Drive west along Route 59 in Rockland County on a Friday afternoon and the rhythm of the road changes. Storefronts carry Yiddish lettering, men in black hats hurry between the kosher market and the study hall, and by sundown the traffic stills for the Sabbath. This is Monsey, and the story of the Jews in Monsey is one of the most consequential chapters of Orthodox life in modern America.
The Place
Monsey is a hamlet within the town of Ramapo, in Rockland County, New York, roughly 35 miles northwest of Manhattan. It sits in a wooded, hilly landscape that the Munsee band of the Lenape once used for seasonal habitation, and the name itself is an alternate spelling of Munsee.
For most of its early history this was farm country. A railroad station built when the New York and Erie Railroad passed through the glen in 1841 gave the place its name and its first small commercial life. For more than a century afterwards it remained a quiet rural corner of the Hudson Valley.
Today Monsey is something else entirely: one of the largest concentrations of Hasidic and Haredi Jews anywhere outside New York City, a place where Torah study and kosher commerce shape almost every block.
How It Became Jewish
The transformation of Monsey from farmland to Torah centre happened within a single human lifetime. It began in the shadow of the Holocaust, accelerated with a bridge, and never stopped.
The first institutions, 1943 to 1944
The foundations were laid by educators, not developers. In 1943 the Yeshiva of Spring Valley took root in the area, reportedly beginning in the basement of a local synagogue with a handful of students. That same year Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz, the visionary behind Torah Vodaas in Brooklyn, purchased property in Monsey with the aim of raising the level of Torah teachers in America.
In 1944 that property was reconstituted as Beth Medrash Elyon, an advanced rabbinical academy and Monsey’s first major Jewish institution. It signalled an idea that would define the hamlet: that serious Torah scholarship could be transplanted from the city to the countryside and flourish there.
The Hasidim arrive, 1948 onward
The Hasidic chapter opened with one rabbi and his followers. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Twersky, grandson of the founder of the Skver dynasty from the Ukrainian town of Skvera, survived the war in Romania and reached the United States in 1948.
Leading his Skverer Hasidim out of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg in search of a more insulated religious life, Twersky settled his community in Rockland County. In 1954 he established what would become the village of New Square, a self-contained Hasidic enclave a short distance from Monsey, incorporated in 1961 after a long struggle with Ramapo officials. Its name was meant to read as New Skver but was recorded otherwise at the county courthouse.
New Square set the pattern. Where one Hasidic court could build a yeshiva, a synagogue and a network of mutual support, others followed.
The bridge and the boom, from 1955
Geography did the rest. When the Tappan Zee Bridge opened across the Hudson in 1955, it suddenly placed Rockland County within easy reach of New York City. Families who had once summered in the country could now live there year-round and still keep ties to Brooklyn.
The arithmetic of Orthodox life pushed migration forward. Post-war Hasidic communities had exceptionally high birth rates, often more than six children per family, and the city offered nothing affordable to growing households. Monsey offered space, lower costs, and a chance to build institutions from scratch.
The growth was relentless. By 1997, Monsey was reported to have 112 synagogues and 45 yeshivas, an astonishing density for a single hamlet. The community drew in court after court, so that today Satmar, Vizhnitz, Sanz, Belz and Spinka Hasidim all maintain a presence, alongside a large non-Hasidic Haredi population.
Monsey’s rise mirrored a wider Orthodox expansion across the New York suburbs. Communities took shape in the Five Towns of Long Island, in places such as the Jewish community of Lawrence and nearby Hewlett, and along the Hudson in the Jews of Riverdale in the Bronx. Monsey was the most concentratedly Hasidic of them all.
A centre for returnees, from 1977
Monsey also became a destination for Jews finding their way back to observance. In 1977 the Jerusalem-based Ohr Somayach yeshiva opened an American campus, first in Yonkers and then, after Rabbi Ezriel Tauber and a group of lay leaders purchased land, on a campus in Monsey itself.
As a baal teshuva yeshiva, Ohr Somayach welcomed men with little prior Jewish education and immersed them in classical texts. For decades it drew students from across North America and beyond, broadening Monsey’s reach past the Hasidic dynasties into the wider Orthodox world. The yeshiva ceased operating around 2019, but its decades in Monsey left a lasting mark on the town’s identity as a place of return.
The Landmarks
Yeshiva of Spring Valley, 142 Grandview Avenue. One of the oldest institutions in the community, tracing its roots to 1943, the school grew from a basement minyan into a sprawling educational network. It now serves well over a thousand students and is regarded as a cornerstone of Monsey chinuch, or religious education.
Evergreen Kosher Market, 59 Route 59. A 30,000 square foot supermarket combining grocery, butcher, bakery, fish counter, produce, sushi and a full service deli, Evergreen is one of the hubs of daily life in Monsey. In a community where every product must carry reliable kosher certification, a market of this scale is both a convenience and a landmark.
Wesley Kosher Supermarket, 455 Route 306. Anchoring the Wesley Hills Plaza on Route 306, Wesley Kosher is another of the large kosher supermarkets that serve the area’s enormous households. The plaza around it has become a small commercial centre of Monsey, with restaurants and shops oriented entirely to an observant clientele.
The Monsey eruv. Established by the community’s rabbonim in the winter of 1995 to 1996, the Monsey Eruv Association maintains the symbolic boundary that permits carrying on the Sabbath. It has grown into one of the largest eruvin in the country, eventually spanning more than 40 square miles and relying on close to 3,000 utility poles across Rockland County.
Congregation Yeshivas Meon Hatorah, 244 Route 306. One of the many yeshivas lining Route 306, the spine of Orthodox Monsey, Meon Hatorah is typical of the institutions that give the corridor its character. Along this road, study halls, schools and synagogues sit in close succession.
New Square, Spring Valley. Just beyond Monsey lies the incorporated village founded by the Skverer Rebbe, the first Hasidic court to plant itself in Rockland County. Entirely Skverer Hasidic, with Yiddish as its everyday language, New Square remains the historic seed from which the wider community grew.
Monsey Glen. The wooded ravine and stone steps of Monsey Glen are a reminder of the older landscape, the glen the railroad once crossed in 1841. It is a quiet counterpoint to the dense religious life that now surrounds it, and a link to the hamlet’s pre-war past.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Monsey trace their origins overwhelmingly to the Hasidic courts of pre-war Central and Eastern Europe. The Skverer Hasidim came by way of Skvera in Ukraine, the Satmar from the town of Szatmar on the Hungarian-Romanian border, and others from Sanz, Belz, Vizhnitz and Spinka, each a dynasty named for the European town where it began.
Almost all arrived by an indirect route. The Holocaust destroyed these communities in Europe, and the surviving rebbes and their followers regrouped first in New York City, mainly in Williamsburg and Borough Park in Brooklyn. Monsey was the second migration, a deliberate move out of the crowded city to build anew.
That history still echoes in the streets. More than four in ten residents speak Yiddish at home, the language of the old country carried intact across an ocean and two generations.
The same dynastic roots connect Monsey to Orthodox enclaves far beyond New York, from the Syrian and Ashkenazi neighbourhoods of the Five Towns to Torah communities in the Midwest such as the Jews of University Heights outside Cleveland. What sets Monsey apart is scale and density, a critical mass that let it reproduce nearly every institution of European Jewish life on American soil.
Monsey Today
Monsey today is young, dense and overwhelmingly observant. The 2020 census counted 26,954 residents, with a median age of just 15.7 years and more than half the population under 18, figures that reflect the community’s very large families. Households average close to five people each.
It is, by most measures, the largest centre of Hasidic Judaism in the United States outside New York City. Yiddish and English share the storefronts and the dinner tables, the kosher supermarkets run at the scale of warehouses, and the calendar turns on the Sabbath and the festivals rather than the secular week.
Growth has brought tension as well. The pressure of a fast-expanding population on a once-rural town has fuelled long-running disputes over housing, schools and land use in Ramapo, and the eruv has drawn legal challenges from neighbouring New Jersey municipalities. These are the frictions of a community that has, in eighty years, remade the place it settled. For the families who live there, Monsey is simply home: a Torah town built from farmland, one synagogue at a time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many Jews live in Monsey, New York?
The Jews in Monsey settled there from the late 1940s onward, seeking affordable suburban space for large Orthodox families within reach of New York City. The opening of the Tappan Zee Bridge in 1955 and the founding of yeshivas and Hasidic courts turned a rural hamlet into a major Torah centre.
What kind of Jewish community is Monsey?
Monsey is a predominantly Hasidic and Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox, community. It includes Skver, Satmar, Vizhnitz, Sanz, Belz and Spinka Hasidim, alongside a large non-Hasidic Haredi population and a network of yeshivas and synagogues.
When did Jews first settle in Monsey?
The first major Jewish institutions appeared in 1943 and 1944, when the Yeshiva of Spring Valley began and Rabbi Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz founded Beth Medrash Elyon. Hasidic settlement followed from 1948, when Rabbi Yaakov Yosef Twersky led his Skverer followers to Rockland County.
How many Jews live in Monsey?
The 2020 census recorded 26,954 residents in Monsey, the overwhelming majority of them Orthodox Jews. With more than half the population under 18 and large households, the Jews in Monsey form one of the largest Hasidic concentrations in America outside New York City.
What is the difference between Monsey and New Square?
New Square is a separately incorporated village founded by the Skverer Rebbe in 1954 and home entirely to Skverer Hasidim. Monsey is the larger surrounding hamlet within the town of Ramapo, home to many different Hasidic courts and Haredi families.
What is the Monsey eruv?
The Monsey eruv is a symbolic boundary, maintained by the Monsey Eruv Association since the winter of 1995 to 1996, that permits observant Jews to carry items outdoors on the Sabbath. It has grown to span more than 40 square miles across Rockland County using nearly 3,000 utility poles.
If your family’s story passed through Monsey, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Hasidic courts of Skvera, Szatmar and Belz, to a Torah town built on Rockland County farmland, to wherever you are now.