https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City#Jewish >>The New York metropolitan area is home to the largest Jewish population in the world outside Israel. While most are descendants of Jews who moved from Europe, a growing number are of Asian and Middle Eastern origin. After dropping from a peak of 2.5 million in the 1950s to a low of 1.4 million in 2002 the population of Jews in the New York metropolitan area grew to 1.54 million in 2011. A study by the UJA-Federation of New York released in 2012[120] showed that the proportion of liberal Jews was decreasing while the proportion of generally conservative Orthodox Jews and recent immigrants from Russia was increasing. Much of this growth is in **Brooklyn, which in 2012 was 23% Jewish and where most of the Russian immigrants live and nearly all of the ultra-orthodox.**[121] The study by UJA-Federation of New York has been criticized by J.J. Goldberg, an observer at The Jewish Daily Forward, as **excluding suburban Jews**, for example in New Jersey, that are outside the service area of UJA-Federation of New York and also for lack of granularity with respect to the Orthodox of New York City.[122] The New York metropolitan area's Jewish population in 2001 was approximately 1.97 million, 600,000 fewer than in Israel's largest metropolitan area, denoted as Gush Dan. **In 2012, an estimated 1,086,000 Ashkenazic Jews lived in New York City and constituted about 12% of the city's population**, while approximately 100,000 Sephardic Jews live in the city too. **New York City is also home to the world headquarters of the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch group and the Bobover, Pupa, Vizhnitz and Satmar branches of Hasidism, ultra-Orthodox sects of Judaism.**[citation needed] Many notable Jews come from New York City. **The first Jewish presence in New York City dates to the arrival of 23 Jewish refugees in 1654, who fled from Recife, Brazil,** after the Portuguese conquered New Holland and brought the Inquisition with them.[123]** Major immigration of Jews to New York began in the 1880s, with the increase of Anti-Semitic actions in Central and Eastern Europe.** The number of Jews in New York City soared throughout the beginning of the 20th century and reached **a peak of 2 million in the 1950s, when Jews constituted one-quarter of the city's population**. New York City's Jewish population then began to **decline because of low fertility rates and migration to suburbs and other states, particularly California and Florida.** **A new wave of Ashkenazi, Kavkazi, Bukharian, and Georgian Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union began arriving in the 1980s and 1990s.** Sephardic Jews including Syrian, Moroccan and other Jews of non-European origin have also lived in New York City since the 17th century. Many Jews, including the newer immigrants, have settled in Queens, south Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where at present most live in neighborhoods such as Riverdale.[citation needed] **Sephardic Jews estimated at 100,000 strong have settled along Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn creating a unified community consisting of about 75,000 people in this area**, while the other Sephardic Jews live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan and in Staten Island. 19th-century Jewish immigrants settled mainly in the tenement houses of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. New York City's current Jewish population is dispersed among all the boroughs; **Brooklyn's Jewish population in 2011 was estimated as 561,000, and Manhattan's was 240,000.[124]** **The Orthodox community is rapidly growing due to higher birthrates among Orthodox (especially Hasidic) Jews, while the numbers of Conservative and Reform Jews are declining.[125] 60% of the Jewish children in New York are Orthodox, 37% Hasidic. This accelerating dynamic is accompanied by a substantial rise in the percentage of Jews who live in poverty.[121]**