Overlooking the Providence River in downtown Providence, Rhode Island. Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

By Louis Keene January 30, 2024

It used to be that the low cost of living in Providence, Rhode Island — and its proximity to Boston and New York — were enough to draw a steady stream of Orthodox Jews to the humble community on the city’s east side.

But when housing prices soared during the pandemic, the community’s population dwindled, prompting its leaders to introduce a new recruitment strategy.

A local initiative called Jewish Providence is soliciting applications from young Orthodox families interested in moving to the community, offering them $50,000, a year of free tuition at the local Orthodox school to enroll their kids, and a $1,000 move-in stipend to relocate.

Rabbi Peretz Scheinerman, the dean of Providence Hebrew Day School, is helping lead the program. He said the community is looking for five to 10 families to join the program, and the initiative has already received double-digit applications since launching about two months ago.

Beth Abrahim, who serves on the recruitment committee for the initiative, told Jewish Rhode Island that 15 families had moved away from Providence just in the past year.

Scheinerman said he’s hoping people see the offer as an incentive to “get away from the grind of New York or the grind of New Jersey,” and to “really join a community where they can make a difference.”

Scheinerman, 66, moved to Providence from Los Angeles about 22 years ago, hoping to get closer to his parents, who lived about a three-hours’ drive away in Lakewood, New Jersey.

He fell in love with the city’s slower pace, and the values of a college town.

Affluence has created a lot of pressure in Jewish culture in bigger Jewish areas, he said. 

People in Providence, on the other hand, may “have nice homes, but they’re not into affluence,” he said. “In general, they’re more into preparing their kids for life — not preparing for the next vacation.”

The city’s Orthodox community is small. There’s a kosher supermarket and an eruv — which enables Orthodox Jews to carry objects on Shabbat — but no kosher pizzeria. There are multiple Orthodox minyanim, or prayer groups, but no Orthodox high school basketball rivalries. The Brown University kosher cafeteria, open six days a week, is its primary hot food service.

“It’s not the same as being in a larger city, certainly,” Scheinerman said. “At the same time, it offers people what they need here.” 

The cost of living has gone up in Providence in recent years, in part as a result of remote work’s increasing prevalence during the pandemic. Still, Scheinerman said, the $50,000 would go a long way toward a down payment on a three-bedroom home on the east side, where the Orthodox community is based.

That money will be disbursed immediately, but comes with a lien held by Jewish Providence that is deducted by $10,000 per year for five years. Scheinerman said the funding came from a grant.

Jewish Providence isn’t the first Jewish community to try a program like this. The Jewish community in Dothan, Alabama, about 100 miles southeast of Montgomery, once offered $50,000 to households to relocate there. In Meridian, Mississippi, in 2012, a Reform synagogue offered $25,000 grants to families who stayed at least five years.

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