The World in a City: Traveling the Globe Through the Neighborhoods of the New New York

by Joseph Berger

  Not all these worshipers in such unlikely places are Orthodox— many are Conservative, Reform, and even so-called cultural Jews trying to say Kaddish, the mourner's prayer, for a father or mother who died within the previous eleven months, at a spot convenient to work. But Orthodox Jews organize and command these services. J. Philip Rosen, a partner at Weil, Gotshal, appreciates the perspective this prayer break offers on what matters in life. “It's private time; it's not billable time,” he said. “It's a recognition of the importance of religion in your life. No matter what else is going on, you find the time to pray.”

  As a moderately observant Jew, I appreciated the availability of these minyanim after the death of my father in December 2003. I felt a need to say Kaddish as often as I could, first to honor him and the tradition of the Galician town from which he sprang, but later to heal my own soul. There was something about standing in the presence of other mourners—all communing with the mystery of death, with the finality of loss—that was strangely comforting. No one in the minyanim I attended at Weil, Gotschal or the Empire State or the cozy Garment Center Congregation actually wept for their relatives. But there was a thick common grief contained in the prayer of men, and sometimes women, who stood up, shut their eyes, bowed their heads, and chanted or murmured the same timeless seventy-five Aramaic words that Jews have been saying for thousands of years: Yisgadal vyiskadash shemey raba …Whether we were corporate executives or baggy-pantsed working stiffs, we all connected with that chain. I too was part of it, and almost every time I headed back to The Times, I felt better.

  It is the most rigorous brands of Orthodoxy that are becoming the most muscular. In my childhood in the 1950s, Orthodox synagogues drew worshipers who wanted a service the old-fashioned European way—one that was exclusively in Hebrew, where men and women sat in separate sections, and where men took care of all the synagogue rituals— but in their private lives, those worshipers might be less than observant. My immigrant father worked on Saturdays because that was his boss's requirement and my father did not feel he had the stature to argue. Many of my synagogue friends were happy going to public schools. More than a few of the grown-up worshipers indulged in the characteristically Jewish misdemeanor of eating Chinese food—shrimp included.

  Today, as the most stringent continue to gain clout in such neighborhoods as Midwood, Orthodoxy is not just surface style. It has become embedded in the habits and outlooks of a new generation raised in fervent yeshivas that insist upon submission to halacha, or Jewish law, and that eye the secular world—particularly the Jewish secular world—with a caution born of bitter experience with its seductions. Younger Orthodox Jews are proud to be frum, or observant, and call each other frummies in slang. The most all-encompassing sects of Orthodoxy such as the Hasidim are stronger and more exacting than ever.

  The growth of the right-wing Orthodox—and such controversies as the Godol book—have raised questions about the state of intellectual freedom in the fervently Orthodox world and about its relations with the wider Jewish world, a culture that is generally known for valuing freewheeling intellectual exploration. On the liberal flank, Orthodox Jews observe all the dietary laws and Sabbath rituals, but they attend colleges, watch television, and engage in secular pursuits. To the right are the more rigorously observant known as haredim: Hasidic groups such as Satmar, headquartered in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or Bobov and Belz, centered in Borough Park, Brooklyn, that revere particular European-bred sages and demonstrate a zestful engagement with Torah, and the groups known as “black hats,” which are equally strict in observance but whose culture centers on the great yeshivas in Baltimore; Lakewood, New Jersey; and Flatbush, Brooklyn. Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology and Jewish studies at the City University of New York and an author of a 1992 book about the haredim called Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry, said that as Jews of all stripes have been able to navigate freely in all sectors of American society, the walls in the haredi world have grown taller and closed in.

  “When the ghettos were locked from the outside, these kinds of issues never happened,” he said. “But when they're locked from the inside, a great deal of energy has to be expended to keep the walls of virtue up so that people on one side have no contact with people on the other. Books and media are one way the walls become permeable.”

  Many children who grew up in so-called modern Orthodox families now make observance a far more encompassing part of their lives than their parents did. “The biggest news is the dawning of the black hat,” Heilman says. “The father is wearing an Izod jersey and the son looks like he came from Lithuania.”

  The remarkable shift in the city's Jewish landscape is also having an impact on its politics. The Orthodox tend to be more conservative than other Jews on such issues as abortion and gay rights, and they can vote in near-bloc strength for candidates who deliver such services as housing and subsistence payments, important matters for groups with a high birth rate and many low-income families. That explains why politicians court Orthodox votes more aggressively than those of more fragmented Jewish constituencies.

  Another result of all this ferment is that the historic pattern of New York Jewish geography has been turned upside down. Only two decades ago, there were a few black-hat and Hasidic neighborhoods in Brooklyn—Williamsburg and Borough Park, for instance—surrounded by a vibrant mix of Jewish styles everywhere else. Now secular Judaism seems to flourish mainly in Manhattan, surrounded by vigorous Orthodoxy everywhere. Orthodox Jews' numbers are expanding in neighborhoods that once held an eclectic mix of Jewish beliefs, neighborhoods such as Midwood and Flatbush in Brooklyn, Riverdale in the Bronx, and Far Rockaway, Hillcrest, Fresh Meadows, and Kew Gardens Hills in Queens. Playing on the Hebrew word haredi, for the stringently observant, Professor Helmreich of the City University told me: “We are witnessing the gradual haredization of the outer boroughs.”

  Take Midwood. It is a genteel neighborhood of eighty-year-old houses with deep front porches and overhanging eaves broken up by weathered apartment buildings. There was a substantial community of Orthodox Jews back when the neighborhood was developed—a major synagogue, Talmud Torah of Flatbush, was built then—but the Orthodox were sprinkled among the largely proletarian and lower-middle-class plain vanilla Jews, among them the parents of Woody Allen, who graduated from Midwood High School.

  Today, unsung as it is, Midwood, when combined with its neighboring zip codes of Flatbush and Kensington, has grown into the largest concentration of Jews in the entire New York area—32,500 Jewish households with 107,800 people—even larger than the far more celebrated neighborhoods of Borough Park or Williamsburg. According to the UJA report, more than half of Midwood's Jews identified themselves as Orthodox. Others suggested they are part of the Orthodox orbit, with 62 percent telling the survey they keep kosher and an astonishing 92 percent saying they send children to so-called Jewish day schools—most of which are Orthodox yeshivas.

  Many neighborhood institutions have been appropriated by the Orthodox for their needs. Vitagraph Studios, which was built in 1907 to make silent movies and became a division of Warner Bros., is now Shulamith School for Girls. Other schools include Yeshiva Chaim Berlin, Yeshiva of Flatbush, Yeshiva of Brooklyn, and, on the periphery, the nationally known Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and its rabbinical seminary, Mesivta Torah Vodaath. At most of the male yeshivas, teenage boys and young men sit at long tables unraveling the meaning of Talmud passages in an ancient singsong, their passion evident in their swaying and the uplifted thumbs that punctuate their arguments. The neighborhood also has Touro College, which was founded in 1971 as a nonsectarian institution emphasizing Jewish studies and has several campuses around New York. In Midwood, though, it holds classes on separate days for men and women so the sexes can't mingle.

  The main commercial streets, Avenue J, Avenue M, and Coney Island Avenue, might as well be the main streets of a shtetl. They are a jazzy kaleidoscope of shops that cater to an Orthodox clientele, kosher restaur
ants including Garden of Eat-In and Essex on Coney, whose pastrami is fabled across Brooklyn; groceries such as Glatt Zone and Negev Take Out; and bakeries such as Isaac's Bake Shop and Ostrowsky, said to have the neighborhood's best challah. Even the Dunkin' Donuts is kosher. The clothing stores are under rabbinical supervision to make sure the prohibition against mixing linen and wool is not violated, and hat stores such as Hat-Dashery sell the large-brimmed black fedoras popular with Orthodox men. There are several wig stores, including Ita's Wig Salon and Vizions in Wigs, since rigorously Orthodox women are prohibited from showing strangers their own hair. And for people of the book, there are several bookstores—even secular bookstores are an uncommon sight in the outer boroughs—such as Eichler's, that sell tall volumes of Talmud and commentaries.

  On Friday mornings, the streets are bustling with black-hatted men, and women pushing baby carriages and buying challahs, fish to make gefilte fish, beets for borscht, and potatoes and beans for a stew known as a cholent, to be prepared for the crowning point of the week, the Sabbath. With sunset approaching, shopkeepers lock stores and draw down protective grills and the street becomes a ghost town. The rhythm of the year is set by the holidays. Before Sukkot, for example, a half dozen shopkeepers wall off corners of their stores to sell sets of lulav and etrog—a palm frond joined with myrtle, willow, and a lemonlike fruit— which are waved in six directions during prayers.

  The reasons for the exodus of so many more secular Jews from the outer boroughs include a desire to gravitate toward the excitement of Manhattan or the spacious homes and safe, solid public schools of the suburbs. While in some neighborhoods departing Jews have been replaced by Asian, Hispanic, and black newcomers, in others they have been replaced by Orthodox families, who cluster in compact communities so they do not need a car to get to the synagogue on the Sabbath, when driving is forbidden. Queens and Brooklyn each have only six Reform synagogues left, and the Bronx has three. In the 1960s, Brooklyn alone had eleven Reform synagogues. In Queens, the majority of Conservative synagogues have lost members, with the largest, the Forest Hills Jewish Center, seeing its rolls drop to 800 families from 1,800.

  I found a vivid example of the Orthodox insurgency in Kew Gardens, one of the city's suburbanized treasures with Tudor, colonial, and Victorian homes surrounded by prewar apartment buildings set in a hilly, tree-shaded enclave in central Queens. Thirty-three years ago, the middle-class members of the Anshe Sholom Jewish Center, a Conservative house of worship, were so flush with success that they built a modernistic new temple. But almost immediately, the congregation began losing younger families to the suburbs and older ones to Florida. The trickle became a flood. By 2003, there were just two bar mitzvahs all year and the Hebrew school had one student left. The congregation could afford only part-time salaries for the rabbi and cantor. And the High Holidays cruelly reminded the aging remnant how much their temple had been humbled. “I remember when they ran a second service in the basement, it was so crowded,” Jay Graber, an earthy seventy-six-year-old printing salesman, told me. “Now we have one service and we put up less and less seats, and we can't even fill them.”

  Two years later, Anshe Sholom could no longer afford its rabbi and was searching for a tenant for its basement catering hall. The news was, nevertheless, good for the Jews. For in that same Kew Gardens neighborhood, there has been a heady upswing of the Orthodox. Indeed, it was to an Orthodox school that Anshe Sholom was trying to rent its catering hall. In tracing the neighborhood's metamorphosis, I was told that the first signs were evident in the late 1970s after the opening of a school for the advanced study of Talmud by adult men, Yeshiva Shaar Hatorah. Orthodox families began snatching up homes close to their teachers—often the homes of Conservative or Reform Jews who had retired to Florida or died—and by 2003 Rabbi Yoel Yankelewitz, executive director of the yeshiva, estimated that there were 700 Orthodox families in Kew Gardens. If the trend continues, Kew Gardens' future can be glimpsed next door in Kew Gardens Hills. The neighborhood that was once a mix of Jewish beliefs now counts all but one of its thirty synagogues as Orthodox, and its shops are so uniformly kosher that its leading ice cream parlor, Max and Mina's, sells flavors like lox, garlic, and hummus.

  Orthodox Jews are now blazing trails into the most unlikely places. In 2003, I learned that an old classmate of mine at Manhattan Day School, the yeshiva I attended through eighth grade, had arranged to hire Madison Square Garden for a performance of the Ringling Bros. circus during Passover in front of an exclusively Orthodox audience. I could not resist going along. The Torah commands Jews to be joyful on three holidays: Passover, Sukkot, and Shavuoth. How much more joyful could anyone be than at a circus? Here's how organizers made the Ring-ling Bros. circus kosher not just for Passover, when leavened bread is forbidden, but for the arcane predilections of its Orthodox audience of 19,000. They sold hot dogs without rolls and bought two brand-new cotton candy machines to make sure they were uncontaminated by leavened products. They reserved areas of the garden for those extrascrupulous souls who believed that for an event like this men and women should not sit together. And they insisted there be no female performers, including the Lycra-clad star aerialist and horse trainer Sylvia Zerbini, aka the Circus Siren.

  “It's not because we don't like ladies,” Rabbi Raphael Wallerstein, my former classmate and now a yeshiva principal in Brooklyn, told me. “I'm married with thirteen children and over thirty grandchildren. We love ladies. It's out of respect for them.”

  For several years, Rabbi Wallerstein, the unofficial impresario of the Orthodox world, had booked Passover or Sukkot events at a sports complex and amusement park in Elizabeth, New Jersey. But he wanted this year to be different from all other years. “So we said, ‘Why not give Ringling Bros. a call,’” he remembered. “They're the biggest and the best. You never know.” Not only did he get the owners to rent him the Garden, but they obeyed all his requests. And why not? He was providing a full house in midweek.

  The band started the afternoon by playing “Dayenu,” a rousing song at the Passover seder that children love. And David Larible, the master clown they call the Prince of Laughter, wore a yarmulke to perform a miracle that more than one youngster must have thought was right up there with the parting of the Red Sea: He turned another performer into a goat for several heart-stopping seconds. Through the performance, the children shrieked, gasped, guffawed, and gazed in wonder like all children who drink in a circus, maybe more so because most of these children don't have televisions and have never seen a circus. “I was scared he was going to rip him up and eat him,” said Lazer Schlesinger, a twelve-year-old with side curls, after seeing the lion tamer put his head in a lion's mouth.

  Not only Ringling Bros. but much of corporate America has found it profitable to accommodate the Orthodox. Hundreds of mainstream companies agreed to have their food production supervised by rabbis, and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, or Orthodox Union, claims that 230,000 discrete products made by 2,500 companies in sixty-eight countries carry its seal of approval. The power of this market was evident when Jews in Midwood and other Orthodox colonies complained to then-owner Kraft Foods about its plan to use a milk-infused chocolate in its Stella D'oro cookies. At the time, Stella D'oro was one of the few widely available brands that were made without milk or butter, and Orthodox Jews loved to munch them right after the Sabbath afternoon meal, where meat is traditionally the main course. (Usually up to six hours must pass before a milk product can be eaten after meat.) The cookies are pareve, meaning they have no trace of meat or dairy, and so can be consumed with either food. Stella D'oro's Swiss Fudge cookies are so treasured for their meat-congenial chocolate centers that they have been nicknamed shtreimels, the term for round fur Sabbath hats. Yet, in the few hours that I was exploring the facts of the story for The New York Times and calling Kraft for comment, Kraft did an about-face, announcing that it would continue using the same pareve chocolate. It was another demonstration of black-hat power.

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nbsp; MIDWOOD

  WHERE TO GO

  Eichler's Book and Religious Articles (TALMUDS AND TORAH COMMENTARIES) 1429 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE; (718) 258-7643; WWW.EICHLERS.COM

  Hat-Dashery Shop (WIDE-BRIMMED FEDORAS OR HOMBURGS) 1419 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE; (718) 252-1336

  Yeshiva Torah Vodaath (FERVENTLY ORTHODOX BOYS' SCHOOL) 425 EAST NINTH STREET; (718) 941-8000; THE RABBINICAL SEMINARY IS AT 452 EAST NINTH STREET.

  WHERE TO EAT

  Essex on Coney (HUMBLE DELI WITH FABLED PASTRAMI) 1359 CONEY ISLAND AVENUE; (718) 25 3-1002

  Garden of Eat-In (KOSHER DAIRY RESTAURANT) 1416 AVENUE J; (718) 252-5289

  Ostrowsky Bakery (CHALLAHS AND CAKES) 1201 AVENUE J; (718) 377-9443

  Chapter 11

  Domestic Disturbances in Rego Park

  WITH THE BREAKUP OF THE SOVIET UNION IN THE EARLY 1990S, a rather obscure group of Jews started streaming out of the Central Asian lands of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, and they soon formed a thriving colony in the central Queens lands of Rego Park, Forest Hills, and Kew Gardens. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, with lush eyebrows and a slightly olive tint to their pallid faces, they were known as Bukharans, after an Uzbek city that once formed the center of their anomalous culture. They came here steeped in a tribal pride in traditions seen nowhere else in Judaism—among them their penchant for holding frequent memorial dinners where poets commissioned for the occasion recite eulogies while mourners feast on ample servings of stuffed grape leaves. In less than a generation in Queens, they have grown to 40,000 strong, establishing a string of synagogues, a yeshiva, and colorful restaurants packed nightly with celebrants or mourners. But this remarkably tight-knit community has also been grappling with a demon that seems to have slipped in with the baggage they brought from Central Asia.