If you wander into Borough Park about an hour or so past midnight on the first night of Passover you will see festively lit homes and hear singing and laughter spilling out from open windows long into the night. Walking around in the quiet, you will hear, as the locals’ Seder nights come to a close, people singing the sweet songs of my childhood; songs that have been sung at Seders around the world for thousands of years.
Though the original architecture of many Borough Park homes in not quite so old as the traditional Passover hymns, it is still far from contemporary; the detailed moldings on the attached brownstones reminiscent of the turn-of-last-century architecture in the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan. More and more, however, developers have been replacing the single-family Victorian and brownstone homes with multi-family, custom-built condominium apartments. These developments are necessary to provide room for the second-fastest growing population in Brooklyn and one of the largest communities of Hasidic Jewry in America.
The majority of Borough Park’s residents are first and second generation Americans whose parents and grandparents emigrated from Eastern Europe after World War II. However there are still enough residents from that initial generation of immigrants to rank Borough Park on the list of “Top 20 Neighborhoods in NYC of the Foreign Born” in the most recent city census. Raizy Jacobs, an English Professor at Borough Park branch of Touro College, told me that when she was growing up, she assumed that all Jewish grandparents spoke Hungarian. She still remembers her surprise upon hearing a summer camp friend’s grandmother speak an unaccented English. “It just seemed that she couldn’t be a Bubby, not with an accent like that.”
Borough Park has been jokingly called the “Jewish Capital of the United States,” and indeed there are few communities in America with such an abundance of kosher food, Jewish schools and synagogues. Hebrew and Yiddish signage abound, reminding people of upcoming hazzanut concerts, begging prayer requests for the elderly and the infirm and offering help through various community service organizations. Though the neighborhood’s population is densely packed – with more than 140,000 residents living in the 2.07 square miles that delineate the neighborhood – Borough Park is a warm and friendly place. Mothers smile at each other on 13th Avenue as they rush to pick up groceries before their children return from school and children congregate on the stoops afterwards sharing nosh from the local Hungarian bakeries as they trade stories in Yiddish.
The majority of “Boro Parkers,” as the locals have named themselves, speak Yiddish as their first language, only learning English as they enter preschool, where their days are split between Judaic and secular studies. According to city-data.com, 26.2% of the population doesn’t speak English well or at all, however with the proliferation of Yiddish speaking jobs in the Hassidic community, many people don’t find that this hinders them in their professional lives. Traditionally, the ultra-orthodox Jewish community hasn’t sent its children to pursue college degrees, with only 6.5% of the neighborhood population attending any level of college at all. Over the past decade though, the fall of manufacturing and skilled labor jobs around the city has led to a rise in poverty in the ultra-orthodox neighborhoods. With a record 34.9% of its population below the poverty mark, Borough Park ranks as one of the poorest neighborhoods in the five boroughs.
Despite the financial setbacks, entrepreneurialism abounds in the neighborhood of Borough Park. Year-long programs teaching skills like graphic design and entry-level programming are equipping the next generation for a new set of jobs, and as always, business can be created wherever there is a need. Efraim Daskal is one such entrepreneur. At the age of 20 he learned to code in a series of technical classes offered in the Lower East Side so he could support his wife and new baby. He spent many years working long, grueling hours in various offices in Williamsburg. One weekend a friend of his asked him to fill in for a sick member in a local singing group. While singing is not always a lucrative career in a city filled with artists, in the Hasidic community, a singer is a steadier profession with paying jobs available every night during high wedding season. Efraim fit in so well with the singing group that they asked him to join as a permanent member. Eventually this inspired him to leave his position as a programmer and start his own business repairing musical equipment for local bands. He loves his new profession.
Efraim and his wife Shifra both grew up in Borough Park, where they are now currently raising their children. Until recently they had been living in a small 700 square foot rental, but when a condo went on the market across from a cemetery at the edge of the neighborhood, Efraim grabbed the opportunity to buy it. With the exponentially rising population rates, property in Borough Park is becoming scarce. The high demand has led to steep spikes in real estate prices. Small concessions, like living near a cemetery or the elevated train allow savvy shoppers to maximize on what funding they do have.
For Efraim and Shifra, this condo is a godsend. Their growing family has outgrown the small rental, and rising rent prices pinch their bank account every month. After months of discussing possible moves to Rockland County or New Jersey, a friend of a friend mentioned the condo to Efraim in synagogue one morning. He headed to the real estate office as soon as he could. Of his five siblings, three still live in Borough Park, and the other two live within a 45 minute driving distance. Efraim loves living within walking distance from his parents: he even runs his repair shop from their garage. His new condo is near his favorite synagogue and close to where his grandparents used to live on 18th Avenue. He chokes up a little when he remembers walking over to Bubby and Zeidy Wercberger for Shabbos meals, mentioning that he wants his own children to have the same proximity to their grandparents. Efraim doesn’t mind his prospective neighbors in the cemetery. “I’ll put up a big fence, and no matter what, I know they won’t have any complaints. What more can you ask for in a neighbor?”
Efraim isn’t the only twenty-something in Borough Park choosing to stay and raise his family within the community of his youth. More and more young couples are moving into Borough Park’s smallest rental spaces right after marriage with the hopes of saving up for an apartment of their own. The borders of communal “Barapark” have expanded well past the central shopping of 13th avenue. The neighborhood is reflecting the growing twenty and thirty something population with new, trendy restaurants constantly opening – a third kosher sushi bar just opened a couple of weeks ago on 13th – extending their hours well into the night. There are all-women’s yoga classes and Yiddish speaking personal trainers. New synagogues open frequently led by a cohort of youthful Hasidic Rebbes paving the way for specific niche congregations, allowing younger people to have a voice in the community’s decisions.
Borough Park wasn’t always bustling and cosmopolitan. Originally named Blythbourne by Electus Litchfield in 1887, the space that is now called Borough Park was once a small community of cottage homes relatively close to Manhattan Island by train. In 1902 the neighborhood was absorbed into a larger sized area dubbed Borough Park by the state senator William Reynolds. As the train systems around Brooklyn and the city expanded, Italian and Jewish immigrants from Western Europe began moving into the neighborhood. The famed 13th avenue filled with Jewish pushcarts and pickle sellers hawking their wares. After the liberation following World War II many Jewish survivors and refugees from Eastern Europe began moving into the neighborhood, attracted by the preexisting synagogues and kosher institutions. By the 1970s Borough Park was predominantly Hasidic, as many of these immigrants’ children chose to settle near their parents to raise their families.
Levi Licht remembers moving to Borough Park in 1964. His family had moved to New York from a displaced persons camp in 1949. They tried a few locations around the city, settling first in Crown Heights near the growing Chabad community of Eastern Parkway. Unsettled by growing tensions in the neighborhood, his parents moved to 51st street in Borough Park so that their neighborhood could be safer for their sons. Real estate was much more affordable then, and his parents bought one half of a two-family attached house for $5,250. Levi still remembers the exact amount more than 50 years later because his parents couldn’t afford to pay a penny more. The real estate agent was so desperate to get the property off of his hands that he was willing to pay another $250 out of his own pocket to make the deal. Levi laughs at this memory, since Borough Park is now, more than ever, a sellers market. He grows pensive though, at the economic difficulty this provides. The average property cost in Borough Park according to city-data.com is $847,700, and he has watched with consternation as his children struggle to afford living in the area.
Levi’s first memories of Borough Park were those that he shared with his Yeshiva classmates. He tells stories of riding the trains around the city, and biking up and down the streets of the neighborhood. Initially, his family was the first Jewish family on the predominantly Italian block, but as time went on, the Italians moved away and more Jewish families moved in from Crown Heights and Canada. He and his wife Sima moved into the other half of the split family home, next to his parents, in 1974, and they have lived on the same property ever since, moving next door when Levi’s mother passed away.
According to Levi, Borough Park was different forty years ago. He says there was more of a communal feeling then between all the Hassidic sects. It didn’t matter which Rebbe you followed or how strict your dress code was; everyone was relieved to have survived the war and grateful for community. Now, he says, the communal growth comes with pros and cons. There are more children and grandchildren than, he thinks, any of the survivors thought possible. There are myriad kosher institutions and community service organizations taking care that no one in the community is left hungry or alone. However all this advancement comes with greater demands for conformity and more socio-religious obligations. “I remember when a fellow Yid [Jew] was just a fellow Yid. We all worked hard to make it in America together, and we reached out to support each other on the way up. I hope the younger generation will understand the value in a community that values every member too.”
