“The Rebbe created Kiryas Yoel to be away from town…”
No one claims that living in KJ is like living in a cave nor was it an effort to recreate an iconic “American Shtetl” in the style of the Alte Heim. There was a really fascinating study of the evolution of KJ published several years ago by Stolzenberg (a USC law professor) and Myers (a UCLA professor of Jewish history). Their hypothesis is that KJ was really NOT an effort to recreate a community whose participants descend into a cave and revert to life in the Alte Heim. Rather, they argue, it was a deliberate adoptation of a mythic past from the Alte Heim built on uniquely American features — the power of religious freedom, private property, and state welfare, all in the context of the Aron versus Zalman commercial litigation. Its an interesting read, even if you come away in strong disagreement with the authors.