Published: 19 September 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
THE ULTRA-ORTHODOX ENCLAVE of Boro Park, Brooklyn, is inhabited by various large Chasidic groups and many smaller ones that began to move into what was a Jewish and Italian neighbourhood in the 1950s and ’60s. By the mid-1970s, most of the non-Orthodox and even modern Orthodox synagogues in Boro Park had closed and the neighbourhood became a bustling world of Chasidic life.
In addition, it began to attract baalei teshuva (newly religious) Jews who sought the romantic life of Hasidism, many of whom, like myself, took on the garb (levush) and lifestyle of Hasidic Jews. We were a bit of an anomaly to many of our neighbours who could not quite make sense of our choices but they embraced us nonetheless albeit somewhat bemused by our passion and devotion.
Boro Park in those years was a specific moment in postwar American Judaism when some Jewish refugees from the New Left began to envision Chasidism as an expression of the counterculture many of us left behind.
FULL STORY The Chasidic underground (Tablet)
Illustration: Michael Gae Levin
