Word has spread quickly in Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in Lakewood, Jackson and Toms River.

Brenda’s is coming to Brewers Bridge Plaza.

Frum fashionistas (“frum” is a Yiddish term for a member of the Orthodox community) know Brenda’s, housed in an unassuming storefront in Brooklyn's heavily Orthodox Borough Park, as a go-to destination for designer-label women’s clothing that meets their religious standards for modest attire.

So the news that Brenda’s is opening a 5,000-square-foot store in Jackson — in a shopping center that’s getting a glam makeover geared for upscale Orthodox shoppers — is eliciting cheers from its faithful female customers in the Lakewood area, and not a few groans from their fathers and husbands.

“I like to joke that I’m the most hated guy in the synagogue,” quipped Barry Mendlowitz, 50, whose wife, Alisa, is one of four siblings at the helm of Brenda’s, a one-time dry goods store turned dress shop started in 1981 by their late mother, Brenda Kamenetsky.

Chaviva Teichman, for one, can't wait for the Jackson store to open, sometime later this summer.

 

Lakewood is a city on the rise, with new businesses, shops and homes popping up all over. Wochit

A Lakewood-based real estate agent, she’s helping market Brewers Bridge Plaza to prospective tenants, in part by pointing to hundreds of recent home sales to Orthodox buyers in the nearby Brookwood Parkway area and other parts of Jackson. Busy as she is with her job, she's not so busy that she can't make time to duck into Brenda’s whenever she’s in Brooklyn.

“And I don’t leave with one thing," she said. "I leave with 10 things.”

A CITY IN THE MAKING

That Brenda’s would make such a move to Ocean County speaks volumes about the demographic changes underway in and around Lakewood, which is well on its way to becoming one of New Jersey’s largest cities.

Though census estimates still peg the 25-square-mile township’s current population hovering under 100,000, local officials believe the true number to be 120,000 or higher. Orthodox residents now make up more than half of the town, they say.

Brenda’s imminent arrival also points to a lesser-known byproduct of that growth: an infusion of new businesses, jobs and wealth into the area’s economy linked to the Orthodox community's rapid expansion.

There's no up-to-date data available to quantify the rise in wealthy Orthodox households in the Lakewood area. In fact, between 2011 and 2014, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the median household income in the Lakewood zip code area actually dipped slightly, from $42,178 to $41,026, when adjusted for inflation, according to the U.S. Census. At the same time, census figures still show fully one-third of Lakewood residents living in poverty.

The data only measure income, however, not wealth, which encompasses savings, stock and other assets. Meanwhile, there's growing anecdotal evidence of the Orthodox community's upward mobility, fueled in part by robust entrepreneurism. Examples include:

  • Million-dollar homes being built in tony new Orthodox neighborhoods along the Lakewood-Jackson border, including a chateau-like,11,000-square-foot estate on Miller Road. "It looks like something you'd see in the Hamptons," says the township's tax assessor, Edward Seeger Jr.
  • Trendy new kosher eateries, including Ottimo in Howell and Estreia in Lakewood, catering to prosperous Orthodox thirtysomethings hungry for more fine dining options and fancier restaurants where they can host family celebrations and entertain clients.
  • Luxurious, modern, Class A office buildings brimming with Orthodox-owned start-ups and larger established businesses rising along Lakewood's New Hampshire Avenue and East County Line Road, among other places. "When I go into some of these companies I'm amazed; I feel like I'm in Manhattan," says Rabbi Aaron Kotler, president of Lakewood's prestigious Beth Medrash Govoha yeshiva, whose graduates are among the area's prime movers and shakers. A state report several years ago said the college has spawned hundreds of new businesses and thousands of local jobs. "It's a self-generating economy," Kotler said.

This isn't the Lakewood that most outsiders talk about.

“Things are getting more high-end in Lakewood,” observed Giorgio Vasilis, vice president of commercial real estate for Sitar Realty Company, who is overseeing Brewers Bridge Plaza’s transformation.

“There are more high-end homes, more high-end businesses and more high-end stores coming in.”

LAKEWOOD'S RODEO DRIVE

For those who associate Lakewood with densely packed duplexes, day laborer muster zones and dilapidated multi-family rental housing, a ride along Hope Chapel Road can be a revelation.

Located on the western edge of town, and crossing into Jackson, the neighborhoods on either side of this once-rural corridor are being transformed by a steady trickle of stately, generously sized homes, some of them seemingly sprung from the pages of House Beautiful magazine, with mansard rooflines, curved driveways and rambling, manicured lawns.

New McMansions, some with amenities like glass domes and indoor swimming pools (one homeowner inquired about the property tax consequences of putting a pool on the second floor of his home, Seeger recalled) are popping up along streets like Tori Court, Pamela Drive, Van Buren Avenue, Clearstream Road and Hope Hill Lane. These are Orthodox neighborhoods now.

Teichman, an agent with Imperial Real Estate in Lakewood, said many of these new homeowners are well-heeled Orthodox couples in their 30s with growing families who wanted lots of elbow room and a place to set down roots. They’re buying up older, smaller homes on larger lots for $500,000 or more and tearing them down to build something more grand.

“It looks like something you'd see in the Hamptons.”

Edward Seeger Jr., Lakewood tax assessor

“There are not a hundred buyers running after those properties. There are a select few,” Teichman said. “It’s definitely more for the high-end buyer.”

Still, when she recently listed an older home on two acres on Green Valley Road in Jackson, north of Hope Chapel, for $359,000, the response was so “insane,” she said, the property owner decided to reconsider the asking price.

Teichman says the typical new home is about 5,000 square feet, but Seeger, the tax assessor, said he’s seen a few come in at 8,000 square feet or larger.

“Four-thousand, 5,000 (square feet) isn’t big anymore here in Lakewood,” he said.

These ritzy estates seem a world removed from Lakewood's headline-grabbing traffic woes, school board controversies and zoning disputes. Despite the negative image many outsiders have of Lakewood, Seeger noted, "people are still willing to come here and build $2 million-plus homes.”

DISPELLING STEREOTYPES

Akiva Reiner winces when he reads some of the comments on social media about the Orthodox community.

“They talk about (how) people don’t pay property taxes, they’re on welfare, and they don’t work,” he said.

Reiner, 37, and his circle of ambitious friends don’t fit that stereotype.

Originally from Toronto, he came to Lakewood to study the Torah at Beth Medrash Govoha. Like many of his classmates, he ultimately decided to pursue a career in business.

“People are going into healthcare industries, mortgages, financials … (Selling on) Amazon is very big,” he said. “People work hard.”

A chief motivator is the need to support large families. Reiner has six children himself, all of whom are enrolled in private yeshivas that cost about $5,000 annually, per child.

Despite having no prior experience, he found his niche in the restaurant business. In 2011, he opened Ottimo, a kosher Italian cafe, in a shopping center on Route 9 in Howell. He borrowed $300,000 to remodel the space, hoping that contemporary touches like high ceilings and wavy, dimensional wall panels would attract a younger, professional crowd.

It seems to be working, judging by the stylishly dressed diners there on a recent Tuesday afternoon, tucking into $11 sides of Ahi tuna, $13 thin-crust bar pies and $23 Thai salads.

On the other side of Route 9, Kava Coffee House in Howell and Yapchick in Lakewood are going after the same, upscale Orthodox clientele. Their customers are also looking to work off all that fettuccine and biscotti, which might explain why Bike Blade & Ball, an Orthodox-owned cycle shop two doors down from Ottimo, is doing such a bang-up business.

“When they started, I thought they were crazy. They were selling bikes for $500, $1,000,” Reiner said.

One look at the Orthodox customers leaving with shiny new bikes attached to their roof racks and bumpers reminds him that even he underestimated the community's buying power.

For a growing number of Orthodox-owned start-ups like his, Reiner said, it's “the right time and the right place" to go into business.

A 11,000-square-foot home on Miller Road in Lakewood, currently assessed at $1.2 million. (Photo: Staff photo/Thomas P. Costello)

COUNTY LINE ROAD, OR PARK AVENUE?

Safer Orthodontics is part of that recent, high-end wave.

Raised in an Orthodox family on Long Island, Dr. Abraham Safer, 35, has spent the bulk of his dentistry career in New York, including a stint in a prestigious surgical fellowship at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx.

Ready to strike out on his own after 13 years of training — he was second in his class at the University of Maryland’s School of Dentistry — the now-board-certified orthodontist and father of five was drawn to the Lakewood area because of its highly regarded Orthodox schools and a flourishing frum community that’s growing by the day.

“The more I looked into it, the more it seemed like this whole Ocean County, Jackson, Lakewood, Howell area was exploding,” he said.

“So I figured there's a lot of crooked teeth in the area.”

Safer Orthodontics opened in Brewers Bridge Plaza in the fall of 2014.

Step inside, and you might think you were visiting a posh medical practice on New York’s Upper East Side, not a strip mall off West County Line Road.

Safer says his patients, Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike, are looking for top-notch care, and he wants them to feel that they’ve come to the right place, as soon as they walk through the door.

Designed by Civitas Architects, a Philadelphia firm that specializes in high-end orthodontist offices, the modern, open layout features an iPad gaming station, a ceramic-tiled teeth-brushing nook, state-of-the-art 3-D imaging equipment, and even an ice cream vending machine that accepts golden tokens emblazoned with the Safer Orthodontics logo.

Classical music, wood floors, soft blue walls and glass partitions give the space a spa-like vibe.

“You might find this type of office in some high-end areas of Manhattan. It's not the typical office,” he said.

“That's my personality. I try to go above and beyond,” he added.

“That's why I went into this field. That's what makes me happy, and that's how I want my cases to turn out.”

That painstaking attention to detail is having the desired effect. Most first-time visitors have the same, one-word reaction, Safer says.

"Wow."