On a Saturday morning in the Northern Valley, families walk to shul along quiet streets shaded by old oaks, carrying nothing, because the eruv lets them. A few miles of thin plastic strips on utility poles, fought over all the way to a federal appeals court, mark the boundary of a Jewish life that has been settling into Tenafly, New Jersey, for the better part of a century. This is a town of 15,000 people on the cliffs above the Hudson, and the story of the Jews in Tenafly runs through its synagogues, its enormous community centre, and its schools.
The Place
Tenafly sits in the Northern Valley of Bergen County, a 5.17-square-mile borough that climbs from the valley floor up the East Hill to the New Jersey Palisades, with the Bronx visible across the river. It was incorporated on 24 January 1894, one of 26 Bergen County boroughs born that single year in a frenzy of municipal splitting that locals later called Boroughitis.
The name is Dutch, traced to the phrase Tiene Vly, roughly ten swamps, from the meadows the early settlers drained. The railroad pulled commuters out from the city in the late nineteenth century, and the town grew into a leafy, deliberate suburb.
Today it is one of the wealthiest towns in New Jersey. Median household income reached $153,381 in the 2013 to 2017 figures, ranking it thirteenth in the state among municipalities of more than 10,000 people. It is the kind of place people move to for the schools and stay for the quiet.
How It Became Jewish
Tenafly did not begin as a Jewish town. For its first half-century it was a Protestant commuter suburb of large houses and tennis clubs, the sort of Bergen County address where Jews, in the era of restrictive covenants and quiet exclusion, were not always made welcome. The change came after the Second World War, and it came from the city.
The post-war move out of New York
The story of the Jews in Tenafly is, at its root, the story of New York Jews leaving the boroughs. Families who had grown up in the Bronx, in Washington Heights, in Brooklyn neighbourhoods like Borough Park, began crossing the George Washington Bridge in the 1950s in search of lawns and good public schools. Bergen County, fifteen minutes from upper Manhattan, was the natural landing place.
They did not arrive in a vacuum. A short drive south, Englewood already had an established Jewish presence, and the new arrivals to Tenafly often built lives that straddled the two towns. The pattern repeated across the Northern Valley, the same migration that filled Englewood and, later and more emphatically, the Modern Orthodox stronghold of Teaneck a few miles to the west.
The founding of Temple Sinai
The institutional beginning can be dated precisely. In May 1952, five families gathered with the idea of a Reform congregation rooted in modern Jewish life. By December of that year the new congregation, Temple Sinai of Bergen County, had affiliated with the national Reform movement.
In the early years they worshipped wherever there was room: in homes, in rented halls, even in a church basement. In 1958 they built a permanent home at the corner of Engle and Hudson Streets, the address the temple still keeps today. It was the anchor that told arriving families a Jewish Tenafly was real.
The JCC comes up the road
The institution that truly made Tenafly a regional Jewish capital was not founded here. The Jewish community centre that became the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades was established in 1950, with Lenny Rubin among its founders, and it originally operated in Englewood.
By 1980 it had outgrown that home, and it moved a short distance up the road to Tenafly. Over the following decades it grew into one of the largest Jewish community centres in the country: a 185,000-square-foot building on 29 acres, with two fitness centres, indoor and outdoor pools, two gymnasiums, an indoor track, tennis and racquet courts, the Thurnauer School of Music, the Rubin nursery school, and the Klatskin summer camps. Its arrival turned Tenafly into a place families across the Northern Valley drive to several times a week.
The Orthodox arrive, and the eruv fight
Through the 1990s a growing number of observant families settled in Tenafly, drawn partly by its proximity to Englewood and Teaneck. For Sabbath-observant Jews, carrying anything outside the home on Shabbat is forbidden unless a community boundary, an eruv, encloses the area. In 1999 a group of Orthodox residents began affixing lechis, thin plastic strips, to utility poles to create one.
In 2000 the borough ordered them removed, citing an ordinance against attachments to the poles. The Tenafly Eruv Association sued. The case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which ruled on 24 October 2002 that because the borough had tolerated other attachments, holiday signs, lost-dog notices, house-number markers, it could not single out the eruv. To do so, the court found, was to discriminate against religiously motivated conduct.
The litigation dragged on for years. Tenafly ultimately settled, the eruv stayed up, and the borough paid $325,000 toward the plaintiffs’ legal fees. The fight, bitter at the time, settled the question: an observant Jewish life was now woven into the streets themselves.
The Landmarks
Kaplen JCC on the Palisades, 411 East Clinton Avenue. The gravitational centre of Jewish Tenafly. Founded in Englewood in 1950 and relocated here in 1980, its 185,000 square feet hold a preschool, music and dance schools, summer camps, a fitness complex and a calendar of film festivals, concerts and lectures. For thousands of families it is the daily meeting point.
Temple Sinai of Bergen County, One Engle Street. The Reform congregation founded by five families in 1952, in its permanent home since 1958 at the corner of Engle and Hudson. It remains the town’s senior Jewish institution and a fixture of borough life.
Kehilat Kesher, the Community Synagogue of Tenafly and Englewood. A congregation serving both towns, led by Rabbi Akiva Block, that reflects how seamlessly Jewish life here crosses the municipal line into neighbouring Englewood. Its Gan Henel is a Reggio-inspired preschool.
The Tenafly Mikvah, 48 Piermont Road. A ritual bath is a quiet but telling marker of a serious observant community. Its presence, alongside the larger Englewood mikvah on Broad Avenue, signals that Tenafly is not merely a town where Jews live, but one where traditional Jewish law is practised.
Tavlin, downtown Tenafly. A Mediterranean kosher restaurant that has served the town since 2013, the sort of everyday establishment, a place to grab dinner after work, that tells you a community has reached a certain size and settledness.
Tenafly High School, 19 Columbus Drive. Not a Jewish institution, but central to the Jewish story here. Named a National Blue Ribbon School in 2005, the only New Jersey high school so honoured that year, it is the engine of the town’s reputation and a major reason families of every background pay to live here.
The Tenafly eruv. Invisible to most residents, the loop of lechis on utility poles is the most fought-over landmark in town. Won in federal court in 2002, it lets observant families walk to synagogue and carry on Shabbat, and it marks the boundary of a way of life.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Tenafly came, overwhelmingly, from New York City. They were the children and grandchildren of the great Eastern European immigration that filled the Lower East Side, the Bronx and Brooklyn, families whose roots ran back to the shtetls and cities of Poland, Russia, Lithuania and the lands between.
The move was generational and short in distance but long in meaning: from crowded city apartments to suburban houses, fifteen minutes across the George Washington Bridge but a world away in daily texture. Tenafly drew the more established, professional end of that migration, doctors, lawyers, academics and businesspeople who could afford the East Hill.
Later arrivals included Israelis and a Modern Orthodox cohort spilling over from Englewood and Teaneck, the families who pressed for the eruv. The common thread, across denominations, was the same priority that drew everyone else to Tenafly: the schools.
Tenafly Today
Tenafly today is a town shared, comfortably, by more than one community. By the 2020 census it was 56.6 percent non-Hispanic white and 30.6 percent Asian, the latter share reflecting a large and well-established Korean American population that has its own institutions, including a Korean community centre that opened in the borough in 2015. The story of the Koreans in Tenafly runs parallel to the Jewish one, two communities drawn by the same schools, living side by side.
The Jewish presence is no longer a matter of a single temple. It spans Reform Temple Sinai, the cross-town Kehilat Kesher, a Chabad centre, a mikvah and an eruv, and above all the Kaplen JCC, which functions as a regional hub far beyond the borough lines. The institutions sit within a wider Northern Valley world that includes the larger communities of Englewood and Teaneck.
It is, honestly, an affluent and assimilated suburban Jewish community rather than a dense urban enclave. People drive more than they walk, except on Shabbat inside the eruv. But the markers are all there, the synagogues, the kosher table, the ritual bath, the schools full of Jewish children, and they are not going anywhere.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did the Jews in Tenafly first arrive?
The Jews in Tenafly arrived mainly after the Second World War, part of the postwar movement of New York Jewish families across the George Washington Bridge into Bergen County. They were drawn by good public schools, larger homes and proximity to Manhattan, and the first major institution, Temple Sinai, was founded in 1952.
What is the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades?
It is one of the largest Jewish community centres in the United States, a 185,000-square-foot facility on 29 acres in Tenafly. Founded in Englewood in 1950, it moved to Tenafly in 1980 and now offers a preschool, music and dance schools, summer camps, a fitness complex and cultural programming that draws families from across the Northern Valley.
What was the Tenafly eruv lawsuit?
In 2000 the borough ordered Orthodox residents to remove an eruv, a symbolic boundary made of plastic strips on utility poles that allows observant Jews to carry on Shabbat. The Tenafly Eruv Association sued, and in 2002 the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in their favour. The borough later settled, the eruv stayed, and Tenafly paid $325,000 in legal fees.
Are there synagogues for the Jews in Tenafly?
Yes. Temple Sinai of Bergen County is the Reform congregation, founded in 1952, at One Engle Street. Kehilat Kesher serves Tenafly and Englewood together, and there is a Chabad centre in town. Many observant families also worship at synagogues in neighbouring Englewood.
Is Tenafly a good place for an observant Jewish family?
It can be. Tenafly has an eruv, a mikvah on Piermont Road, a Chabad presence and kosher dining, and it sits beside Englewood and Teaneck, two of the largest Modern Orthodox communities in the country. It is more suburban and spread out than an urban enclave, but the infrastructure for traditional observance exists.
How big is the Jewish community in Tenafly?
Tenafly has roughly 15,400 residents overall, and while no official figure isolates the Jewish share, the community is substantial and long established, anchored by the regional Kaplen JCC. It is one of several significant Jewish communities clustered in Bergen County’s Northern Valley.
If your family’s story passed through Tenafly, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Bronx apartment to a house on the East Hill, to wherever you are now.