New Hasidic Community Growing in Brownsville, Brooklyn

BROOKLYN (JTA) – Back in 2018, rabbi and educator Yossi Overlander was paying $1,500 a month to rent a one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, with his wife and two children.

It was hardly an ideal situation. “I was living on the sixth floor of an apartment building with an elevator that was sometimes not working,” Overlander, 32, said, adding that the landlord wouldn’t let him install a washer/dryer in his unit. 

For a while, though, Overlander stayed anyway; as a member of the Chabad-Lubavitch community, who works at a Lubavitcher school, Crown Heights — the epicenter of the Hasidic movement and home to its global headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway — seemed like the most logical place to live.

Fast forward to today, however, and Overlander, now a father of five, finally owns his home. And it’s decidedly not a small apartment: The house has five bedrooms, plus a dining room, a driveway, a washer/dryer and both a front yard and a back yard. Unlike in his old apartment, “I’m not at the whims of a landlord,” said Overlander, who added that he’s thrilled with the upgrade. 

The catch? The house isn’t in Crown Heights. Instead, it’s in Brownsville, a neighborhood that’s about a 35-minute walk away from 770, as the Chabad HQ is colloquially known. Brownsville was once home to a thriving Jewish community  — in 1910, 85% of the area’s residents were Jewish, according to Wendell Pritchett’s “Brownsville, Brooklyn: Blacks, Jews, and the Changing Face of the Ghetto,” and the neighborhood boasted dozens of synagogues and yeshivas. 

Today, the majority of the neighborhood’s residents are Black or Hispanic. And according to NYC.gov, 37% of residents live below the federal poverty level, making it the poorest neighborhood in Brooklyn and the seventh-poorest neighborhood in NYC, and one of its most dangerous.

A street corner in Brownsville. The Brooklyn neighborhood was once home to a large Jewish population; today the majority of its residents are Black and Latino. (Lauren Hakimi)

Nonetheless, there’s a growing cadre of Hasidic families who are moving to the neighborhood. According to Overlander — a neighborhood cheerleader, who serves on the board of a local Hasidic organization called Brownsville Anash that raises funds for the local synagogue and hosts events for the community — there were only four other Lubavitcher families in the area when his family moved there six years ago. Now, there are approximately 21 Jewish households, he said — many of them parents with young children, who left Crown Heights in search of more affordable housing. 

One of those parents is rabbi and educator Yoni Lewkowicz. He said that he moved to Brownsville around five years ago after he and his wife had their second child and needed more space than their one-bedroom apartment in Crown Heights.

“A friend of mine who happened to move to Brownsville said, ‘You know, the house across the street from me is having an open house. It looks beautiful inside. Come check it out,’” Lewkowicz said. “We were a little skeptical, and we actually used to make fun of him for living so far out. And then we ended up falling in love with the house.”

According to Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of real estate appraisal and consulting firm Miller Samuel, the median price for a home in Brownsville is approximately $610,000. Meanwhile, the median price in Crown Heights is nearly $1.2 million.

For many Orthodox Jews, moving away from established neighborhoods like Crown Heights can be difficult. Their communities boast a self-sufficient set of institutions: synagogues and yeshivas, kosher supermarkets and restaurants, mikvahs and special clothing stores, as well asf volunteer emergency services such as Hatzalah. Moving away also means losing out on the accrued benefits of relationships with elected officials and police officers who’ve grown sensitive to the needs of fervently religious Jews.

“If you’re living in Brownsville and one of your kids opens the fridge and says, ‘Hey, Dad, there’s no more milk. Mom, there’s no more bread,’ you can’t just say, ‘OK, here’s a few dollars, run around the corner to the grocery store and buy it,’ because there are no kosher food establishments in that area,” said local real estate broker JJ Katz, who is also a member of the Lubavitch community.

The newcomers interviewed by the New York Jewish Week said they visit Crown Heights often, and that some kosher grocery stores there deliver to Brownsville. There are strong reasons why these new Brownsville residents are willing to cope with the inconvenience: The benefits of living in a long-established Hasidic neighborhood might help explain why the Brooklyn neighborhoods with the largest Hasidic communities are also some of the city’s most rent-burdened — meaning that the people who live there spend more than 30% of their household income on rent.

Couple these sky-high rents with the mitzvah of having a large family and the desire to live near fellow Jews, and it’s easy to see the problem. “There’s people in Crown Heights living with five kids in a one-bedroom,” Overlander said.

Simcha Baez, a community activist who moved from Crown Heights to Brownsville last summer, said she and her husband relocated partly because they wanted to own, not rent. “We wanted to stay in Crown Heights,” she said. “We wanted to be close to 770 and the rebbe, but Crown Heights was unaffordable to buy a house.”

Chabad’s global headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights is about a 35-minute walk from Brownsville. (Luke Tress)

As more Chabadniks move to Brownsville, there are signs of a fledgling Jewish infrastructure growing in the neighborhood: Last fall, Lubavitchers celebrated a milestone when they moved their synagogue from the basement of a house to a larger space in a new, mixed-use luxury building developed by Hello Living, which is owned by Monsey-based Orthodox businessman Eli Karp.

For now, these new Brownsville Chabadniks are hopeful that as the community continues to grow so, too, will the local Orthodox infrastructure. Overlander said Anash hopes to build a mikvah, hire a dedicated rabbi for the local congregation, and someday relocate to a larger space. He’s optimistic that they can raise funds for these institutions by appealing to nostalgia for Brownsville’s Jewish past.

Back in 1939, the neighborhood had 73 synagogues, according to Pritchett. In the 1950s, though, the Jewish community declined as white residents left the neighborhood’s largely tenement housing for homes in wealthier suburbs. At the time, crime rates were high due to what some experts describe as failed urban renewal and slum clearance policies, which displaced many working-class Black and Puerto Rican people from their communities of origin and sent them to Brownsville, along with systemic discrimination and government neglect.

A sore point in Black-Jewish relations came during the Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers’ strike of 1968, which followed growing tensions between a largely Jewish group of public school teachers and a new community-controlled Black and Latino school board that wanted local parents to control curricula and staffing. Charges of racism and antisemitism abounded, and the schools shut down for 36 days.

Nonetheless, citing the Crown Heights riots of 1991 — which erupted after two Black children were unintentionally struck by a driver who was part of the motorcade of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson — Overlander said being Jewish in Brownsville doesn’t seem to come with the same baggage as it does in Crown Heights. “My kids go scootering up and down the block with all their Black neighbors,” he said. “We love them very much.”

In 1939, Brownsville boasted 73 synagogues. Today, a church uses the building that was once the Amboy Street Shul.(Lauren Hakimi)

Today’s Brownsville Lubavitcher Hasidim live in what residents describe as a quiet, 10-block radius, full of single-family houses owned largely by older Black residents. In many cases, their shared religiosity and old-school worldview makes Hasidim and older Black Brownsville homeowners compatible. 

Tiera Mack, the executive director of the Pitkin Avenue Business Improvement District and a Black resident of Brownsville, told the New York Jewish Week she hasn’t noticed an influx of Hasidic Jews. She pointed out the neighborhood’s Jewish past and said that “the majority of our property owners are Jewish” and mostly Orthodox, estimating that at least 80% of commercial properties in the neighborhood are Jewish-owned. Asked about gentrification — the fear that new, more affluent renters and buyers might displace poorer residents and businesses — Mack said it wasn’t that simple, and used Crown Heights as an example.

“On the Black and Caribbean population in Crown Heights, there’s a lot of erasure happening, but it’s not because of Hasidic people directly,” Mack said. “The conversation isn’t about one group or another gentrifying a neighborhood. The conversation is, how do we maintain cultural relevance and exposure and reduce erasure and displacement when neighborhoods change?”

Linnette Howard, a pastor at United Faith Evangelistic Ministry, a Black church in Brownsville, said that she noticed Hasidic Jews moving to her street. “We have about four families moved in on our block, and they have some beautiful children running around the block,” said Howard, whose own children are grown. “They don’t give no trouble.”

If Overlander has his way, more Lubavitcher families will soon move to the neighborhood. “We have a WhatsApp group with dozens of people trying to find houses here,” he said. “I created the group.”