Brooklyn, NY - Chasidic Families Are Priced Out Of The Boro, For Western N.Y.

Brooklyn, NY - The cost of living in Brooklyn has become so outrageous for some Chasidic families that a Williamsburg rabbi has carved a path of enlightenment - all the way to Scranton, in far western New York State.

As many as 100 families are expected to flee to the serenity of Scranton, in Erie County south of Buffalo, where rabbis Isaac and Altar Rosenbaum are opening a 900-seat private school.
"We are a very large group in Brooklyn and everything has become very expensive here - house payments, taxes, bills, everything," said Isaac Rosenbaum, 39. "It's too much."
Fifteen families from the Nitra and Nadvornah sects have already signed contracts on new homes, the most costly going for around $229,000, said a broker.

The exodus from Williamsburg and Borough Park started in June after Backus took out ads in a local Jewish paper and on a popular Chasidic phone line.
Those ads averaged 40 calls a day, she said. The rabbis, who sermonize from the synagogue Mamer Mordachi on Bedford Ave., were the first to respond. After a Scranton developer bowed out, the rabbis purchased the shuttered intermediate school for $400,000, Isaac Rosenbaum said.
Rabbi Isaac Rosenbaum said he believes he can lure several hundred more families - enough to fill the entire school.
Rivky Gross, 23, said she and husband Abraham, 21, have already picked out their dream home - a four-unit apartment building with a ground floor storefront.
That building will cost her $130,000, said Backus. "If I know there's going to be a Jewish settlement and they'll have everything we need, that's all I need to go there," said Rivky Gross, who currently rents an apartment in Williamsburg. "A lot of people are looking."
Luzi Friedman, whose family lives in Williamsburg, moved to Scranton last August. He plans to open a shoe store with the money he's saved on cheap lunches and cheaper parking. "I actually have a friend who moved in yesterday from Brooklyn - another city guy," said Friedman, 32. "There are plenty of Jews here, but I'm the first so far to walk around with a shtrimel."