There is a particular kind of quiet on the four-acre lots of Old Westbury, the hush of long driveways and old trees, of land that money has held still for more than a century. For most of that century it belonged to the Whitneys and the Phippses and the Graces, to fox hunts and polo ponies and Protestant fortunes. Today the same hush settles over a Friday-night Kiddush table, because the story of the Jews in Old Westbury is the story of an old WASP redoubt that, parcel by parcel, became a Jewish one.
The Place
Old Westbury is a village on the North Shore of Long Island, in Nassau County, straddling the towns of North Hempstead and Oyster Bay. It is small, a few thousand people on rolling acres, and it is staggeringly rich. By most measures it ranks among the wealthiest municipalities in the United States, and its zip code, 11568, sits near the very top of New York State for income.
The wealth is not loud. Zoning that requires four-acre minimum lots keeps the houses set back behind hedges and gates, invisible from Jericho Turnpike. What you see from the road is greenery, the brick wall of a former estate, the discreet sign of a private school or a college campus carved from a Gilded Age mansion.
This is Gold Coast country, the Long Island of grand houses and clipped lawns, and Old Westbury is one of its purest surviving fragments.
How It Became Jewish
To understand why affluent Jewish families came to Old Westbury, you first have to understand who they were replacing, and why the place was off-limits to them for so long.
The Quaker farms and the railroad
The land was settled in 1658 and called Woodedge before Quaker families renamed it Westbury after a town in England. For roughly two centuries it stayed exactly that: isolated Quaker farms, perhaps ninety per cent of the land in Quaker hands, reachable only with effort. The railroad changed the arithmetic in 1836, putting the open farmland within reach of New York City.
The estate era
Beginning in the 1880s, the industrial fortunes of New York went looking for room. They found it here, in unspoiled hills close to the city and perfect for the sports the rich played: horse breeding, fox hunting, and polo at the Meadow Brook Club. The Phippses, the Whitneys, the Vanderbilts and the Graces built country houses on hundreds of acres each. Within a decade only nine Quaker farms were left.
The grandest of these houses still stands. Westbury House, completed in 1906 for John S. Phipps and his wife Margarita Grace Phipps, is a Charles II-style mansion designed by the English architect George A. Crawley, sitting amid two hundred acres of formal gardens. The village incorporated in 1924 with a population of about five hundred and an assessed valuation of six and a half million dollars, a deliberate act of preservation by people who wanted the estate world kept intact.
The estates break up
The world that built Old Westbury did not survive the twentieth century intact. After the Second World War, new parkways put the village within commuting distance of the city, and rising property taxes made the enormous estates impossible to hold. The great parcels were subdivided. Some became institutions: the Phipps gardens opened to the public, and a du Pont mansion of 1916 eventually became the centrepiece of a college campus. Others were broken into building lots, still large by any normal standard but no longer the domain of a single dynasty.
The new families arrive
This is the opening that Jewish Long Island walked through. The same post-war suburban surge that built up nearby Westbury, Roslyn and Syosset eventually reached Old Westbury’s subdivided estates, and the families who could afford four-acre lots increasingly included Jewish doctors, lawyers, manufacturers and developers who had made good in the city and the inner suburbs.
The institutional marker of that arrival is the Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue affiliated with United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, at 21 Old Westbury Road. A community does not build a synagogue, a preschool and a religious school until enough families have decided to stay and raise children. By the late twentieth century, enough had.
A later chapter belongs to Persian Jews. Iran’s Jews, who began arriving in the United States in large numbers around the 1979 revolution, built their first great American stronghold a short drive west, in the Persian-Jewish world of Great Neck. As that community prospered and spread east along the North Shore, some of its most successful families followed the same logic the Phippses once had: they wanted land, privacy and grandeur, and Old Westbury had all three. The result, slowly, was a village where the estate aesthetic outlived the estate families.
The Landmarks
Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation, 21 Old Westbury Road. The anchor of organised Jewish life in the village, a Conservative and egalitarian congregation that runs the Shorashim Preschool Academy and a religious school for the children of the four-acre lots. It is the place a Jewish Old Westbury announces itself, the building you would not have found here a lifetime ago.
Old Westbury Gardens, 71 Old Westbury Road. The former Phipps estate, Westbury House of 1906, set in two hundred acres of formal gardens and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is the surviving heart of the old world, the picture-book version of the Gold Coast that everyone who moves here is, in some sense, buying a corner of.
New York Institute of Technology, Northern Boulevard at Valentines Lane. The university’s Long Island campus spreads across roughly a thousand acres of former estate land and includes the de Seversky Mansion, a 1916 du Pont house by Thomas Hastings that the school restored in the 1970s. It is the clearest example of an aristocrat’s house given a second, public life.
SUNY Old Westbury, 223 Store Hill Road. A public liberal arts college of the State University of New York, founded on estate acreage in the village. Its presence, a state campus inside one of the nation’s richest zip codes, is a reminder that Old Westbury was never only a private enclave.
Chabad of Old Westbury. The Hasidic outreach movement keeps a presence in the village, a sign that Jewish life here is not confined to a single congregation or denomination but has grown varied enough to support more than one address.
The four-acre lots. Not a single landmark but the defining one. The zoning that mandates four-acre minimums, raised from earlier limits in 1987, is what preserves the estate feel and what every new family, Jewish or otherwise, buys into. The privacy that once protected old money now protects new neighbours just as completely.
Where They Came From
The Jewish families of Old Westbury did not arrive in one wave from one place. Most came outward, from New York City and from the older Jewish suburbs of Nassau County, the children and grandchildren of immigrants who had climbed from the Lower East Side to the inner ring of Long Island and then to its outermost, leafiest edge.
That arc connects Old Westbury to a chain of North Shore communities that filled with Jewish families across the second half of the twentieth century, from the long-established Jewish community of Great Neck to the families of Roslyn just to the north and the Jewish neighbourhoods of Syosset to the east.
The Persian-Jewish thread came from further away, from Tehran and other Iranian cities by way of the revolution, and from the dense Persian world that took root in Great Neck and the Persian-Jewish community of Roslyn. For its wealthiest members, Old Westbury was the next step up the same ladder the old families had once climbed: more land, more distance, more quiet.
Old Westbury Today
Old Westbury today is a village of a few thousand people, more diverse than its reputation suggests. The 2020 census recorded a population of roughly 4,300 that was about 54 per cent White, 23 per cent Asian, 14 per cent Black and 7 per cent Hispanic, with newer counts putting the figure above five thousand. It is one of the most expensive places to buy a house in America, with average household incomes and net worth that read like typographical errors.
Jewish life here is real but understated, in keeping with everything else about the village. A Conservative congregation, a Chabad presence and a mikvah serve families spread across enormous private lots rather than clustered along a main street. There is no Jewish quarter to walk through, because there is no quarter and barely a sidewalk; this is a community you find behind gates, at the synagogue on a Saturday morning, in the children at the preschool.
What gives the place its particular flavour is the inversion at its core. A village built to keep certain people out is now substantially home to their descendants and to newcomers from Tehran. The estate aesthetic survived; the estate families largely did not. The hedges still do their work, only now they shelter Shabbat tables and bar mitzvahs, and the old quiet of the Gold Coast belongs to whoever can afford the land.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a Jewish community in Old Westbury, New York?
Yes. The Jews in Old Westbury are served by the Old Westbury Hebrew Congregation, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue at 21 Old Westbury Road, along with a Chabad presence and a mikvah. Because the village is built on very large lots, the community is dispersed rather than concentrated in one neighbourhood.
Why did affluent Jewish families move to Old Westbury?
After the Second World War, the village’s Gilded Age estates were subdivided into large residential lots, opening a place that had long been an exclusive WASP enclave. Successful Jewish families from New York City and the older Nassau County suburbs were drawn by the land, privacy and prestige, the same things that had attracted the original estate builders.
Is there a Persian-Jewish community in Old Westbury?
There is a Persian-Jewish presence. As the large Iranian-Jewish community centred on nearby Great Neck prospered and spread east along the North Shore after 1979, some of its wealthiest families settled in Old Westbury for its space and grandeur. The broader Persian-Jewish world remains anchored in Great Neck.
What is Old Westbury known for?
Old Westbury is known as one of the wealthiest villages in the United States, a Gold Coast estate community famous for Old Westbury Gardens, the former Phipps mansion, and for hosting campuses of the New York Institute of Technology and SUNY Old Westbury on former estate land.
How wealthy is Old Westbury, New York?
Extremely. Its zip code ranks near the top of New York State for income, and studies have estimated average household net worth in the tens of millions and average incomes well into the hundreds of thousands. Four-acre minimum zoning keeps the housing stock large and expensive.
Where did the Jews in Old Westbury come from?
Most came outward from New York City and the older Jewish suburbs of Nassau County, the descendants of earlier immigrants moving to Long Island’s leafiest edge. A later Persian-Jewish thread arrived from Iran by way of the revolution and the Persian community of Great Neck.
If your family’s story passed through Old Westbury, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenement on the Lower East Side to a four-acre lot on the Gold Coast, to wherever you are now.