STROUDSBURG, PA — For at least the past decade, demographers across the nation have been chronicling a new form of suburban flight: the booming relocation of city-dwellers and suburbanites to the exurbs, the furthest extremes of the population bands surrounding major metropolises.
Mountain Region Chabad House Symbol of Exurbs’ Growth Nationwide
STROUDSBURG, PA — For at least the past decade, demographers across the nation have been chronicling a new form of suburban flight: the booming relocation of city-dwellers and suburbanites to the exurbs, the furthest extremes of the population bands surrounding major metropolises.
Exurbs now dot the nation from coast to coast, from Elk Grove, Calif., to Port S. Lucie, Fla., and several rapidly-growing locales between. They are to the suburbs today what the suburbs were to the cities decades ago – lower density, low-cost alternatives to congested urban living, providing the chance to live close to relatively untarnished natural beauty. They are also defined by having at least 20 percent of their populations making long daily commutes to work.
The exurbs’ newly-arrived denizens come from the full spectrum of modern-day American groups, including a fair share of Jewish community members and Israeli expatriates. But as the growth of technology tends to proceed faster than infrastructure can use it, many exurbias glaringly lack the synagogue or community facility almost taken for granted in the big cities and major suburbs.
Enter Chabad.
“If not one more Jew moved here, we’d still have our work cut out for us,” says Rabbi Mendel Bendet, the young co-director of the four-year-old Chabad-Lubavitch of the Poconos, which serves a once-sleepy Eastern Pennsylvania mountain country now undergoing significant growth. “But at the same time, we are prepared for the future wave of [Jewish] people moving in. It hasn’t peaked.”
Stroudsburg, home to the Chabad center and the epicenter of the Poconos’ still-booming exurbia, has very little organized Jewish life for its still-growing population, which is precisely why Bendet is there. The rabbi, his wife, fellow co-director Shterni Bendet, and their little daughter moved to the area in September 2003 and set up a makeshift synagogue and community center in their home in the Blue Mountain Lake section of Stroud Township. They began reaching out to Jews one at a time and held their first communal event, a Chanukah celebration, just two months after their arrival; 30 people attended.
They recently moved the operation to a storefront a short distance away. At their most recent community program, more than 100 Jews took part, some driving more than 25 miles to attend.
