By the time the sun starts dropping on a Friday afternoon, Bedford Avenue south of the Williamsburg Bridge has emptied of traffic and filled with men in long black coats walking briskly home. The storefront signs are in Yiddish. The bakery windows are stacked with challah. A child in a velvet kippah holds his father’s hand, and the whole street is preparing for Shabbos as if the year were 1953 and as if the world had not changed around them. This is South Williamsburg, the heart of the Satmar Hasidic community, the largest single Hasidic group in the world.
The Place
South Williamsburg sits south of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the elevated concrete spine that splits the neighbourhood in two. To the north, beyond the BQE, is the Williamsburg of artists, breweries, and twenty-something transplants. To the south, the streets tighten into a dense grid of brick rowhouses, yeshivos, kosher butchers, and synagogues.
The core runs along Bedford Avenue and Lee Avenue, with Marcy, Penn, Hooper, and Rodney streets threaded between. The J, M, and Z trains stop at Marcy Avenue and Hewes. From those platforms you can walk a block south and be in what feels, in language and dress and rhythm, like a small Hungarian Hasidic town that somehow survived.
How It Became Satmar
A Rebbe from Hungary
The story of Satmar in Williamsburg starts in a town called Szatmárnémeti, known in Yiddish as Satmar. It sat in northeastern Hungary at the time, in a region of small market towns where Hasidic life was woven into the fabric of every street. After the First World War, the Treaty of Trianon redrew the map and the town became Satu Mare, Romania. Today it is still in Romania, near the Hungarian border.
In 1905, a young rabbi named Joel Teitelbaum, born in 1887 into the Sighet Hasidic dynasty, began to establish his own court. After years of disputes within the local Orthodox community, he was confirmed as the chief rabbi of Satmar in 1934. He was a fierce traditionalist and an outspoken anti-Zionist, and his court drew followers from across northern Transylvania, Subcarpathian Rus, and Hungary.
The Kasztner Train
In the spring of 1944, German forces occupied Hungary and the deportations to Auschwitz began. Within months, nearly the entire Jewish population of Satmar was gone. Joel Teitelbaum was placed on a train organised by the Hungarian Zionist Rudolf Kasztner, which left Budapest on 30 June 1944 carrying roughly 1,680 Jews who had been ransomed from the Nazis. The train was diverted to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany.
After months of captivity, the passengers were released in stages. Teitelbaum reached Switzerland with the second group on 7 December 1944. From there he went to Mandatory Palestine, and on 27 September 1946 he arrived in New York aboard the motor vessel Vulcania. He settled in Williamsburg.
Rebuilding on Bedford Avenue
Williamsburg in 1946 was a working-class district of Polish, Italian, and German Catholics, with a smaller German-Jewish presence already established. It was cheap, it was unfashionable, and it was, crucially, not yet a centre of Jewish middle-class life. That suited Teitelbaum. He wanted distance from the assimilation he saw on the Upper West Side, and he wanted streets where his followers could live an unbroken Hungarian-Hasidic life in Yiddish.
In April 1948, his followers incorporated Congregation Yetev Lev as a religious corporation. The first main shul went up on Bedford Avenue. Survivors of the Hungarian camps came in through the 1940s and 1950s, drawn by the rebbe’s presence and by relatives who had arrived first. By 1961, a survey put the Satmar community in Williamsburg at around 4,500 people. A network of yeshivos, mikvahs, bakeries, butchers, and Yiddish bookshops grew up around the rebbe’s court.
Succession, and a Split
Joel Teitelbaum died in 1979. His nephew Moshe Teitelbaum took over as Satmar rebbe and led the community for nearly three decades. In 1999, Moshe appointed his younger son Zalman Leib as rabbi of the Williamsburg congregation, while his elder son Aaron continued to lead the Satmar village of Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York. Hasidic custom usually passes leadership to the eldest son, and the appointment was contested from the start.
When Moshe died in 2006, the dispute hardened into an open break. Two brothers, two courts, two sets of institutions. Aaron leads the Satmar of Kiryas Joel. Zalman Leib leads the Satmar of Williamsburg from the shul on Rodney Street. The split runs through schools, charities, newspapers, and weddings, and it has shaped daily life in Williamsburg for nearly twenty years.
The Landmarks
Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar, 152 Rodney Street. The main shul of the Williamsburg Satmar community and the seat of Zalman Leib Teitelbaum. It replaced the older Bedford Avenue shul once the congregation outgrew it. On Shabbos and the high holidays the building fills with thousands of men in shtreimels and black silk bekishes, and the sound of Hungarian Yiddish prayer fills the block.
Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar, Hooper Street. The earlier Satmar shul, still in use, sits a few blocks away. For many older Satmar Hasidim, it remains the heart of the community as the rebbe Joel Teitelbaum knew it.
Lee Avenue. The commercial spine of Hasidic Williamsburg. Yiddish-only signs above kosher grocers, sheitel shops, sefarim stores, and bakeries. On a weekday afternoon the avenue is full of mothers pushing twin strollers and yeshiva boys walking home.
The yeshivos and kollels. The community runs an enormous network of Yiddish-language schools, from cheders for boys to seminaries for girls and kollels for married men studying full time. The Satmar school system is one of the largest private religious networks in the United States.
Satmar Bikur Cholim. The community chesed organisation that provides meals, medical advocacy, lodging, and support to Satmar families when a relative is hospitalised. It is one of the most visible expressions of the Hasidic ethic that no member of the community should face illness alone.
Der Yid. The weekly Yiddish newspaper founded in 1953 by Aaron Rosmarin and shaped from its early years by the Satmar rebbe himself. Today Der Yid is aligned with the Williamsburg faction and is one of the largest Yiddish-language papers in the world.
The Krias HaTorah parade. An annual Williamsburg procession that escorts a newly written Torah scroll through the streets under a wedding canopy, with music, dancing, and thousands of marchers. It is one of the few moments when the Satmar community pours out of its institutions and onto Bedford and Lee in plain view.
Where They Came From
Almost every Satmar family in Williamsburg can trace its roots to a corridor of small towns in northern Transylvania, Subcarpathian Rus, and northeastern Hungary. Satu Mare itself. Sighet, the neighbouring town of the parent dynasty. Máramaros, Munkács, and the network of Hungarian-speaking Hasidic centres that the Treaty of Trianon scattered across new borders after 1920.
The Holocaust erased almost all of it. The Hungarian Jewish communities were among the last destroyed and among the most completely destroyed, with deportations beginning only in the spring of 1944. The Satmar dynasty in Williamsburg was rebuilt by survivors, around a rebbe who had himself been pulled off a train bound for the camps. Memory in this community is not abstract. It is one generation away.
Williamsburg Today
Satmar is now the largest Hasidic group in the world. Estimates put the global Satmar population somewhere above 120,000, with major centres in Williamsburg, Borough Park, Kiryas Joel, Monroe, Montreal, London, Antwerp, Bnei Brak, and Jerusalem. The community in Williamsburg has been growing for seventy-five years, driven by high birth rates and by the Satmar rule that Yiddish, not English, is the language of the home, the school, and the street.
The neighbourhood has held its ground against the wave of gentrification that transformed North Williamsburg into one of the most expensive parts of Brooklyn. Satmar institutions buy buildings, build new yeshivos, and house young families nearby. Many Williamsburg families now also keep a home in Kiryas Joel or Monroe, with husbands commuting in for work and children moving freely between the two centres.
Across the BQE, the contrast is almost surreal. A ten-minute walk separates the rooftop bars of North Williamsburg from a shul on Rodney Street where a thousand men learn Talmud in Yiddish on a weekday night. The two halves of Williamsburg share a name, a postal code, and almost nothing else. The Satmar half is still here, still Hungarian in its bones, still building.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Satmar Hasidic community settle in Williamsburg, Brooklyn?
The Satmar Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum arrived in New York in September 1946 after surviving the Holocaust and a year in Mandatory Palestine. He chose Williamsburg because it was working class, affordable, and not yet a centre of Jewish middle-class assimilation. He wanted streets where his followers could live an unbroken Hungarian Hasidic life in Yiddish, and Williamsburg gave him that room.
Is Williamsburg still a Satmar Hasidic neighbourhood today?
Yes. The Satmar community in South Williamsburg, south of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, is one of the largest and densest Hasidic neighbourhoods in the world. North Williamsburg, across the BQE, has been transformed by gentrification, but the Satmar core along Bedford and Lee Avenues continues to grow rapidly because of high birth rates and Yiddish-first family life.
What are the most famous Satmar landmarks in Williamsburg?
Congregation Yetev Lev D’Satmar at 152 Rodney Street is the main shul of the Williamsburg faction and the seat of Zalman Leib Teitelbaum. The older Yetev Lev shul on Hooper Street, the commercial strip along Lee Avenue, the Satmar Bikur Cholim, and the offices of the Yiddish weekly Der Yid are the most recognised institutions.
Where did the Satmar Hasidim come from before Williamsburg?
The dynasty takes its name from Satu Mare, a city now in northwestern Romania that was part of Hungary until 1920 and again from 1940 to 1945. Most Satmar families trace their roots to a corridor of towns in northern Transylvania, Subcarpathian Rus, and northeastern Hungary, including Sighet, Máramaros, and Munkács. Almost all of those communities were destroyed in 1944.
When did the Satmar Hasidic community arrive in Williamsburg?
Rebbe Joel Teitelbaum arrived in Williamsburg on the second day of Rosh HaShana in September 1946. Congregation Yetev Lev was formally incorporated in April 1948. The community grew steadily through the late 1940s and 1950s as Hungarian Hasidic survivors arrived in New York and gathered around the rebbe’s court.
What happened in the Satmar succession after 2006?
When Rebbe Moshe Teitelbaum died in April 2006, his two sons each claimed the title of Satmar Rebbe. Aaron leads the Satmar court in Kiryas Joel, New York, while Zalman Leib leads the Williamsburg court from the Rodney Street shul. The two factions run parallel schools, charities, and newspapers, and the split continues to shape daily life in Williamsburg.
If your family’s story passes through Williamsburg, or through Satu Mare and the lost Hungarian Hasidic world before it, Atlas of Home can help trace that journey. From a Transylvanian market town to a synagogue on Rodney Street, to wherever you are now.