✡️Passover 2023 (Pesach) Brooklyn 🎩🎩🎩 HAT TRICK: Williamsburg, Crown Heights & Borough Park

For Passover 2023 we compare the three biggest orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn: South Williamsburg, Crown Heights, and Borough Park. Who does it the best? Walk with us and find out!

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From Hadassah:

Brooklyn, the Most Jewish Spot on Earth

By Hilary Danailova

A dozen years ago, I moved from a Park Slope brownstone to a rent-controlled apartment south of Kings Highway in Brooklyn. It turned out to be next door to the Ocean Avenue building where my grandmother, Shirley, had spent her first married years. “Tell me,” she demanded over the phone, her Brooklyn accent undimmed by 20 years in Florida, “is it one of those units with a sunken living room? Those were the hot ticket!”

​It was indeed. And as I unpacked my Ikea sofa into that sunken living room—60 years after Shirley snared her own—my family’s Brooklyn story had come full circle.

​By any measure, Brooklyn is the most Jewish place in America. Approximately 600,000 Jews now call the borough home, down from an incredible 900,000 in the 1940s. One in four Brooklyn residents is Jewish, the largest proportion by far among New York City’s five boroughs, according to the most recent survey by the UJA-Federation of New York.

​“There are more Jews right now in Brooklyn than anywhere else in the world, including the city of Tel Aviv,” said Ron Schweiger, the borough’s official historian, whose Flatlands home is a shrine to the long-vanished Brooklyn Dodgers (the team moved to Los Angeles in 1957).

(Read our travel story on the borough to learn about what to see and where to eat in Brooklyn.)

​Scratch the surface of most American Jewish families and you’ll find a Brooklyn connection. At a Passover seder in the Hollywood Hills in 2010, I learned that two fellow diners had been my Park Slope neighbors before we all headed to California for graduate school. When conversation turned to the Dodgers, the grandparents at the table joined in, reminiscing about their Brooklyn childhoods and outings to see the team play at Ebbets Field.


Park Slope brownstones
​Back in the borough, a onetime bastion of Reform Judaism, Brooklyn is today the worldwide headquarters of numerous Hasidic groups, including the Satmar dynasty and the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, whose members migrated en masse from Europe after the war and stayed through the upheavals of 20th-century urban life.

​Now those demographics are shifting again. “Almost every week I get invited to a new, independent minyan that’s launching,” says Jon Leener, an Orthodox rabbi who founded Base BKLYN, a Hillel-sponsored, post-denominational Jewish community in Williamsburg, three years ago to serve north Brooklyn’s growing non-Hasidic Jewish population. “These communities are very organic.”

​Organic is one way to describe the soulful howls of singer Louisa Rachel Solomon, whose vocals animate the Brooklyn-based band The Shondes (Yiddish for “shame”) in music they describe as “riot grrl, feminist klezmer stomp.” Solomon co-founded the group with best friend Elijah Oberman in 2006. Since then, the pair has performed with rotating bandmates they refer to as “The Greater Shondes Mishpocha.”

​“Whatever your leanings are, you can find it in Brooklyn. You never have to leave the borough,” notes Gail Hammerman, a lifelong Brooklynite and former president of Hadassah’s Brooklyn region. Worshipers can choose from 120 synagogues representing virtually every nuance of modern Jewish practice, from the full Orthodox spectrum to the cultural mosaic of Sephardim.

Signs and sidewalk chatter are Yiddish in Williamsburg, Russian in Brighton Beach, Hebrew in parts of Flatbush and Midwood. The manicured lawns and stucco mansions of Gravesend are home to the famously tight-knit Syrian community, an Arabic-speaking outpost of Brooklyn’s
Levantine Diaspora.


Rabbi Jon Leener of Base BKLYN
​Some shuls have lesbian rabbis, while many are strictly gender-segregated; some are fervently Zionist, others are hostile to the State of Israel. There are grand, historic temples and storefront shtiebels (small, informal congregations). Post-denominational organizations host pop-up Shabbat dinners, interfaith seders and gay singles nights.

​But Brooklyn’s Jewish diversity goes deeper than that. Orthodox congregations thrive in predominantly liberal neighborhoods, non-denominational minyanim pepper Hasidic bastions, and Sephardi and Ashkenazi cultures mingle in ways you rarely see elsewhere.

​“One of the crucial characteristics of Brooklyn is that Jews, on an hourly basis, are interacting with people of different backgrounds, different languages,” notes Hasia Diner, the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History at New York University. “So in Brooklyn, they’d had no choice but to find common ground with the diversity of the world’s people.”

Read more at: https://www.hadassahmagazine.org/2018...