On a Friday afternoon in Emerald Hills, the sprinklers click off, the last delivery van pulls away from Stirling Road, and a quiet settles over the wide streets. By the time the sun drops behind the golf course, families are walking. The Jews in Hollywood, Florida have built something rare in a sprawling beach city: a neighbourhood you can cross on foot, where the synagogue, the kosher market and your daughter’s school all sit inside a single morning’s walk.
The Place
Hollywood sits in southeastern Broward County, the third-largest city in the county with 153,067 residents at the 2020 census. It runs from the Atlantic Ocean inland across roughly thirty square miles, with several miles of beachfront and the famous 2.5-mile Broadwalk on its eastern edge.
The Jewish story here is not the beach. It is the inland neighbourhood of Emerald Hills, a leafy, low-slung district wrapped around a golf course a few miles west of the ocean, hard against the Hallandale Beach line to the south, where it meets the Israeli and Russian-speaking communities of Hallandale Beach. This is where the synagogues cluster, where the eruv runs, and where the Orthodox community has put down its deepest roots.
It is a city of contrasts. The tourist Hollywood is all Atlantic surf and the palm-lined Broadwalk; the residential Hollywood, a few miles inland, is wide quiet streets and single-family homes. The Jewish community lives almost entirely in the second one, in a district laid out for golf and cars that has reinvented itself, against the grain of South Florida, as a place you walk.
How It Became Jewish
A dream city, planned from nothing
Hollywood was the invention of one man. Joseph Wesley Young, a developer from the Pacific Northwest, arrived in South Florida in 1920 and platted “Hollywood by the Sea” the following year on a square mile of farmland. He laid out lakes, boulevards and circles, spent a fortune building it, and was elected the city’s first mayor when Hollywood incorporated on 28 November 1925.
Young’s city grew slowly through hurricanes and depression, then quickly after the Second World War, climbing from fewer than 3,000 people in 1930 to more than 35,000 by 1960. The Jews who would later define Emerald Hills did not arrive with the founders. They came later, in the great postwar migration that turned South Florida into the most Jewish stretch of the Sun Belt.
The golf course and the first families
Emerald Hills as a neighbourhood begins with a golf course. The course was laid out in 1969 by the design team of Bruce Devlin and Robert von Hagge on gently rolling ground, and the gated subdivisions and ranch streets grew up around it through the 1970s. The spacious lots and quiet cul-de-sacs drew a steady stream of Jewish families moving south, many of them from the Northeast, looking for warmth, space and a synagogue close to home.
An Orthodox centre takes shape
The institution that anchored the modern community was Young Israel of Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale, established in 1987 on Stirling Road. Affiliated with the National Council of Young Israel and the Orthodox Union, it became the magnet around which Modern Orthodox life organised: daily minyanim, an on-site mikvah, classes through the week. Where Young Israel went, families followed, buying within walking distance so they could reach shul on Shabbat.
The Sephardic community grew alongside it. B’nai Sephardim Synagogue completed its building in 1999 a short distance away on Stirling Road, eventually serving hundreds of affiliated families with its own mikvah. The presence of two large congregations, one Ashkenazi-leaning and one Sephardic, gave Emerald Hills the density that smaller communities never achieve.
Day schools made it permanent. Brauser Maimonides Academy, a Modern Orthodox co-educational school running from early childhood through eighth grade, grew to several hundred students and became the reason young couples could commit to the neighbourhood rather than treat it as a stopover.
The pandemic surge
The most dramatic chapter is recent. When the COVID-19 pandemic upended life in the dense Orthodox enclaves of the Northeast, Hollywood became a destination. Hundreds of Orthodox families relocated to the area in a short span, drawn by space, lower cost than Miami Beach, and an existing infrastructure of shuls and schools ready to absorb them.
The arrivals reshaped the streetscape. New smaller congregations and study halls opened, kosher restaurants multiplied, and what had been a comfortable suburban community tipped into something denser and younger. Estimates put the Jewish population of Hollywood around 13,000, a figure that has only grown with the recent wave.
The pull was practical as much as spiritual. A house in Emerald Hills cost a fraction of an equivalent in Miami Beach or the Five Towns the families had left, and it came with a yard, a garage and a synagogue at the end of the street. For couples raising large families on a single observant calendar, the arithmetic was hard to argue with. Word travelled fast through the connected world of Orthodox real estate, and a relocation that might once have taken a decade happened in a couple of years.
The Landmarks
Young Israel of Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale, 3291 Stirling Road. Established in 1987, this is the keystone of Modern Orthodox life in Emerald Hills. Its location on Stirling Road set the geography of the whole community, as families bought homes within walking distance and the eruv was drawn to take them in.
B’nai Sephardim Synagogue, 3670 Stirling Road. Completed in 1999, B’nai Sephardim serves the area’s large Sephardic population and grew to hundreds of affiliated families. Its presence a short walk from Young Israel gave the neighbourhood two anchors instead of one.
The Club at Emerald Hills, around which the neighbourhood was built. The golf course, designed in 1969 by Bruce Devlin and Robert von Hagge, is the physical reason Emerald Hills exists. The rolling fairways and the gated streets threaded around them set the pattern of spacious, walkable blocks the community later filled.
Brauser Maimonides Academy. The Modern Orthodox day school, serving early childhood through eighth grade with several hundred students, is what turns a community of newcomers into a place families stay. Its growth tracks the neighbourhood’s own.
KC Kosher Center, 5650 Stirling Road. A full kosher supermarket and caterer on Stirling Road, KC is one of the food anchors that let an observant family run an entire week without leaving the eruv. Its expansion mirrors the community’s appetite, literally.
The Grove Kosher Market, 2889 Stirling Road. Another of the area’s large kosher markets, The Grove sits on the same Stirling Road spine that has become the community’s main street, lined with bakeries, cafes and specialty grocers serving the Orthodox population.
Sylvia’s Kosher Place, 3294 Stirling Road. A neighbourhood kosher fixture directly across from Young Israel, the kind of small business that fills in around the synagogues and makes the walkable district function day to day.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Hollywood are, overwhelmingly, transplants. The early Emerald Hills families came south from the Northeast in the postwar decades, part of the same migration that built Jewish South Florida from Miami Beach up through Broward and Palm Beach counties. The same wave settled the high-rise enclaves of the Jewish community in Aventura just to the south, and pushed north toward the established Jewish community of Delray Beach in Palm Beach County. New York and New Jersey supplied the largest share, retirees and then their grown children chasing warmth and lower costs.
The Sephardic presence broadened the mix, drawing families with roots in the Middle East and North Africa alongside the Ashkenazi mainstream. And the recent pandemic-era wave came largely from dense Orthodox communities in the Tri-State area, families who had long summered in Florida and decided to make it permanent, the same instinct that drew an earlier generation to the oceanfront Jewish community of Bal Harbour.
Hollywood Today
Drive Stirling Road today and the community announces itself: kosher markets, pizza shops, sushi counters and steakhouses strung along the corridor, men in hats walking between them on a weekday. The eruv encircling Emerald Hills makes the whole neighbourhood usable on Shabbat, and on Saturday mornings the sidewalks fill with families heading to a choice of more than twenty congregations within a small radius.
It is, by the standards of newer Orthodox enclaves, an enviable place. Homes are larger and cheaper than in Miami Beach to the south or Boca Raton to the north. The schools are full, the shuls are multiplying, and the pandemic influx gave a maturing community a fresh jolt of young families.
The community is also notably mixed for its size. Ashkenazi and Sephardic congregations sit within blocks of each other, Israelis and American transplants daven side by side, and the range runs from Modern Orthodox to more traditional shtiebels. That breadth is unusual outside the largest Jewish cities, and it is part of what keeps families choosing Emerald Hills over starting fresh somewhere with only one flavour of shul.
The pressures are the ordinary ones of success. Prices have climbed as demand outran supply, and the neighbourhood that once felt semi-rural around its golf course now feels busy. But for the families who walk these streets on Friday evening, Hollywood is exactly what Joseph Young promised a century ago, without ever imagining who would build it: a planned city by the sea, made into a home.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where do the Jews in Hollywood, Florida live?
The Jewish community in Hollywood is concentrated in Emerald Hills, an inland neighbourhood a few miles west of the beach, wrapped around a golf course and running south toward the Hallandale Beach line. Most synagogues, kosher markets and schools sit along the Stirling Road corridor.
Is there an eruv in Hollywood, Florida?
Yes. The Emerald Hills community is encircled by an eruv, which allows observant Jews to carry items outside the home on Shabbat. The eruv is part of what makes the neighbourhood genuinely walkable for Sabbath observance.
How big is the Jewish community in Hollywood, Florida?
Estimates place the Jewish population of Hollywood at roughly 13,000. The number has grown substantially in recent years, particularly after hundreds of Orthodox families relocated from the Northeast during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
What synagogues are in Hollywood’s Emerald Hills?
The two largest are Young Israel of Hollywood-Fort Lauderdale, established in 1987 on Stirling Road, and B’nai Sephardim Synagogue, which completed its building in 1999. Alongside them are roughly two dozen smaller Orthodox congregations and study halls, plus Reform and Conservative temples elsewhere in the city.
Is kosher food easy to find in Hollywood, Florida?
Very. The community supports several large kosher supermarkets, including KC Kosher Center and The Grove, along with more than twenty kosher restaurants ranging from pizza and sushi to steakhouses, most of them clustered along Stirling Road.
Why did so many Jewish families move to Hollywood, Florida?
The early draw was the postwar migration to warm, affordable South Florida. More recently, the pandemic accelerated relocation from dense Orthodox communities in New York and New Jersey, drawn by Hollywood’s space, lower cost than Miami Beach, and ready-made infrastructure of synagogues and day schools.
If your family’s story passed through Hollywood, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the walk-up apartments of the Northeast to a walkable street in Emerald Hills, to wherever you are now.