The Jewish population in the New York area has grown by 9 percent in the past ten years, according to a new survey quoted by the ‘New York Times'. This reverses the previous trend of decline, a survey found. The New York community also remains highly concentrated, with four distinct areas that would each qualify as one of America’s 20 most-populous areas.Some of the city’s more affluent areas, like Brownstone Brooklyn and the Upper East Side, still saw a decline in their Jewish population, according to the Geographic Profile Report which is part of a study entitled ‘The Jewish Community Study of New York: 2011’ that was commissioned by the UJA-Federation of New York.
A total of 1,086,000 Jews live in the New York City area (which includes the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan and Staten Island), up from 1,027,000 in 1991 and 972,000 in 2001. A further 452,000 Jews live in the counties Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester. “There is no typical Jewish community. We found significant differences from area to area,” Pearl Beck, lead author of the paper, told the ‘New York Times’.
Brownstone Brooklyn was the most secular of the region’s Jewish neighborhoods with 43 percent of Jewish respondents defining themselves as not religious or secular Jews. At 59 percent that area also had the highest rate of intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews in the entire NYC region, Long Island and Westchester, and it had the lowest percentage of children receiving any form of Jewish education. Only 15 percent of Jews surveyed there said they felt “a lot” connected to the Jewish community.
In the he observant enclaves of Borough Park and Williamsburg nearby, however, less than one percent of Jewish children receive no Jewish education, the study found. In those neighborhoods, where lifelong religious study by men is prized, many adult men reported no employment, and up to three quarter of all Jewish households earned less than $50,000 a year.
About three-quarters of the 1.8 million people who live in Jewish households in the New York area live in one of 30 distinct geographic areas, the study found. There are as many Jews on the Upper West Side (70,000) as there are in all of Cleveland, Ohio, the study found, and more Jews in central Brooklyn than in all of Baltimore, Maryland.
The area with the largest increase in Jews over the last decade was Washington Heights and Inwood in Upper Manhattan, with a 144 percent increase. But there were still fewer than 24,000 Jews there. On Long Island, the Huntington area had the largest Jewish population increase, 50 percent.
The study was based on nearly 6,000 telephone interviews with Jewish families across the region, followed a previous report, based on the same survey, that showed that the New York area has growing numbers of both Orthodox Jews and those considering themselves partially Jewish. However, New York still has strong enclaves of Conservative and Reform Jewry, according to the latest report.
Of the 30 areas studied, six had Jewish communities where at least 30 percent of families described themselves as Conservative, including Kew Gardens, Roslyn, Plainview and Great Neck, and in five areas, more than 40 percent of the Jewish population identified as Reform, including in north central and northwestern Westchester County, as well as on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Traditional Jewish values appeared to extend even to places where identification with the Jewish community had grown weak. Brownstone Brooklyn, for example, had the lowest level of philanthropic giving to Jewish causes: 29 percent, but about half of families did volunteer for charities, even if not always Jewish ones.
Read the full Geographic Profile Report here.
