Mystics in the Suburbs

Along Route 45 near rural Ramapo, N.Y., bounces a big green soda truck with a driver to make heads turn--big, bespectacled and full-bearded, beneath a round, wide-brimmed black hat. When he turns off the highway into a community of modern Cape Cod cottages, the friend who greets him on the roadside or waves from a window might be his double--big beard, black hat, black coat and all. This is how men look in New Square.

Miraculous Rabbis. The people of New Square are Hasidim, adherents of a Jewish mystical movement that sprang from the ghettos of eastern Europe in the 18th century in reaction against the rigid intellectual austerity of Diaspora Judaism. The Hasidim were orthodox in observing the law, but their special emphasis was on love and joy and they gathered around holy men, or zaddikim, whom they believed to have miraculous powers.

Today three of the most illustrious zaddikim live in the U.S., notably the Rabbi Jacob Joseph Twersky, from the Ukrainian town of Skvir and known as "the Skvirer Rabbi," who came to Brooklyn in 1948.* Six years ago, deciding that the city pressed too hard on community piety and godly raising of children, the Skvirer Rabbi moved with his followers about 40 miles from Manhattan to a 130-acre farm near the heavily Jewish village of Spring Valley. Here they planned a Hasidic haven of five-room cottages and laid out streets named for Presidents of the U.S. They intended to name the community New Skvir, but a typist's error Americanized it to New Square.

In New Square the rabbi's followers felt that they would at last be free to live unto themselves, without subjecting their schoolboys to jeers at their traditional black coats, round black hats, Orthodox Jewish earlocks. But they soon found that things were not that simple. Zoning laws and sewage disposal, bonds and deeds and building permits, suits and countersuits have plagued the gentle Hasidim of New Square.

The Law's Delay. For their part, the officials of Ramapo township feel that their patience has been severely tried by a wily band which, if it has its way, will import droves of bearded and babushkaed fanatics from Brooklyn and crowd them into jerry-built cottages. The current standoff: New Square has applied for incorporation as a village, which would give it control over its own zoning and building, but the township refuses to process the application and is suing the Hasidim for the deed to their streets and sewage system, which they are required by law to surrender (New Square refuses to turn over the deeds until the township acts on its application for incorporation).

About 40 New Square citizens work in New York City and commute on a bus dubbed "The Mobile Synagogue." En route, the commuters pray, and when female passengers are aboard, a curtain separates them from the men, in observance of Jewish law. In the warm kitchens --each with two sinks and two stoves to keep dairy and meat foods strictly separate--the women work and wonder when the community will be free of its mundane bedevilments. It is not likely to be soon. Says Ramapo's town attorney, David Moses, himself a Jew: "We have done more for them than for others under similar circumstances. But frankly, I wish they'd go back to Brooklyn."

* The others: the Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum and the Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson of the so-called Lubavitcher sect, both established in Brooklyn's Williamsburg section.

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