It’s spring in Williamsburg and that means one thing: Hasidic groups and New York City are gearing up for another fight over single-sex swimming hours at public pools. The city originally granted the single-sex swimming hours at two area pools as an accommodation to the area’s Hasidic women, whose code of modesty precludes them from…
An Orthodox man walking to his car in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn was on the receiving end of New York’s post-election hate crime wave, as teens pelted him with ice and shouted at “South Side Jew” at him. “Two kids, they were DNAInfo. “I don’t know what that means.” The epithet might have been…
The country’s post-election hate crime wave has now hit Williamsburg, where residents at the Independence Towers in the southern part of the Brooklyn neighborhood discovered swastikas and the slogans “KKK” and “Trump” graffitied on the stairwell Friday. “Such messages are extremely painful and when dismissed and ignored, it can escalate into physical attacks, God forbid,”…
Before we got married, my husband, Tom, lived in an old limestone tenement in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn. North Williamsburg had already become hipsterville, but almost every building south of Broadway housed Satmar families. If you’ve driven through Brooklyn on a Friday night or Saturday morning, you have at least glimpsed Satmar families walking to synagogue,…
Assemblyman Dov Hikind dove back into Brooklyn’s Hasidic swimming pool wars, sending a letter to the New York City Parks Department that demands it reverse a plan to limit women-only hours at the Metropolitan Recreation Center in Williamsburg. The city Parks Department granted the single-sex swimming hours as an accommodation to the area’s Hasidic women,…
Residents of the Hasidic neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, refused to help police investigating the 2013 gang beating of a black gay man by Orthodox Jews, an NYPD detective testified in open court August 30. According to accounts of the trial published in the New York Post and the New York Daily News, a police detective…
Two-and-a-half years after a late-night gang beating that left him partially blinded, Brooklyn man Taj Patterson is preparing to face one of his alleged assailants in court. Mayer Herskovic, a 24-year-old Hasidic man, faces felony charges connected to the Williamsburg, Brooklyn beating in a trial that began August 29 in Brooklyn Supreme Court. Patterson is…
Federal raids last week of yeshivas in Brooklyn and in Rockland and Orange Counties in New York have set Hasidic communities on edge, as concern spreads about a possible government crackdown on Orthodox exploitation of the federal E-Rate technology subsidy program. Now, the Forward has learned that Hasidic leaders believe that the Federal Bureau of…
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