How Brooklyn became the biggest Hungarian city outside Budapest

TAS TOBIAS: While few Chasidic Jews remained in Hungary after the Holocaust, Hungarian culture lives on among more than a 100,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn

WHEN I’M IN New York City, I have a favourite routine: I grab a cappuccino at one of the chic coffee shops in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighbourhood, then head south toward the Chasidic area. At about South 9th Street, a strikingly different world emerges; gone are the designer stores, stylish hipsters, and luxury high-rises. Instead a secluded world of ultra-Orthodox Jews appears.

The men wear hats, long beards, side curls, and black coats from which the white fringes of their prayer shawls dangle. Speaking Yiddish, they’re glued to their flip phones as they scurry around the busy streets. The women, bewigged and clad in long black skirts, navigate the streets with baby strollers and roving children. 

Often, I’m the only non-Orthodox person on the street. All restaurants, grocery stores, and pastry shops are strictly kosher, many of them with Yiddish signs. Observing this insular world smack in the middle of New York City is a surreal experience.

I like to walk up to elderly men and ask for directions — in Hungarian. Almost without fail, they respond in fluent, though rustic Hungarian, spoken with a charming vernacular of the countryside. 

Few people know that Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Chasidic people originate from 19th century Hungary. Chasidism, a branch of Orthodox Judaism, found fertile ground among the poor Jews of northeastern Hungary who lived in rural communities. 

Unlike the secular, assimilated Jews of Budapest and other big cities, the Chasidim opposed integration, held to the ancient traditions, and formed large hereditary dynasties (or sects) under the strict guidance of a revered grand rebbe. 

After the Holocaust, when nearly all were killed, the survivors fled Hungary and rebuilt their communities from the ashes in the newly formed Israel and in the United States.

FULL STORY Brooklyn is the biggest Hungarian city outside Budapest (Offbeat Budapest)