Sons of The Father

(Arriving in Williamsburg in 1946, Teitelbaum found a hardworking Italian and Jewish neighborhood of markets and factories, dance halls and pool joints. This was not so good; it was a trayfe medina (unclean city).

Slowly, Teitelbaum built his shtetl. He encouraged his followers to make their way in the secular work world, the better to accumulate riches in real estate and the diamond trade (and B&H camera stores), and tithe money to build shuls and yeshivas. They set about pushing aside secular neighbors -- more than a few Puerto Rican and Italian homeowners tell of men in black hats and beards knocking daily at their door and offering them suitcases of cash to leave.

"It was infuriating," recalls Luis Acosta, a longtime Williamsburg activist who harbors a grudging respect for the Satmar. "They just wanted to force everyone out."

Teitelbaum established a cradle-to-grave kingdom. There are tuition subsidies and interest-free loans, and Satmar butchers give discounts to the poor. New families receive free car seats; impoverished brides get wedding dresses. Satmar bureaucrats play New York's social service agencies like a Wurlitzer organ, pulling down many state and federal grants.

But Teitelbaum brooked no compromise with modernity. He banned television and frowned on radio and novels. His fiercest sermons inveighed against the very notion of accommodation. When he died in 1979, his nephew Moses took over, running a caretaker regime until his death six weeks ago.

Boys study the Torah and, until the age of 6, speak Yiddish only. Girls are tutored in math and English and enough computer skills to make a living. (Science is an unexplored hallway; the Satmars teach nothing of physics and biology and believe the world was created 6,000 years ago.) Only 3 percent have college degrees.

On her wedding day, a Satmar woman shaves her head and dons a wig or turban for modesty. "Everything Joel said, we move not one inch," says Abe Rubin, the rotund Aaroni, holding a forefinger and thumb a centimeter apart. "We're the most ultra-, ultra-, ultra-orthodox in the world."

Zalmen is cut from his father's cloth, a careful leader who relies on the counsel of his gabbai, the white-bearded Moses Friedman.

Aaron walks a different, more charismatic path. He has a distaste for dissent. His followers have barred dissidents from a communal graveyard and shooed their children from the yeshiva.

And there are whispers of worse at the hands of his yungerleit .

"He's trying to morph his community into a more consciously Hasidic community," says Zalman Alpert, a research librarian at Yeshiva University and scholar of Hasidism. "But charismatic leaders have a way of alienating themselves, and violence has reared its ugly head."

Not So Merry Mischief

Last fall, the Aaronis marched African American nightclub bouncers into the Williamsburg synagogue and punched out a few Zalis. A Teitelbaum brother, Leipa, aligned with Zalmen, kicked an Aaroni in the face at shul. Cars have been torched, one in front of Aaron's house. A convalescent home burned to the ground in a suspicious fire.