The Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, across the East River from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has long been a stronghold of Orthodox Judaism. In recent years the religious and cultural life of that community has been diversified by the immigration of Hasidic Jews from Europe, each group with its own rebbe and its own special tradition. Walter Goodman describes the impact of the Hasidim on crowded Williamsburg, and speculates about what may in the long run be the impact of Williamsburg—and of America—on them. We will soon print, from the pen of Rabbi Herbert Weiner, a more intimate study of the faith and thought of the Lubavitcher Rov, one of the most celebrated of Brooklyn’s Hasidic rabbis, whose influence extends far beyond his immediate environment into the lives of thousands of disciples throughout the world.
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Today about 75,000 Jews live in Williamsburg. Nobody can be sure exactly how many, what with all the moving going on. They’re running a new Brooklyn-Queens Expressway through Williamsburg, and the once fashionable residences on Ross Street are being reduced to rubble-strewn lots, and Lee Avenue’s small shops have boarded-up windows and ragged signs with new addresses hanging on their doors. It’s a big demolition job; everyone has a friend or a relative who has already moved to another part of Brooklyn or “out to the Island,” and many of those still here have moving plans of their own.
But others will stay, like the Hasidim who, in their caftans and fur hats, began converging on Williamsburg in the late 30’s. And the old people will stay, like Mrs. Rachel Young, who is sixty-eight now. She came to Williamsburg thirty-two years ago when the houses were in fair condition and the stores were beginning to prosper. She, her husband who had preceded her to America from Polish Russia, and their two teen-age daughters lived in Williamsburg for five years before moving to Borough Park and then up to the Bronx. Her husband died in 1944; a few years later she remarried and returned to Williamsburg. Now she lives in a three-room apartment whose windows look out on Division Avenue. Her children and her present husband’s children all live uptown.
She remembers Williamsburg as it was when she first saw it in 1922. “Lots of us were just coming over. They were starting shuls and yeshivas. It was always a Jewish neighborhood—but real Orthodox. Like now, only newer.” Her husband worked a machine in a small embroidery factory on Orchard Street, and she settled down to keeping house and raising her girls. She shopped at the kosher butchers and fishmongers and appetizer stores. Things went on much as they did in many parts of the Lower East Side, or in the developing Bronx and Brooklyn neighborhoods. “But more Orthodox,” repeats Mrs. Young nodding in reminiscence. “Always more Orthodox.”
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“Williamsburg in the middle-nineteenth century was a popular resort,” records the WPA Guide on New York; “its hotels near the Brooklyn Ferry attracted a wealthy cosmopolitan crowd, including such gourmets and sportsmen as Commodore Vanderbilt, Jim Fisk, and William C. Whitney. With the opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903 and the resultant influx of immigrant families from overcrowded Manhattan, the district’s affluence vanished.” The first known Jewish inhabitant of Williamsburg had settled there in 1837; for many years, the tenth man for Williamsburg’s minyan ferried across from New York every Friday in the early afternoon. After 1903, however, Williamsburg became as densely Jewish as Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which sprawled out from the foot of the bridge’s western arch. Indeed, the East Side merely overflowed into Williamsburg, just across the bridge which rises from Delancey Street, not to find a new way of daily living there, but simply to establish more of the same.
Williamsburg’s Jewish section today still extends for about ten blocks in the area of the bridge, bounded on the south by the Navy Yard and on the north by Grand Street. Facing the high Navy Yard gates are garages, steam laundries, a small factory or two, stores that sell innumerable nameless second-hand objects. Walk away from the Navy Yard on any one of the streets that end here—say, Wilson Street—and suddenly the neighborhood changes. It becomes neat, almost clean. There are trees, and turn-of-the-century two and three-story brick houses with their iron fences.
But if you continue walking north, this changes too, and almost as suddenly. You reach Division Avenue lined with its old five-story apartment houses packed close, reeking of a thousand Friday nights of chicken soup, and its busy food stores, and women carrying loaded bags or minding baby carriages, kids playing at the curb, delivery trucks unloading. You can turn down bustling Marcy Street, where the stores are a little bigger, and follow it into Broadway, lying at the foot of the bridge and shadowed by its El. Here it is like Manhattan’s Third Avenue—newsstands, movie houses, shabby bars. Past this, the streets become narrower, more crowded, very much like many of the East Side neighborhoods just across the bridge. Then you reach Grand Street and find yourself among the Italians.
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If it had not been for Hitler and the war, Williamsburg might have gone much the way of all the other immigrant sections around New York, becoming year by year just a little more American Jewish, adapting to the surrounding pattern. But a new influx of East Europeans began to arrive after Hitler. Some had managed to escape from Europe in time; great numbers of the Hasidim came as DP’s, only after they had already experienced the concentration camps. Why Williamsburg? “My sister was here.” “An aunt of my oldest brother-in-law was here.” “The rabbi came and we came later.”
Most of the Hasidim arrived after the war, following their several leaders, including the Sage of Sattmur, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, and the late renowned Lubavitcher Rabbi Joseph I. Schneersohn. The latter, with his entourage, was granted safe escort by the Germans at the intervention of the State Department and settled in Brooklyn in 1940, not in Williamsburg itself, but in nearby Crown Heights. The Sage was rescued when a whole train was allowed to pass from Germany to Switzerland during the war—miraculously, his disciples maintain. The followers of the two rabbis came by harder routes—through all of Europe, the Middle East, even China—carrying their belongings in kerchiefs and cardboard boxes. They came to Williamsburg, seeking again the shtetl from which they had been uprooted.
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The Hasidim did not transform the complexion of the Williamsburg community; it was already Old World. But they intensified it, holding fast against the erosion that had been taking place uptown and in other parts of Brooklyn. “With them around,” a yarmelke’d grocer asks, “How could you become any less religious?”
Still more shuls and yeshivas sprang up, a few large ones, but most of them very small affairs, serving a handful of disciples of some obscure tsaddik. Fur-hatted Hungarians in black caftans and long stockings appeared on the streets, and their wives, in sheitls and fachelkes, sat before their new homes and rocked their carriages along with everyone else. Soon their children, earlocks dangling, were racing around, yelling at one another in a combination of tongues.
The Hasidim retain customs which few of America’s Jews have ever known except by hearsay. Before Yom Kippur they still line up at a Division Avenue butcher shop to shlog kapporis, whirling live chickens over the heads of every member of the family as a blessing for the year to come. On Simchas Torah they still dance in the streets from late afternoon till early morning, and spectators, including the policemen on duty, are drawn into the joyous melee. The building of a succah remains a studied and exacting matter. While loudspeaker trucks tour the area urging citizens to register in October, the black-clothed Hasidim examine their ethrogim under jeweler’s glasses and devote a whole day to selecting and comparing their lulavim. And lately the trucks have been appearing on the streets on ordinary Friday afternoons blaring out the announcement to citizen and storekeeper that the Sabbath is approaching.
No Jews in Williamsburg are rich, but the Hasidim, it is generally agreed, are the poorest of all. Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in their bare synagogues and their impoverished schools. The case of the Arugath Habosem Yeshiva and Mesifta is typical. The school was founded about eighty years ago by Rabbi Moshe Ben Amram Grunwald; under the leadership of his son, Rabbi Levi Isaac Grunwald, of Zelem, it was transplanted to the United States about fifteen years ago. In October of 1953, the city authorities shut down the yeshiva premises, which were on the verge of collapse. Since then the five hundred students—most of them refugees and orphans—have been studying in makeshift quarters while the school heads have been trying to raise $250,000 for a new building. The youngest boys were playing noisily in a small backyard just outside his office window while the director spoke in a resigned way of his school’s future. “We have to refuse fifty, sixty, one hundred children every year because we have no room. We hold alumni meetings, dances, a banquet for the older people once a year. . . . But for us $250,000 is a lot of money.” There is no definite tuition at Arugath Habosem. “They pay what they can. Half don’t pay anything.”
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This problem of school support is one the Hasidim share with their non-Hasidic neighbors. With fifteen hundred pupils, Torah Vodaath is the biggest yeshiva and mesifta in Williamsburg, founded in 1918. But the principal of the yeshiva’s Hebrew department, Rabbi David S. Stern, must still spend much of his time on urgent appeals for money. On the day I visited the school, the teachers had not been paid for a month and Dr. Stern was busy on the telephone seeking aid.
The student at Torah Vodaath is likely to start attending the yeshiva as early as the age of three, beginning with the Hebrew alphabet and advancing to the Chumash, the Gemarah, and the Shulchan Aruch. From nine to one he studies in Hebrew, and from two to six in English—to satisfy New York state regulations. The English instruction given at these yeshivas rarely satisfies the state completely, although the boys invariably manage to pass their Regents examinations. Discipline and instruction tend to be minimal. But as the Assistant Superintendent of Schools for the Williamsburg area explains, “We try to be understanding. We enforce our standards—but flexibly, sympathetically. We move as gently as we can where religious beliefs are concerned. They’re touchy things.”
When he receives his diploma, the Torah Vodaath student may go on to college—often to the evening session of one of the city colleges. Numerous students, as one might expect, plan to go into the rabbinate; the chances are that they will have to leave New York City and seek Orthodox congregations elsewhere—and the search may not be easy; no ready market welcomes the young Orthodox rabbi from Williamsburg. Others will become lawyers or accountants. “They can become anything they want,” Dr. Stern says. “In this country an Orthodox Jew can become anything.”
Not so the Hasidim. Their yeshiva bachurim will not attend college. A few of those who eventually become rabbis may be directed to congregations outside of New York. But most, whether rabbis or laymen, will not leave the city; very probably they will not even leave Williamsburg. The average Hasid is likely destined for a pressing iron or sewing machine in a midtown cloak and suit loft, or perhaps he will run a neighborhood shop selling guaranteed kosher food to members of his own sect. “So what do you expect us to do for a living? We do what we can do!” His wedding will be arranged for him, without dating or hand-holding or any of the other rituals of American courtship. The bride’s head will be shaved. The husband will have his job and his synagogue; the woman her home and children. Children come fast. It is not unusual to see two small ones holding onto a baby carriage wheeled by their young and pregnant mother. “God will provide.”
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Williamsburg is sanguine about the future of Orthodoxy in America. On this one point, the Hasidic and non-Hasidic leaders, viewing the world from the perspective of their own unique community, are close—if hardly warm—allies. Nissan Mindel, secretary to the present Lubavitcher Rabbi, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the late Rabbi’s son-in-law, tells the story of the English rabbi whose plane from London was delayed, arriving at Idlewild only minutes before the sunset that would begin Rosh Hashanah. A police motorcycle escort was provided to make certain the rabbi would get to Eastern Parkway on time. “Imagine! Policemen on motorcycles and all for one Jew! We survived under the Czars; what shouldn’t we be able to accomplish in such a country!”
All the Hasidic sects insist that there has been no falling away among their followers. “True, no more are coming from Europe, but the ones that are here keep up the old ways. We don’t expect them to go to extremes as they used to, but the Hasidic spirit they keep. And the children are keeping it too. If four hundred students graduate and ten become rabbis, that’s enough. As long as the other three hundred and ninety know the value of those ten.”
They can point to Williamsburg itself as the living justification for their optimism. No Conservative or Reform congregations have been able to establish themselves here. Other religions have fled. A Roman Catholic church on Bedford Avenue, its crucifixes and plaster saints removed, has become the Beth Jacob Hebrew School. Most stores are closed Saturday and open Sunday. Thousands of boys attend the yeshivas (nobody has the total at his fingertips) and on the High Holy Days crowds of worshippers fill the tiny synagogues. On Friday nights, groups of Jews in the traditional costume of Eastern Europe dot the streets.
“Here we are not Shabbos yidn,” the old men declare, fondling their beards. An assistant to the Sage of Sattmur puts the case forthrightly: “For us there is no compromise. You believe or you don’t believe. Maybe some Jews need a more comfortable religion; maybe they got very important business to take care of and being a Jew would interfere with them. But for us there is only one way to be a Jew.” As he speaks, an undercurrent of chanting comes from the next room where one old man in long white stockings and the black coat that comes down below his knees is making his devotions over a dog-eared Bible; there are sudden bursts of hammering from somewhere in the building, and arguments rage in Yiddish.
Dr. Stern of Torah Vodaath is Williamsburg’s most articulate spokesman for the case of the non-Hasidic Orthodox. “So a Jew goes one step away, then two steps. He reforms and reforms until one day he wakes up to the fact that he’s a Unitarian. Now, after all, these people are Jews! Being a Unitarian isn’t the same thing. So the movement starts back. They’re all searching for the substance, the Jewishness they have lost somewhere along the way. They didn’t find it in a Reform temple and they won’t find it in a Conservative temple. They must come back. They are Jews.”
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In fact, however, even in this stronghold of Orthodoxy, most of the young people seem to be drifting away from tradition, not into Conservative or Reform Judaism, to be sure, but into that large and ill-defined mass of “just Jews.” There is no sudden outbreak, no revolt. Most of the children go to public schools; they attend socials at the Bedford Avenue “Y”; they are drafted into the Army, and when they’re discharged some of them join the local Jewish War Veterans post.
Ira Rabinowitz is adjutant of Private Seymour A. Diamond Post No. 478, which meets on the first and third Tuesday of each month in a store on Lee Avenue furnished with some old chairs and tables and an unsavory-looking couch. The store is in one of those blocks that will be coming down to make room for the new Expressway, and Ira is hunting for a new location. “The whole neighborhood’s like that,” Ira says. “Everything’s either being torn down or falling down by itself.” An air of dusty desertion hangs over the clubhouse, even on Sunday, when six or seven members show up for an afternoon of poker. The post has sixty-one members now, most in their late twenties. Sixteen were raised in Germany and Poland and came to this country as refugees from Hitler. About a third of the membership has moved away from Williamsburg in recent years, and this trend is continuing.
Ira himself was born in New York City, the grandson of a rabbi, and came to Williamsburg in 1944. “I’m still Orthodox. I go to shul on Shabbos; I don’t carry change.” Ira plays poker with his hat on. But most of the veterans (including one or two sons of Hasidim) enter a synagogue only on the High Holy Days. “You know—they’re just Jews.” Why did the sons of the Hasidim make the break? Ira sees nothing strange about it. “They’re like anybody else.”
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But the Hasidim, on the whole, are not moving away very fast—either from tradition or from Williamsburg. A few wild boys may go, they say, but “couldn’t that happen in Europe too?” It is axiomatic that a Hasid cannot worship or celebrate alone; the essentials of Hasidic life revolve around the tsaddik and the entire group must participate. They must remain in Williamsburg by the nature of things. Anywhere else the black-frocked, bearded figures would be gaped at; and whom could their wives trust in a strange neighborhood to pass on the edibility of their meat, the cleanliness of their dishes? From Eastern Europe they have brought with them the old loyalties, and the old rivalries and suspicions as well. These are not so heated here as they once were, but even now the sects tend to be insulated from one another. Each lives in the innermost of several concentric circles. Nearest are the other Hasidim, then come the non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews, then the “just Jews,” then the rest of the world, alien, distant, never to be really encountered. The three-and four-year-old fence climbers with peyes pose, giggling, for an outsider’s camera. The students look nervously at the sidewalk if approached; they shuffle their feet, rub their hands, mumble their answers to the outsider’s impertinent questions: “No . . . no movies . . . no television . . . .” The mothers and fathers look at the stranger distantly; whether Jewish or not, he is not a significant part of their proudly limited horizon.
The xenophobia of the non-Hasidic yeshiva boys is not quite so pronounced. They mingle more easily with the rest of the Jewish community, but for them too the goyim are a kind of strange caste to whom the good Jew does not get very close. And America itself is in some ways not quite their country.
In mesifta study rooms they dispute delicate points of the Law; they examine and reexamine the Commentaries; they grow incensed at the suggestion that women be drafted into Israel’s armed forces. But they rarely talk about America—not even about the Jews in America. Girls, sports, politics—the stuff of dormitory conversation throughout the country—go unacknowledged when the yeshiva bachurim gather.
Ira Rabinowitz makes a wry face when he talks about them. “We don’t have anything in common with those kids. Especially the Hasidim—lots of the boys don’t like the Hasidim. Why? You know—they dress different; they don’t talk English. They’re so fanatical. Maybe they make some of us feel guilty.”
The storekeepers shrug: “Sure they’re meshuga. So what?”
Ask the non-Jewish residents of Williamsburg about their Orthodox and Hasidic neighbors and they nod philosophically: “That’s New York for you.”
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About five years ago Puerto Ricans began to move into this already segmented community. The candy store newsstands took to featuring La Prensa and Diario de la Nueva York alongside the Tog-Morgen Journal. The Division Avenue store that once housed Nat Pernick Linens became a Spanish-American grocery, and other stores appeared with names like “Casa Lucky Discos” and “La Palmita Colonado.” A large multicolored sign hanging clear across one Taylor Street house celebrated the “Primera Iglesia Libre Methodista Hispana.” Spanish-language double features were booked at a small Broadway movie house. Spanish shouts mixed with the American, Yiddish, and Hungarian of kids playing on the side streets.
The Puerto Ricans met much the same hostile reception in Williamsburg as they met elsewhere in New York. “They’re dirty. They’re always having fights.” But actually there is very little contact among Williamsburg’s ethnic groups. “There’s no real mingling, and, thank God, there are no scraps,” says the principal of a junior high school attended by the children of Jews, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. “The Puerto Rican kids are shy; their family bonds are strong. They stay very much by themselves.” A Jewish housewife says: “A family of them moved in here. I see the woman going shopping. It must be a good three years since they moved in. We never yet passed two words.”
The Hasidim patronize their own stores, but the other Jewish women will occasionally find themselves buying fruit next to a Puerto Rican housewife. Boys stopping off for a hot dog at one of the kosher delicatessens will often stand at the same counter with Puerto Rican boys on the same errand. But this is about the extent of their contact. The Puerto Ricans are at one end of Williamsburg’s social spectrum, the Hasidim at the other, two worlds separated by language, by appearance, and most of all by their own cohesive power. But as the neighborhood changes, as more Puerto Ricans move in and more Jews move out, these two societies may grow closer. For America is impinging equally on both of them. Their children are being born American citizens; they will all be speaking the same language—though, for a while at least, with different accents.
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“No Cossacks here, no broken heads.” This is the refrain that runs through statements of the Orthodox leaders, both Hasidic and non-Hasidic. “No yellow stars or Nuremberg laws. No gas chambers.”
Dr. Stern is confident that a return to the Truth is inevitable. But he admits that young Orthodox rabbis are having an increasingly difficult time searching out congregations, and he is finding it harder and harder to get support for his school.
As for the Hasidim, “the pious,” they recall how their movement burgeoned out of the dry earth of the 18th-century Polish and Ukrainian ghettos. The false Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, had blinded the masses with illusory dreams of the millennium and then converted to Mohammedanism, plunging them into darker despair than before. The stern Talmudic scholars in Vilna reacted by squeezing Judaism into an academic exercise cold and forbidding to simple Jews.
To these masses the Baal Shem Tov preached a religion of personal piety, of individual contact with the divine. By thousands they flocked to him and his disciples. No dissertations on nice points of the Law at the tsaddik’s court, but moving parables, down-to-earth advice, dancing, singing.
Now, the Hasidic leaders ask, if their movement could stir men so amid the squalor and oppression of Eastern Europe, what can it not do here where all things work for it—even policemen on motorcycles? But perhaps their question answers itself. Life in Williamsburg is not easy, to be sure. But can the religious surge that developed out of the despair of oppressed aliens in Poland remain the religion of merely poor citizens in Brooklyn? Will not the children of Hasidim respond to the blandishments of America as the children of other Orthodox Jews have done before? The Hasidic leaders, fundamentally uninterested in America, do not ask such questions. An old follower of the Sage of Sattmur declines to speculate: “We remember the past. We live in the present. The future is in God’s hands.”
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Meanwhile Williamsburg with its boarded-up windows and cluttered backyards is changing. Its old buildings are being torn down, and the “just Jews” who occupied them are moving away; the children of the Orthodox are becoming lawyers and accountants, and many of them too are departing—some to Conservative congregations elsewhere. Silently, the introverted Puerto Ricans continue to fill all emptying apartments. The Williamsburg Bridge and the Broadway El are showing themselves to be not the boundaries of a ghetto but simply ways of coming into and leaving another section of New York City.
On Wilson Street, near Bedford Avenue, stands P. S. 16; right across from it is a yeshiva. At lunchtime children come streaming from both buildings and the little boys in skullcaps are lost among the others on their way home. The new Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that is being built through Williamsburg is one of those concrete multi-lane highways that cut into and circle New York and stretch shining across every state. Direct, clean, precise, it is slashing through Williamsburg’s slums like a sword of purification—and also, perhaps, of destruction.
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