Sons of The Father

"Every party, every get-together, this is all we talk about," says one Aaroni. "It's our Mets and Yankees."

Hasidic dynasties often sunder violently. In neighboring Crown Heights the Lubavitcher Hasids wrestle with a far more irreconcilable succession problem: The biggest faction refuses to anoint a successor to Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, who died a decade ago, as they believe he was the Messiah and so is about to rise from the grave.

Moses Teitelbaum hoped to forestall such a war and ordered his sons to pick their turfs. Aaron, 57, the eldest and most scholarly of his four sons, reluctantly chose Kiryas Joel, a fast-growing Satmar shtetl of 23,000 some 90 minutes north of Brooklyn along the main caravan route to the Catskill Mountains. Then Moses appointed his milder-mannered younger son, Zalmen, 55, as rabbi of Williamsburg, the 50,000-strong shtetl in Brooklyn that remains the beating heart of Satmar. (An additional 40,000 or so Satmars live in Montreal, Antwerp, Argentina and Jerusalem). Before Moses could clearly pick his successor, Alzheimer's descended. The Satmars have no equivalent to a College of Cardinals to choose between the sons. Rabbi Isaac Wertheimer is a Zali and his explanation of succession has the simplicity of a Zen koan: "You become grand rebbe by acting grand."

So the Royal Teitelbaums wrestle for control of a kingdom vast by Hasidic standards, with more than $1 billion worth of shuls and yeshivas, social service groups and subsidized housing and mikvahs (ritual baths). Many foresee a schism.

"The Satmar are like stock market," says Avi Zupnick, a well-heeled businessman who supports Aaron, on a walking tour of the Williamsburg shtetl, 70 square blocks thick with Hasids. "We get too big" -- he snaps his fingers -- "we split!"

As with bruises and broken bones, burned cars and slashed tires, the siren song of modernity poses a danger for the Satmars. How could it not? Hasidic Williamsburg sits cheek to jowl with the hipster Williamsburg of art galleries and pierced orifices. Every Satmar man carries a cellphone and a BlackBerry. There are secret Satmar poet bloggers and a rapper or two -- Hasidic shtetls are most complicated cloisters.

Still the Satmars survive. They are enthusiastic procreators (the average mother has eight children; it is God's will) and their sect has doubled, to 120,000, in the past two decades. They grow as modern variations of Judaism shrink.

Sarala Fischer, 21, sits with Menachem, her husband, at their kitchen table in a new townhouse on a cul-de-sac up in Kiryas Joel, where Yiddish is the first language. She wears a long robe, pearl earrings, a turquoise turban and a faint, ironic smile.

"We are no angels, that's a fact -- this place is A-plus at monitoring you," she says, pushing a rocker for her 6-month-old son. "Sometimes Satmar is very, very beautiful, like family. Sometimes it's 'get out of my face,' like family. But we don't see it as restrictive -- it is loving . . . and choices are not helpful."

Menachem, only recently fluent in English, nods. "That's our barrier against leaving -- to lead a fulfilled Jewish life you need to be in the community."

Rebbe Love

Kiryas Joel is celebrating the engagement of one of Aaron's dozens of granddaughters.

The hubbub begins outside Yetev Lev D'Satmar synagogue, big as an airport terminal, with dozens of teenage boys in flat black felt hats and prayer shawls running up to peer quizzically into your face. Inside, the place is packed -- thousands of men in black coats and hats press together so tightly that you cross the floor with something close to a swimming motion, arms akimbo. Wood bleachers rise up each wall, and young men pack the rows, arms locked and bouncing up and down and side to side, smiling and singing prayers.