joel's Planning Board since the land used to be part of a 140-acre farm by that name that closed last year after a century in operation plans are being developed for another 400 to 500 homes that would be built around the perimeter of Coronet Lake the land owners — a group of investors known as Bakertown Realty Equities LLC — sold a 50 percent stake in the 36-acre property to two other limited liability companies for $12.1 million on Jan according to a deed transfer and sale contract filed last week with the Orange County Clerk's Office At least one other big project has been proposed on the 2016 annexation properties Two years before the border change was consummated the Town of Monroe Planning Board approved Forest Edge a 55-lot subdivision on Mountain and Forest roads that had been under review for years has pitched much more intensive plans since his 24-acre property fell under Kiryas Joel's control: a five-phase development with up to 482 housing units The revamped Forest Edge is now pending before the Kiryas Joel Planning Board Other big development plans are pending on properties that already were part of Kiryas Joel before the annexation Construction started last year on Veyoel Moshe Gardens a 1,600-condominium complex on a 70-acre peninsula of Kirays Joel along Nininger Road And work is expected to start soon on 250-unit Golden Towers which will be built on the opposite side of County Route 105 from Veyoel Moshe Gardens behind Kiryas Joel's sewage treatment plants Yet another impending project is Acres Point which will consist of about 400 new homes on Acres Road Though the plans are still awaiting the village's approval the developer has cleared the 12-acre site and started preparing for construction those six approved or proposed housing projects in Kiryas Joel total more than 3,700 housing units a 90 percent addition to the roughly 4,100 homes the village had as of 2015 The bureau estimated the village population was about 24,000 as of July 1 Kiryas Joel's 2016 expansion came after a heated conflict with neighboring communities over what began as a 507-acre annexation petition Kiryas Joel officials and leaders of the United Monroe citizens group agreed to drop their annexation court cases and support the formation of a new town that would separate Kirays Joel from the Town of Monroe Approved overwhelmingly by Monroe voters in a referendum that year the Town of Palm Tree came into existence last month and consists of the expanded Kiryas Joel and 62 additional acres Kiryas Joel officials have begun the process of annexing those 62 acres so that the two municipalities — Kiryas Joel and Palm Tree — will have the same borders and can operate under a single government cmckenna@th-record.com Things you buy through our links may earn Vox Media a commission This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly Fifty miles northwest of New York City is a town built as a kind of experiment: an attempt to insulate a religious community from the vagaries of time and assimilation the women serve Sabbath meals that would not be out of place in 19th-century Eastern Europe — gefilte fish buttery kokosh cake — and the men dress in black coats and long sidelocks 30-year-old Malky Gold Berkowitz has been fighting to be freed from her husband a man who she says has subjected her to extensive harassment and physical assault a reference to the original leader of the Satmar Hasidic sect whose adherents form a majority of the town’s residents It is an ultra-Orthodox enclave whose strictures on women make it an outlier even among other ultra-Orthodox sects — a world within a world within a world global home to a subsect of a sect of a minority religion It’s a primarily Yiddish-speaking enclave that does not welcome outsiders and is doctrinaire in its approach to rebels Malky grew up under the aegis of this faith expected to be wed at the age of 18 and produce as many children as possible But Malky was 21 when a matchmaker set her up with Volvy — an old maid by Kiryas Joel standards which made her more likely to receive an unfavorable match The couple met in person for 15 minutes before their marriage Malky says Volvy began to act erratically immediately after the marriage; as Malky bore him two children “It got worse from year to year,” she told me According to hospital records provided to New York He has been hospitalized multiple times with symptoms of “hypersexual” and otherwise alarming behavior including running around with a knife and an alleged instance of exposing himself to a minor In a complaint filed in Rockland County court Malky claimed that Volvy physically assaulted her and cautioned his 3-year-old daughter not to sit on his lap After enduring this situation for three years in a marriage she called “Siberia,” Malky decided to seek a religious divorce Yet due to the unique qualities of Orthodox Jewish marriage a man has the absolute right to refuse a divorce decree Gett refusal has haunted the dissolution of Jewish marriages for millennia and there is a term for a woman trapped in legal limbo: agunah — a woman in chains Should she remarry without obtaining her gett any future children would technically be considered products of adultery; they would be mamzers Mamzers are forbidden from marrying other Jews (The same taint does not apply to the children of men who remarry without obtaining a religious divorce.) charging hefty sums to the wives and their families for the service During her seven years in “Siberia,” Malky has sought out multiple solutions from begging her husband for a gett (he subsequently blocked her from his phone she told me) to begging his family for help: “I reached out to his mom the witch she didn’t even wanna hear that I wanna offer them anything to get my blood soaking Get She screamed on me like a wild dog and knocked down the phone,” Malky told me in a text message is Yiddish.) Malky pleaded her case to multiple Jewish religious courts and succeeded: According to documents I reviewed decrees that prohibit community members from doing business or speaking with the gett-refusing husband until he agrees to appear in court — a rare coup in a system that often seeks to bury marital problems to avoid strife But Volvy and his family have circled the wagons and refused to acknowledge the decrees of courts that exist outside their insular community (Multiple members of the Berkowitz family refused to comment when reached for this story.) That’s when Adina Sash got involved. In January, men within the Satmar sect who do quiet advocacy for agunot reached out to Sash on Malky’s behalf. Known by her moniker @FlatbushGirl on Instagram and other social media Sash has become something like the agunah’s secret weapon with a reputation for going after recalcitrant husbands with ruthless and creative energy It was Sash who came up with the idea in March for a mikvah strike — a sex strike creating a concentric circle of pressure that would eventually reach Malky and Volvy’s community Sash made clear to me that she isn’t looking for radical reform of Jewish law She wants religious courts to actually use the many weapons they have at their disposal against gett refusers from voiding marriages to issuing proclamations that allow for use of force against recalcitrant husbands Sash contends that the last few decades have seen dual trends: an uptick in female-initiated divorces and an attendant reluctance among courts to use these drastic measures instead often pushing women to remain in marriages that have run their course “This is not about pushing for reform or modernization; it’s more about a refining that needs to happen,” Sash told me is a Jewish world in which gett refusal is seen as the perversion of faith that it is — a twisting of the sacrament of marriage in order to hold women hostage But her small stature and china-doll looks hide a fountain of energy and resolve She’s amassed 70,000 followers on Instagram through a combination of activism and videos featuring her two kids; in 2019 she ran unsuccessfully for New York’s 45th-District City Council seat she’s been on something like a holy mission for agunot “We’re advocating not just for women who want freedom these women are victims of domestic violence,” Sash said “I believe that the agunah crisis can only be solved with all Jewish women helping.” was born and raised in Flatbush in a deeply observant Orthodox home and attended Bais Yaakov an ultra-Orthodox all-girls’ Jewish school Sash then went to Brooklyn College to study medieval literature in the hopes of better understanding the religious texts she grew up with She graduated with a master’s degree in the same subject in 2012 and spent the next few years working retail and raising her toddler she tried to find a job in marketing in the Flatbush Orthodox community by male-run Orthodox publications that refused to allow her to advertise her services using a photo of herself telling her she could use her husband’s face “or a flower” instead she became an advocate for women within the Jewish community — starting with issues she deemed “low-hanging fruit,” such as fixations on the modesty of women’s wigs never had any social-media app until the moment I realized I couldn’t compete with the way the patriarchy was censoring my ability to communicate with my Jewish sisters,” she told me a female-staffed ambulance corps that serves the Orthodox women of Brooklyn whose concerns over modesty led them in the past to delay seeking urgent medical care from male EMTs Its creation in 2014 was so contentious that Hatzalah the male-staffed Orthodox ambulance corps founded in the 1960s to serve the Yiddish-speaking community attempted to block the service from getting its own ambulance She’s a divisive figure within a deeply patriarchal community — a woman who shows her face unashamedly and isn’t afraid to command the stage She said teachers from her Bais Yaakov days have called her up “I just started seeing all the hypocrisy for what it was — and the hypocrisy specifically within the gender divide,” she said we’re sent to the back or upstairs or the basement it’s not right — we’re spectators in our own religion So I started whistleblowing on my own community in hopes to help fix it and I got lambasted as being a self-hating Jew.” especially since her involvement with the Berkowitz case she is also known by other epithets: a machasheifah (a witch) The town of Monroe began its association with Kiryas Joel in the 1970s the Grand Rabbi of the Hungarian Satmar sect had led his congregation from ghettoes in Hungary and Romania during the Holocaust to the more welcoming shores of Brooklyn he felt his followers needed a more rural outpost — a shtetl A few pioneering Satmar families moved to the sleepy upstate town which had previously been best known for being the birthplace of Velveeta cheese after several decades of uneasy and sometimes hostile coexistence the town of Monroe and Kiryas Joel officially split those initial families had grown into a population of more than 20,000 Hasidim the Grand Rabbi of the Satmar sect who succeeded Joel The two erstwhile leaders of the sect feuded over the succession and effectively split the dynasty in two: Zalman reigned in Williamsburg which also publish dueling Yiddish newspapers Der Blatt and Der Yid Kiryas Joel is infamous in the Jewish community for its extremism: Women are not allowed to drive wearing the turbanlike head covering known as a shpitzel but it is stigmatized and might result in less favorable future matches for the parties involved And should a community member prove a rebel — by driving while female for example — she may lose custody of her children a potent threat that hangs over would-be nonconformists But Malky Berkowitz never wanted to be a rebel or a nonconformist Sash used some tried-and-true methods to pressure Volvy and the Berkowitz family to give Malky her gett First there was a social-media campaign and flyers put up around Orthodox neighborhoods Then there were the robocalls: a call to 8,000 households in Kiryas Joel in Yiddish addressed to the women of the town on a Thursday should be released from her agunakeit,” the message said a reference to her status as a chained woman Sash and a few dozen others — almost entirely women — set out to protest on Malky’s behalf in Kiryas Joel Holding up signs depicting Volvy and Malky’s mother-in-law and slogans like “Volvy Give a Gett” and “Gett it Good,” the women chanted “Free Malky!” and “Let her go.” A gender-segregated crowd with men and women on different sides of the street “I don’t know if there were any men on the other side of the street who were supporting what we were doing in any way; they were gawking an Orthodox activist and politician in Brooklyn “Some of them were mocking us and laughing a lot of rude jokes and condescending slurs and then it began to turn into things like eggs were being thrown.” The protesters had eggs hurled at them from cruising cars Men jeered at them and accused them of breaking modesty laws for supposedly raising their voices in a sexually provocative manner during which Sash and others handed out “halachic prenups” (legal documents that mandate financial penalties for gett refusal) to passing women in the heavily Hasidic enclave of Borough Park was met with even more hostility: According to videos provided by Sash a crowd of young men and teenage boys gathered and began to pelt the demonstrators with eggs and other projectiles and eventually set their pamphlets on fire “If these boys and men were willing to behave that way in public a Modern Orthodox woman based in Manhattan who attended the Borough Park protest also felt very far removed from the agunah crisis I warned them that it could G-d forbid be them They didn’t seem to understand this or care or they were preoccupied with their immediate concerns about tznius (modesty).” There was the plane that flew over Kiryas Joel in February with a banner reading In a technique she’s used before to shame gett refusers a company that provides LED-screen-equipped trucks that run advertisements usually for corporations or political campaigns Sash provided the company with an ad campaign of her own: a “Free Malky” display that included a blown-up photo of Volvy’s mother; photos of the siruvim issued by various rabbinical courts; “Free Malky” and “Volvy Give a Gett” signs; and messages in Yiddish targeting the Berkowitz family I spoke to Luis (he declined to provide his last name) a truck driver for LED Truck Media who participated in two campaigns with the “Free Malky” truck in Kiryas Joel one on January 30 and the second on February 5 one of Volvy’s brothers rammed the truck with his car breaking his own mirror and causing scratches to the truck While the truck was parked on Garfield Road a popular gathering spot near Kiryas Joel’s most important synagogue Luis said they were providing cover for a man who began to spray-paint one of the screens depicting Volvy’s mother images of women (even in full Satmar garb) are considered immodest both sides of the truck were covered with black spray paint “It was thousands of dollars of property damage no restraint on whether they cared or not to be arrested,” Luis told me on the phone “It’s its own little Jewish country,” he told me Returning to the gathering point on Garfield Road Luis found his truck surrounded once again A man began spray-painting the sides of the truck Luis jumped out of the truck to confront the man someone jumped into the driver’s seat and stole the truck “I saw 50 Jews coming at me,” Luis told me and he had a hammer and he was swinging the hammer around at my head ‘You better get the fuck out of here this second or you’re gonna get fucked up.’ I started running He made it known he was not playing games.” to locate the truck through GPS at the end of a dead-end road on the outskirts of town On returning to Garfield Road to retrieve his dropped AirPods Luis says he found himself surrounded again the truck hemmed in on all sides by a swarming crowd He sat there pinned as the crowd punctured his tires with metal strips and nails and the man with the hammer swung it at the truck repeatedly driving on tires that slowly deflated all the way back to New Jersey “The extent of that campaign was me showing up to one place What if I had gotten hit in the head with the hammer?” Sash had run through her usual playbook to no avail and she began to consider ways to influence Kiryas Joel from the outside What if there were some way for women in the broader Orthodox world to put pressure on their husbands who could then put pressure on their rabbis — the word traveling up the chain until it reached Zalman Teitelbaum the leader of the sect to which the Berkowitz family belongs The idea of a sex strike was inspired in part which she read when she got her master’s degree at Brooklyn College the women use the strike to end the Peloponnesian War; as the titular character says: “Their stirring love will rise up furiously “I knew that it’s high-risk — if we do it and we fail it’s a huge failure for Orthodox women to have to admit to themselves and to the patriarchy that they are not empowered enough to do this,” Sash told me “When I got to my wit’s end and felt like I had no more ideas I realized this was the nuclear weapon that I had to try.” The term “mikvah strike” refers to the ritual bath women are required to undergo to cleanse themselves from menstrual impurity before having sex is not unprecedented: Sash kept hearing stories of purported mikvah strikes on behalf of agunot although no one could pinpoint a specific town or time which surfaced in several Jewish publications told the tale of a group of Canadian women who engaged in a sex strike when a woman in their community found her gett held for a $25,000 ransom; however What is probably the earliest story of a mikvah strike comes from Jewish divorce-court records in Saxony-Anhalt in the 13th century: A woman who claimed her husband was abusive stopped going to the mikvah for over a year Her husband brought her to court over causing him to sin implying that her refusal was an act of retaliation against his physical and sexual abuse That’s the thing about Jewish history: It’s cyclical in extraordinary ways and a tactic used in the 1200s can come around again this time on an activist’s Instagram Story View this post on Instagram A post shared by Adina Sash (@flatbushgirl) Being an agunah can be immensely painful for Orthodox women for whom spirituality is at the forefront of their lives and manifests in myriad ways every day from scrupulous following of kosher dietary laws to modest dress to prayer To be spiritually connected against one’s will to someone who has caused you pain and to be unable to escape from that bond and fulfill one’s desire to be a wife and mother with someone else Amber Adler was an agunah for two years after requesting a divorce from a husband who had gone on violent rampages in their home In one particularly frightening incident while she was in the apartment with their 6-month-old son her husband punched a framed photo and smeared the walls of their apartment with blood The state of limbo left her emotionally exhausted and spiritually defeated even after receiving a divorce in 2018 thanks to the efforts of a persistent rabbi “I’ve lost my 30s and part of my 20s to a relationship where I suffered a lot And I’m still impacted by it; my children are still impacted by it.” Adler has advocated for New York to adopt a “coercive control” statute like the one New Jersey has which makes “a pattern of behavior” that “unreasonably interferes with a person’s free will and personal liberty” a criminal form of domestic violence Adler argues that gett refusal is such a form of coercive control “There are so many women who have become agunahs who are forced to give up many things they should never have given up — everything from money to pay off their husband for a gett to giving up child-support agreements to get a divorce,” Adler told me “I know women who have paid $25,000 to $400,000 for a gett after years it can be intimidating to have your marriage dissolved by a beit din which is the only court that can free an Orthodox woman of her bond my then-husband and I had signed a “halachic prenup.” Still the Beth Din of America at 305 Seventh Avenue and standing before an all-male panel of rabbis was a forbidding experience writes the text of the decree with a quill in front of male witnesses; it is folded by the scribe and then given to the husband The room was hushed; the whole world felt blurred with a group of men peering at me; and despite free-flowing tears I remember moonwalking backwards out of that room in total silence determined to make a statement without saying a word And this was the easiest kind of divorce — we had no children nothing but a scribed document that said we were free of one another Sash’s strike has since spread to Orthodox enclaves from the Hendon neighborhood of London to Pittsburgh “I just felt I had to do something,” said a 35-year-old woman from Passaic an Orthodox redoubt who was withholding sex from her husband “And if maybe my husband mentioned something to his rabbi Another woman told Sash she withheld sex for two consecutive weeks trying to pressure her husband to speak to his rabbi I’ll talk to the rabbi.” A Williamsburg-based Satmar woman said she’d refrained from sex for five weeks and felt increasingly disconnected from her husband who insisted that Malky did not deserve a gett didn’t abstain from sex but rather from serving an elaborate meal on the Jewish holiday of Purim to her husband and his disciples a 40-year-old Orthodox woman from Flatbush began refusing sex to her husband of 20 years he bought a sex doll and parked it in his bed “He buys her/it lingerie and says he’ll buy her/it jewelry if I don’t start opening it up,” she told me And I’m a Bais Yaakov girl and I encouraged my friends to withhold sex too.” It’s not that these women necessarily want to be free of Orthodoxy; rather they want to see the sacred laws they live by applied fairly the complexities of divorce have long been acknowledged: There is an entire tractate of the Talmud that elaborates on the many laws associated with the dissolution of a sacred marriage Jewish sailors used to sign documents releasing their wives in the event that they might be lost in a storm; there are systems in place for messengers to take the place of the divorcing parties in court; there are debates about whether a divorce can be written on an olive leaf or the horn of a cow (permissible if the husband then gifts his ex-wife the cow) is a communal decision to ensure that women’s Jewish marriages don’t turn into prisons for the soul — the kind of decision that can lead to change One side effect of the mikvah strike is women rediscovering their ability to say no In an environment in which marital sex is viewed as a holy commandment refusal even for one night a week is a subversive act “The sex strike got backlash from men who couldn’t handle that women should assert themselves the community’s relationship to sex,” one Lakewood-based source told me The mind-set is straightforward: “You’re married “I avoided sex on mikvah night to show that just because you’re ‘allowed,’ it doesn’t mean you can have it because we women have lives and can decide what we want and when we want “This should be a lesson to all Jewish people everywhere that women are held hostage in dead marriages because of controlling sick men,” one sex striker based in Los Angeles told Sash “And that if we don’t come together as one community to help it’s as if we have turned our backs on our own faith completely.” She is waiting for God to relieve her suffering “The community showed their anger about gett withholders and feel the loneliness of women chained,” she told me Thanks to Sash’s efforts and the global campaign Malky has finally gotten a date to proceed with the civil divorce from Volvy The pair are due in Rockland County Family Court in mid-May more progress than has happened in four years even if it still falls short of Malky obtaining her gett it remains up to the men who control every institution in Orthodox life to recognize that change is not only an urgent necessity but a means of strengthening their religion The concerted efforts of religious leaders like the Satmar Rebbes have striven to preserve a certain type of Judaism in amber and isolate it from the modern world But Jewish law is not static: It has always been porous changing according to thousands of years’ worth of commentaries rabbinical answers to congregants’ queries What makes Malky’s story different from the many agunot that have preceded her is the fact that her plight has been recognized by a network of Orthodox women around the world able to communicate with each other directly without the mediation of patriarchal systems These women may be part of a faith that regards them as “less than” — unable to complete their own divorces to stand up in front of a congregation and lead prayers even to serve as witnesses in rabbinical courts — but they are talking and from such talk change can arise even in a hidebound world Password must be at least 8 characters and contain: you’ll receive occasional updates and offers from New York the Hasidic doctor who came to national prominence for treating presumptive Covid-19 patients with an unproven drug regimen announced that he is leaving the area where he treated mostly Hasidic clients “It’s with a broken heart that I have to say this but I have decided to leave Monroe after almost two decades of working as a doctor most recently with this terrible magefah,” he said in a video addressed to his patients and Kiryas Joel residents and after speaking to my family and my mashpi’im” — religious advisers — “and thinking about what I want for the future I’ve decided that its time for me to move on,” Zelenko continued The announcement comes several days after President Donald Trump announced Monday that he was taking hydroxychloroquine the drug that Zelenko gained fame for prescribing to his coronavirus patients in the hopes that it would prevent them from going to the hospital Trump connected his decision to start taking the drug to a New York doctor — a designation Zelenko claimed for himself in a text message to this reporter sent Monday evening It also comes after Zelenko released a video over the weekend in which he accused town leaders of orchestrating multiple investigations against him Zelenko accused three men — Gedalye Szegedin the chief executive of the main health care provider in Kiryas Joel where Zelenko used to work — of being responsible for the deaths of 14 Jews who died of Covid-19 The three did not act quickly enough in closing the town’s synagogues and schools at the beginning of the pandemic Mittelman and Hirsch were considering legal proceedings for libel against Zelenko Zekenko declined to comment further on his video Zelenko said that he wanted to dispel rumors that his decision to leave had anything to do with a disagreement with his current employer Zelenko wished Kiryas Joel residents long life and that they should all live to see the coming of the Messiah — a customary message among some members of the Chabad Hasidic community Ari Feldman is a staff writer at the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aefeldman Settled in the mid-1970s by a small contingent of Hasidic families Kiryas Joel is an American town with few parallels in Jewish history—but many precedents among religious communities in the United States This book tells the story of how this group of pious Yiddish-speaking Jews has grown to become a thriving insular enclave and a powerful local government in upstate New York While rejecting the norms of mainstream American society Kiryas Joel has been stunningly successful in creating a world apart by using the very instruments of secular political and legal power that it disavows Read the full transcript. Stolzenberg holds the Nathan and Lilly Shapell Chair at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law She has written widely on law and religion Myers holds the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Chair in Jewish History at the University of California His many books include Jewish History: A Very Short Introduction Website davidnmyers.com Twitter @DavidNMyersUCLA Stay connected for new books and special offers Subscribe to receive a welcome discount for your next order.  50% off sitewide with code BLOOM50  |  April 28–May 31  |  Some exclusions apply. See our FAQ new mothers are pampered with prepared meals nails and facials before they go home from the hospital and while their babies are cared for by nurses.News 12 Staff