[Photo courtesy of gkjarvis/flickr]
It turns out that the Chabad-Lubavitch movement is looking for real estate from which they can better approach and try to reach Jewish hipsters. Seriously. TRE reportrs that Rabbi Menachem Heller thinks his current location isn't close enough to the real hipster core of Bushwick. He moved to Bushwick a few years ago after a couple of relatives in North Williamsburg told him that hipsters were making tracks for Bushwick because of the cheaper rent. So, he's looking for better real estate, more like where the Chabad's center is above the Mini-Mall on Bedford Avenue at N. 5 Street. "I was trying to copy what they had in North Williamsburg, but it’s not working here," he says. "People come and go a lot. Most people aren’t married, they don’t settle down. They come for a half-year, then they move out." There are other Chabad outposts in Dumbo, Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, Carroll Gardens and Prospect Heights. Says one rabbi: "We don’t look at it like, ‘hey, there’s gentrification here.’ It’s where there’s a need. But a lot of times, when there’s gentrification, there are Jews moving in as well." The implications of any degentrification for this are unclear.
· A Brookyn Mitzvah: Converting the Hipsters [TRE]For more stories from Curbed, go to curbed.com.
