Squeezed Out 

When families tried to add extra bedrooms in their basements, the city declared it illegal to sleep in a basement. When school buses loaded up with Jewish children, police pulled them over for traveling on certain streets. When large families needed to purchase more trash cans, it suddenly became forbidden. Is the town of Linden out to make life intolerable for its Orthodox Jewish residents?

New Jersey municipalities can’t seem to learn from each other’s mistakes.

Following a line of costly failures, the city of Linden now seems determined to throw down the gauntlet with its Orthodox Jewish population.

A crowd dressed in resplendent shtreimlach and beketshes filled the Linden city hall for an odd Chol Hamoed trip last Tuesday night in response to new ordinances that seemingly target the chassidic population. Coverage of the gathering quickly went viral due to the striking imagery.

The boilerplate legalese in the ordinances seemed like typical land use and zoning laws passed by suburban locales, but these were daggers aimed at the heart of the Orthodox Jewish lifestyle. The salvo in Linden comes in the wake of a decade of New Jersey towns waging legislative battles against their frum residents. All these efforts ended up losing, costing local taxpayers millions of dollars.