When Mordechai Burnstein moved to Jackson Township, N.J., in 2015, his was just the third Orthodox Jewish family to settle in their neighborhood; now, he estimates there are more than 350 Orthodox families living there. 

Last month, he became the first Orthodox Jew ever elected to the town council, a major victory for the leader of a once-marginalized community, boosted by reported record voter turnout.

The explosive growth of the Orthodox community in this once-sleepy New Jersey town is tied to nearby Lakewood, home to Beth Medrash Govoha, the largest yeshiva outside of Israel — the popularity of which has led to thousands of Orthodox Jews putting down roots in this quiet part of central New Jersey. As Lakewood has begun to reach capacity, Jews like Burnstein who sought more space and a slower pace of life have settled down in neighboring Jackson. 

That growth hasn’t come easy. Soon after arriving in Jackson, Burnstein became a leader in efforts to fight discriminatory zoning laws that kept the burgeoning Jewish community from building synagogues and other institutions necessary to support and sustain an observant Jewish life. Ultimately, it took civil rights lawsuits filed by both the New Jersey attorney general and the federal Department of Justice for the town to begin to change its tune and acknowledge that Orthodox Jews were in Jackson to stay.

In an interview with Jewish Insider this week, the 36-year-old Burnstein, a Republican, shied away from talking about the bumpy road that first got him on the path toward public service, preferring instead to take a forward-looking approach to the town he now serves.

“The story really is that there were speed bumps, but we’re going to live in the present and the future. We have to, as a community, as Americans, learn how to learn from people’s mistakes, but move on. You can’t always be living with those scars,” said Burnstein, who has served on the council since he was appointed to fill a term-limited vacancy last year.

So while the story of Jackson, home to just 60,000 people, is a local one, unique to Ocean County, it’s also an American story — about religious freedom and representation, property values and neighborhood personalities, discrimination and the messy business of democracy. Burnstein won his election by just 228 votes.

“To have a religious Jew elected in a town that’s majority not religious I think speaks to and exemplifies the strength of this country’s democratic system,” said Shlomo Schorr, a lifelong Lakewood resident and the director of legislative affairs in Agudath Israel’s New Jersey office.

With his election to the town council, Burnstein has journeyed far from his first involvement with municipal officials in Jackson: Soon after he moved to the township, his home came under surveillance. 

A code enforcement officer from the town used to sit outside his house on Saturday mornings in 2016, taking a tally of how many people were going into Burnstein’s home. The officer had been alerted by a neighbor that “men in black suits with shawls” were going to Burnstein’s home. 

“They came three weeks in a row, just sitting in front of my house watching, counting how many people were coming into my house,” he told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2021. At the time, with no synagogues in walking distance, Burnstein was hosting Shabbat prayer services in his home for two dozen or so men — hence the prayer shawls. 

The unfair treatment prompted Burnstein to get involved with town politics. Some local officials soon urged him to step up his activism. 

“They said, ‘If you want to make a difference, get involved.’ That’s how I rolled up my sleeves. I started coming to council meetings. I started going to meet the mayors, and I got to know some of our elected officials. So then I took the deep plunge,” Burnstein said. He got involved in the town’s Republican club, ultimately becoming its president. He spoke at the Republican Party’s statewide leadership convention this spring. 

But not everyone in Jackson was happy with Burnstein’s rise. 

“It wasn’t too long ago that being caught in a photograph with Jackson resident Mordechai Burnstein was a political death warrant,” a 2023 article published on Shore News Network, a local media site, stated. 

An activist group called Jackson Strong, consisting of local residents unhappy with the growth of the Orthodox community, targeted Burnstein. After he was the victim of an antisemitic attack on his walk home from a prayer service, they mocked him: “Mordy Burnstein claims he was a victim of a drive by biased hate beeping & name calling(Boo hoo),” a 2023 post on its website read.

“They made it their mission to try to either scare away or keep Jews out as much as they can,” Schorr said. “That continued for quite a few years, really until the settlement last year. Now, we do still see isolated cases of antisemitism, but not from the township or municipal level.”

Challenges remain, but they haven’t scared Burnstein away. “I’ve been to meetings where people have muttered things to me, where the feeling has not been positive, where I thought to myself, ‘Is this really worth it?’” he questioned. “Sometimes it’s not worth it. But sometimes I felt like, ‘OK, if I back down, who’s going to step up?’”

Last year, the town reached an agreement with the New Jersey attorney general to repeal the measures that reportedly targeted Orthodox Jews and to implement new policies to protect religious freedom. Since then, and following a similar resolution with the federal government a year earlier, Jewish community members in Jackson say things have changed for the better. 

Mayor Michael Reina, once one of the fiercest opponents of the growing Orthodox community, has since changed his tune. 

The federal lawsuit against Jackson revealed that in 2015, Reina had encouraged locals not to sell their homes to Orthodox Jews. He had also opposed the construction of an eruv, a boundary used by Orthodox Jews to allow them to carry items outside their homes on Shabbat. Yet last year, he appointed Burnstein to an open seat on the Jackson Township Council. 

Burnstein didn’t anticipate running this year for a full term, expecting to face a difficult race. “When I was put on, people said, ‘Mordy, there’s no way someone Orthodox is going to win next year, in a presidential year where the turnout is higher.’ And I think Jackson showed all the pundits that they were wrong,” he said. His campaign ran a sophisticated ground operation, centered on Jewish neighborhoods and synagogues, to make sure community members turned out to vote.

“It should be copied by campaigns across the state and even the country,” said Schorr. “They were reminded of what was at stake here and to make every effort to vote. Their efforts paid off with that over 90% turnout rate [in the Orthodox community], which is remarkable.” 

Burnstein knows that his election is meaningful to Jackson’s Jewish community, but he said he intends to represent the needs of all residents of the town. And while he’s a proud Republican who was excited to see Donald Trump win last month’s election, he knows the work of a small-town city council is more about quality of life than big political debates.

“The religious stuff might have been the initial push, but I want to make a difference,” said Burnstein. “I think a lot of it was just saying, Hey, my family’s gonna live here. I want to make sure my town stays safe, my town stays a place where we can have religious freedom and my town remains economically feasible for a family to live in.”