In this ultra-Orthodox Jewish village of about 12,000, Yiddish is the first language.
Men wear black coats, black hats and long beards. Women wear ankle-length skirts and wives cover their heads, indoors and out. Most people marry by age 19 in weddings arranged by parents or matchmakers. Families average about 10 children, and contraception is forbidden.But a secular voice penetrated this Satmar Hasidic community on Monday, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that a public school district for the village's disabled children violates the Constitution's ban on government establishment of religion.
That means a big change for children like 8-year-old Shaloimy Reisman, who has Down syndrome.
"I don't see him going to school with English people. He doesn't speak the language," said his mother, Chaya.
"These surroundings is what he needs the most - his type of people," she said.
"I feel as if my child's second home is being taken away," Judith Gluck said of her 6-year-old son Yitzchok, who has Down syndrome and has attended the school since he was a toddler. "I can't imagine what happens next."
This reclusive village about 50 miles north of New York City maintains its traditions by educating its 5,300 children at private, single-sex yeshivas.
The yeshivas could not handle the disabled children, so they were taught in a village school run by the neighboring Monroe-Woodbury Central School District until 1985, when the district began placing them in Monroe's public schools.
But parents said village children were teased because of their dress, language and customs.
In violation of Satmar practices, boys and girls were placed in the same classes and boys were sometimes driven to school by female bus drivers. Children were exposed to Christian influences such as Christmas plays.
In 1989, the state created the Kiryas Joel Village Union Free School District, allowing the village to receive state aid for its disabled students. Instruction was in Yiddish and Hebrew; instruction was secular, and boys and girls were not kept separate.
But the Supreme Court threw out the district.
"We do not deny that the Constitution allows the state to accommodate religious needs by alleviating special burdens. (However,) accommodation is not a principle without limits," Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court.
Souter said the Kiryas Joel district "singles out a particular religious sect for special treatment."
The Satmar sect survived the Nazi Holocaust thanks largely to Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum, who escorted many of the followers he had led since age 14 from Hungary to safety in Romania.
The sect then moved to Palestine, then to Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods in the New York City borough of Brooklyn. But housing became scarce there in the 1970s, and sect members also worried about rising crime, leading to the migration to rural Kiryas Joel.
Community leaders said they would try to reach an agreement with state officials to keep their school.
"We have no choice but to continue our search in a suitable way to provide a quality education for the most vulnerable of our children," said Abraham Wieder, board of education president and deputy mayor.