Williamsburg Shul Map

Williamsburg is, with Boro Park, one of the two great Chasidic centers of Brooklyn — and the most insular of the neighborhoods on ShulMap. Daily life runs in Yiddish, and the community is organized around kehillos rather than around individual shuls the way a Modern Orthodox neighborhood is. Satmar is the dominant kehilla and has been split since 2006 between the followers of Aaron Teitelbaum and those of Zalman Teitelbaum, each with its own Yetev Lev beis medrash: Zalman’s on Rodney Street, and Aaron’s larger building at Kent Avenue and Hooper Street. Alongside Satmar, Pupa on Bedford Avenue, Adas Yereim (Vien) and Sanz-Klausenburg on Lee Avenue, Viznitz on Ross Street and the Boyaner Kloiz on Marcy Avenue each anchor their own kehilla.

Lee Avenue and Bedford Avenue are the commercial spine, with Flaum’s and a dense run of groceries, bakeries and appetizing stores. The United Talmudical Academy network educates most of the neighborhood’s boys, and the community’s mikvaos include Mikvah Tahara on Williamsburg Street East. Housing in the Chasidic core is dense, mostly rental, and tight — this is a neighborhood people generally move into through family and kehilla ties rather than by browsing listings, and the trendy waterfront to the north is effectively a separate, far more expensive and largely non-Jewish neighborhood despite sharing the name.

A note on the eruv. Williamsburg is not a neighborhood where you should assume you can carry. A 1979 public ruling signed by 73 leading rabbonim — including Rav Moshe Feinstein and the Satmar, Bobov and Pupa rebbes — declared that no eruv should be erected in any neighborhood of Brooklyn. An eruv has nonetheless been put up in Williamsburg, but it is relied on only by a minority and is actively opposed by the Satmar leadership; the prevailing practice in the community is not to carry on Shabbos. ShulMap takes no position on this machlokes and does not map an eruv boundary here. Ask your own rav.