Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By admin on August 15, 2021

KIRYAS JOEL - A community that began in the 1970s with about a dozen families moving upstate from Brooklyn has grown to become Orange County's most populated municipality with around 33,000 residents as of a year ago.

Figures from the 2020 census released Thursday show that Kiryas Joel grew by a booming 63% in the last decade, pushing its population past that of the cities of Middletown and Newburgh and of towns much larger than the 1.5-square-mile Hasidic village. Its nearest population rival is Warwick, which is 105 square miles.

Kiryas Joel also vaulted ahead of other Hudson Valley population centers since the 2010 census, surpassing the cities of Poughkeepsie and Kingston and the village of Spring Valley in Rockland County, according to the Census Bureau's data.

Kiryas Joel accounted for almost half of Orange County's population increase of more than 28,000 from 2010 to 2020. The county as a whole grew by 7.6% in that decade and had about 401,000 residents as of April 1, 2020.

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Kiryas Joel's steady growth is driven largely the customs of a community in which couples typically marry young, settle close to home and raise large families. More than 3,500 condominiums are being built or planned in the village's limited remaining space to help meet the constant housing demand.

That construction means the population will continue to climb by the thousands in the years ahead. Just one of those housing projects, a1,600-unit complex taking shape on a 70-acre peninsula of the village, is expected to house as many as 9,000 people once completed, according to its planners.

The 2020 census provided the following counts for Orange County's most populous municipalities: Kiryas Joel, 32,954; town of Warwick, 32,027; town of Newburgh, 31,985; town of Wallkill, 30,486; Middletown, 30,345; city of Newburgh, 28,856; and New Windsor, 27,805.

Kiryas Joel was incorporated as a village within the town of Monroe in 1977 and named for Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, the founder and leader of the Satmar Hasidic movement. Teitelbaum, who led the Satmar Hasidim to Brooklyn from Hungary decades earlier after the horrors of the Holocaust, died in 1979 at age 92.

The densely populated village has been expanded three times through annexation, most recently with the addition of 164 acres in 2016 and then 62 acres in 2019. The 2019 annexation followed the creation of the town of Palm Tree, which was formed to separate Kiryas Joel from the town of Monroe and has the same boundaries as Kiryas Joel.

Kiryas Joel has been building a 13.5-mile long pipeline for the last eight years to tap New York City's Catskill Aqueduct as a long-term water source for its ever-growing population. It started laying the second half through Cornwall and New Windsor this year. The most recent cost projection for the entire project was $94 million.

In addition to the rapid growth inside Kiryas Joel, many families from the community - as well as Brooklyn - have flocked to neighboring Blooming Grove, Woodbury and Monroe in the last several years in search of more suburban-style homes and quiet neighborhoods.

That out-migration is reflected in the state's enrollment data for nonpublic schools, which shows that the number of children living outside Kiryas Joel and attending Hasidic schools in the area has grown by about 1,600 in the last five years.

cmckenna@th-record.com

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2020 Census: Kiryas Joel grew by 63% in 10 years and leads Orange County in population - Times Herald-Record

Category: Hasidic
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