Lakewood NJ -9 part series - Orthodox Community

[EllieBC]

1. The Lakewood situation is an unsustainable mess.

I'm not sure how familiar you are with kollel and kollel families. Lakewood residents are not chassidishe. They are yeshivish....Litvaks maybe is a better description?

Anyway, the Lakewood Jewish community does (more often than not) kollel after yeshivah. The men continue to study. So they graduate high school (from a yeshivah) with an at best questionable secular education and marry. The Bais Yaakov schools for girls provide the girls with a better secular education. This is because the girls will be working once married because their husbands will be learners instead of earners. This is the preferred set up. But the women can't totally support the men and their families because they tend to have large families and they start early.

So you have parents supporting their children and their spouses.

Can you see where this system is destined to fail?

People like to talk shit about chassidim but at least chassidim believe in working.

But these young and growing families with a not very high income to no income has created an atmosphere where fraud seems like a way out of the financial disaster.

Instead of working like chassidim or MO do.