MARY ESCH and RYAN TARINELLI
Associated Press
MONSEY, N.Y. (AP) — For years, ultra-Orthodox Jewish families priced out of increasingly expensive Brooklyn neighborhoods have been turning to the suburbs, where they have taken advantage of open space and cheaper housing to establish modern-day versions of the European shtetls where their ancestors lived for centuries before the Holocaust.
The expansion of Hasidic communities in New York's Hudson Valley, the Catskills and northern New Jersey has led to predictable sparring over new housing development and local political control. It has also led to flare-ups of rhetoric that some say is cloaked anti-Semitism.
Now, a pair of violent attacks on such communities, just weeks apart, worry many that intolerance is boiling over.
On Dec. 10, a
