American Shtetl

The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York

Nomi M. Stolzenberg, David N. Myers

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780691226439
• Categoría: Ciencias sociales
• Categoría: Antropología cultural y social

A compelling account of how a group of Hasidic Jews established its own local government on American soil 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.Nomi Stolzenberg and David Myers paint a richly textured portrait of daily life in Kiryas Joel, exploring the community's guiding religious, social, and economic norms. They delve into the roots of Satmar Hasidism and its charismatic founder, Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum, following his journey from nineteenth-century Hungary to post–World War II Brooklyn, where he dreamed of founding an ideal Jewish town modeled on the shtetls of eastern Europe. Stolzenberg and Myers chart the rise of Kiryas Joel as an official municipality with its own elected local government. They show how constant legal and political battles defined and even bolstered the community, whose very success has coincided with the rise of political conservatism and multiculturalism in American society over the past forty years.Timely and accessible, American Shtetl unravels the strands of cultural and legal conflict that gave rise to one of the most vibrant religious communities in America, and reveals a way of life shaped by both self-segregation and unwitting assimilation.

PART I

THE PAST AND PRESENT OF THE SHTETL

CHAPTER 1

Life in the Shtetl

Every Friday in the late afternoon, as the sun gives way to dusk, a series of loud sirens pierce the air of a densely packed village located in a suburban town in the Catskill Mountains fifty miles north and slightly west of New York City. As in American company towns of yore, the blare marks an end to the busy work week. But instead of releasing thousands of laborers from the factory to their homes or the nearby bar, the sirens clear the streets of Kiryas Joel. The frantic pace of the hours leading up to the sirens, with women and men scurrying about to complete their chores, gives way to calm as the twenty-five-hour-long Jewish Sabbath enters, during which most forms of labor permitted during the week—the Talmud records thirty-nine varieties—are forbidden. The sirens thereby delineate the border between labor and rest, profane and sacred, weekday and Shabbes.

Rather than being controlled by a single business corporation, KJ is dominated by a religious corporation, the Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar, to which all of the residents, at least originally, belonged. It is the all-encompassing religious character of KJ life that leads members of the community to declare that their mode of living is the most organic way of life around.¹ When the main Yiddish newspaper of the Satmar community published a long article in 1978 declaring that Kiryas Joel was “a dream that became a reality,” the sentiment was no exaggeration. The first residents who made their way from Brooklyn to Orange County four years earlier knew well the difficulties they faced on the path to their suburban community.² They retained their deep faith that it was God’s will, along with the leadership of their spiritual shepherd, Rabbi Teitelbaum, that allowed the community to rise. And they were proud that their small settlement had become what they had originally hoped—a place of purity, an enclave at a remove from the rest of a society that, for all its willingness to countenance the creation of a Hasidic village, was still irredeemably golus, exile.

At the same time, they were proud of the community’s success, as measured by its stunning growth; Kiryas Joel quickly became the fastest growing municipality in the state of New York, with an annual rate that sometimes reached 13 percent in a given year. Indeed, the village has grown from 2,000 people in 1980 to 7,500 in 1990, 13,000 in 2000, 20,000 in 2010, and 25,000 in 2019. According to one estimate, it may well reach 96,000 residents in 2040, thereby making it the first all-Hasidic city in the world.³

The chief official responsible for planning growth in Kiryas Joel is village administrator Gedalye Szegedin, an exceptionally capable Satmar Hasid, now in his early fifties, who speaks English with a Yiddish inflection, although he was born and raised in New York. Bespectacled and bearded, Szegedin wears the familiar workday outfit of most men in the community: a white shirt buttoned to the top, black pants, a black vest, and, when the occasion arises, a long black caftan (outer coat), and big round black hat. But he is unlike his Satmar peers in many other regards. He mixes the tasks of city manager, town planner, savvy politician, and decisive CEO to guide virtually every aspect of municipal life in Kiryas Joel, from residential development to traffic patterns and garbage collection. Admired by friends and resented by foes, who accuse him of working only on behalf of the establishment faction, Szegedin exudes an air of confidence born of more than twenty-five years of service as administrator as well as by his extensive web of local and statewide political ties. He is related to some of the leading figures in the village. His uncle is Mayer Hirsch, a wealthy and well-connected developer who is one of the most powerful people in KJ, serving as the moving force behind the semiofficial Vaad hakirya (which oversees land acquisition and sale in the village); and his stepfather, Rabbi Wolf Gluck, was head of the largest private school system in town, the United Talmudic Academy. During his time in office, KJ has grown dramatically in terms of both population and village services. Szegedin observes with a mix of pride and amusement that some have called him the Robert Moses of KJ, referring to the legendary and controversial New York city planner.⁴

FIGURE 1.1. Aerial Photo of Kiryas Joel over Time. Courtesy of Mordechai Friedman.

This picture of a blessedly insular but rapidly growing rural community is a key part of the story of Kiryas Joel. But this is only one strand of the story. In many regards, the village is not a model of tranquility and orderly growth but is rather rife with tensions, both within and beyond.⁵ Satmar Hasidim may look to the uninitiated eye as identical to one another in appearance and worldview, but there are sharp divisions separating factions in the village, each of which follows its own leaders and maintains its own set of religious and educational institutions. The faction associated with the chief rabbi of the village, R. Aaron Teitelbaum, dominates the major institutions in town and has presided over the dramatic growth of the community; the main opposition party is associated with his younger brother and rival, R. Zalman of Williamsburg. And there is the smaller dissident group, Bnai Yoel, which follows neither rabbi.

In a curious reenactment of history, the Bnai Yoel are known as misnagdim (opponents), while the mainstream party goes by the name “Hasidim,” which literally means “pious ones.” This is the very set of terms—Hasidim and misnagdim—used to distinguish groups of Jews in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Eastern Europe, although the “Hasidic” camp was then the renegade upstart, whereas now it is the establishment. The misnagdim, in that earlier context, were precisely the opponents of Hasidim—in fact, the anti-Hasidim.

In the context of Kiryas Joel, the so-called misnagdim not only claim to be more pious and to maintain greater fidelity to the first Satmar Rebbe’s path but also assert that the establishment party of R. Aaron denies them religious and civil services and, in doing so, reveals KJ’s true colors as an authoritarian theocracy. They report being intimidated, pressured, excluded, and even attacked.⁶ By contrast, those associated with the ruling faction maintain that there is a “live and let live” policy that allows each group to provide for its members within the framework of a Satmar way of life. For the outside observer, it is difficult to reconcile the two sharply divergent accounts, both of which seem to contain more than a grain of truth.

Both the establishment and the dissidents are steadfast in their commitment to halakhah (Jewish law). They do, however, have different outlooks regarding how to approach neighbors beyond KJ’s borders, which stretch just to 1.5 square miles. The dissidents are keen on forging harmonious relations with the gentile world and believe that the mainstream k’hul (from the Hebrew word kahal for congregation) has been needlessly aggressive in throwing its weight around. Since the early 2000s, an organization called the Kiryas Joel Alliance, associated with the Bnai Yoel, has sought to create a more favorable image of the community in the broader public eye by distinguishing between the residents and leaders of KJ.⁷ These good neighbor policies coexist, paradoxically, with the dissidents’ commitment to religious separatism, which they believe has been breached by the establishment party’s assumption of the powers of secular local government.

The leadership of KJ, for its part, maintains that the problem is neither politics nor an absence of neighborly relations. It is demographic, plain and simple. As Gedalye Szegedin formulated it in 2016, Kiryas Joel must continue to expand in order “to accommodate the needs of the community and secure the necessary infrastructure.” Szegedin noted that there have been 2,500 babies born in the community since late 2013, during which time he himself issued 750 marriage licenses.⁸ It is that explosive growth that impels him to seek out more land, sewage capacity, and water at every turn.

It is also that rate of growth that makes Kiryas Joel an outlier in Orange County, New York. Neither its physical appearance nor its population density conforms to the classic American suburban ideal that one encounters in the rest of the town of Monroe, where the village of Kiryas Joel is located.⁹ There one finds, over twenty square miles, a mix of American creature comforts (restaurants, a movie theater, and small businesses), a diverse range of architectural styles, and generously spaced lots on which ranch-style homes sit. By contrast, KJ has had to cram more than 30,000 people into its 1.5 square miles, which, given its birth rate, has necessitated constant efforts to annex new territory. These have been met with vocal opposition by neighbors, who have felt the threat of encroachment by Kiryas Joel for decades. In fact, in 2013 a group of citizens in the town of Monroe, of which KJ was a part and constituted a majority until 2019, established an organization called United Monroe in order to check the expansion of KJ beyond its then present borders. In particular, United Monroe strenuously objected to the village’s desire to gain control over an additional 507 acres of land. It took aim at what it called, in somewhat ominous terms, the KJPE—the Kiryas Joel Political Elite—which it described as “masters of manipulation” intent on securing gain for themselves and their community at the expense of neighboring groups and individuals.¹⁰

The fact of the matter is that, over the course of its history, Kiryas Joel has punched well above its weight in the political arena, using its ability to deliver a bloc vote to elect candidates sympathetic to the community who, in turn, deliver economic and other benefits to it. Although KJ is a town of 25,000 residents, its leaders can pick up the phone and quickly reach top state and federal officials. A key question is whether the presence of increasingly assertive and independent dissenting factions within the community will mean the end of KJ’s extraordinary political clout through the bloc vote. It is worth noting that in the town of Palm Tree, available voter registration records from 2019 revealed that 35 percent of the community identified as Democrats, 38 percent as Republicans, and 9 percent as Independents.¹¹

Past voting results yield conflicting signals. In the November 2016 election, the competing camps in KJ joined forces to support the reelection of Republican state senator Bill Larkin by a vote of 5,852 to 140. KJ voters were more divided on the race for state assembly in which a Haredi candidate from neighboring Spring Valley, Aron Wieder, garnered 4,598 votes in the village to his opponent’s 1,491, though Wieder eventually lost. Meanwhile, the presidential contest was even more divided, with Donald Trump receiving 55 percent (1,592) and Hillary Clinton 45 percent (1,291). What was noteworthy in the 2016 election was that 3,000 fewer voters cast ballots in the presidential election than in the local races.¹² This suggests that, until the dramatic shift to Donald Trump in 2020, the Satmars of KJ had much more at stake, in terms of the welfare of their community, in local elections in which candidates are expected to bring direct, tangible benefits to their constituents.

The recent trend toward a more assertive national political presence requires much careful analysis in coming years. It reveals a new sensibility among Satmars—a conservative, libertarian, ideological Americanness. In the past, it was not at all uncommon to hear Satmar Hasidim express appreciation and loyalty to the United States, which offered safe haven to the surviving remnant of their community after the Holocaust. But the 2020 presidential campaign featured a more forceful form of political identity, exemplified by the sight of flag-waving Haredim at pro-Trump rallies. In many ways, Satmar Hasidim operate with a good deal of cognitive dissonance, recognizing that America has been uniquely hospitable to Jews while still expressing the daily hope that the Messiah will come and liberate Jews from the state of exile in which they dwell. One of the sharpest formulations of this belief came from Zalman Teitelbaum, who declared in the midst of the 2020 campaign—and on the day marking the liberation of Joel Teitelbaum from Bergen-Belsen—that “we need to understand that we are in exile, we live here but we are not Americans.”¹³ In many regards, Satmar Hasidim today live in two zones of time: in the realm of messianic hope and in the everyday reality of their own legally recognized municipality, which, as we shall see, transformed a relatively small collection of private property owners into a sovereign shtetl.

An Uncommon Suburb

Out-of-towners are offered an eye-opening introduction to KJ’s unusual nature when they drive down Forest Road into the village; there they can see the sign that, since 2010, has urged those entering the village to respect THE TRADITIONS AND RELIGIOUS CUSTOMS of the Satmar community. As one proceeds further into town on Forest Road, one sees color-coded signs posted on either side advising men and women to walk on different sides of the street during the Sabbath and holidays.

Sidewalk segregation is actually not practiced in Kiryas Joel. Men and women cohabit public spaces in the heart of the village, where just to the left of Forest Road is a large lot of land containing the village’s first shopping center, to which is appended a suite of village government offices. Directly adjacent to the village offices is the Ezras Cholim, Kiryas Joel’s ...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue: Approaching Kiryas Joel
• Part I: The Past and Present of the Shtetl
• Part II: Law and Religion in the Village and Beyond
• Part III: Conflict, Competition, and the Future of Kiryas Joel
• Notes
• Glossary of Hebrew and Yiddish Terms
• List of Personalities
• Index