New York ניו יורק
The chief city of the modern diaspora: millions of immigrants, yeshivot and hasidic courts rebuilt after the Shoah.
The first Jews reached New Amsterdam in 5414 — twenty-three refugees from Brazil whom the governor tried to turn away. The real story begins in 5641: after the pogroms in Russia, mass emigration flows through Ellis Island, and within forty years some two million Jews arrive, most of them in New York. The Lower East Side, with its sweatshops, Yiddish papers and theatres, becomes the densest Jewish quarter in the world.
The first generation lost tradition faster than it built institutions; America was called a treife land. The turn came after the Shoah, when surviving heads of yeshivot and hasidic rebbes transplanted their courts — Lubavitch to Crown Heights, Satmar to Williamsburg, Mir and Telz — and Brooklyn and Lakewood became the largest centres of Torah study outside Israel.
More than a million Jews live in the New York area today.