Kiryas Joel and Satmar

Hasidism was the powerful Jewish pietist movement that took rise in eastern Europe in the late 18th century and spread widely throughout the region in the 19th century. Among the places where Hasidism found a particularly receptive audience was Hungary, especially the northeast quadrant known as the Unterland. It was there that the Teitelbaum family of rabbis emerged as purveyors of a stringent form of religious Orthodoxy that came to be known as haredi. A scion of the family, Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum (b. 1887–d. 1979), was appointed rabbi of the city of Satu Mare, Romania (formerly Szatmár, Hungary) in 1928; after six years of opposition in the city, he assumed his new job in 1934, thereby inaugurating the Satmar movement of Hasidism. Unlike most of his followers (and for some, quite controversially), Teitelbaum survived World War II, and eventually made his way to the United States in 1946. There he settled in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn and began the work of rebuilding the Satmar community. Over the course of the past seventy years, the Satmars have grown into the largest Hasidic group in the world with some 150,000 estimated members in North America, Europe, Israel, South America, and Australia. One of Rabbi Teitelbaum’s goals upon settling in the United States was to create, alongside the home base in Williamsburg, an enclave outside of the city where members of the Satmar flock could lead their traditional lives without interference. It took decades to find an appropriate site at a remove from New York City, but still close enough to commute for employment. In the early 1970s, Rabbi Teitelbaum’s advisors, to whom he entrusted the task of finding a venue, purchased land in the town of Monroe in Orange County, New York. In the summer of 1974, the first Satmar settlers began arriving from Brooklyn to the newly built neighborhood in Monroe that was called “Kiryas Joel,” the village of Joel. In 1977, after several years of conflict with town officials, the Satmar community was officially incorporated as the village of Kiryas Joel within the town of Monroe. The community has grown from the first hundred residents in 1974 to over thirty thousand residents today, almost all of whom are Satmar Hasidim. In 2019, Kiryas Joel residents ended decades of acrimony by exiting the town of Monroe altogether to create the new town of Palm Tree (the English for Teitelbaum).