On a Saturday morning in Toco Hills, the sidewalks along LaVista Road fill with families walking to shul, fathers in suits, children in dress shoes, mothers steering strollers past brick ranch houses and dogwoods. No cars start, no errands are run. This is the Orthodox Jewish heart of Atlanta, a walkable Sabbath neighbourhood tucked into the wooded hills near Emory University, and for more than sixty years it has grown one family at a time around a single synagogue on LaVista.
The Place
Toco Hills sits in unincorporated DeKalb County, in the North Druid Hills area just northeast of Emory University and roughly four miles from downtown Atlanta. It takes its name from the Toco Hill Shopping Center, built in 1956 by developer W. C. (Clyde) Shepherd at the intersection of LaVista and North Druid Hills roads.
The name itself is a small mystery. Shepherd had spent time in Brazil during the Second World War and brought back the word Toco, believed to mean something to do with luck. A persistent local legend that it stands for Top of the County has never held up.
What turned this ordinary post-war suburb into Atlanta’s most concentrated Jewish neighbourhood was not the shopping centre but a congregation that moved in beside it.
How It Became Jewish
A congregation born from a disagreement
Congregation Beth Jacob first held services in the autumn of 1942 and was formally founded in 1943 by a group of men, among them Maurice Gavronski, Frank Taffel and M. S. Katz, who worried that Atlanta’s established Ahavath Achim synagogue was drifting away from Orthodoxy. They began in a converted house on Boulevard, in the old in-town Jewish quarter.
For its first decade the congregation was small. Yosef Saffra became its first rabbi in 1951, when there were forty members. The following year a young rabbi named Emanuel Feldman arrived. He would stay for thirty-nine years, until 1991, and reshape Jewish Atlanta in the process.
Feldman led at a moment when American Orthodoxy was uncertain of its future, in the South perhaps most of all. Many assumed observant life could not survive far from the dense Jewish neighbourhoods of the Northeast. The decision he and the congregation made in the early 1960s would test that assumption directly, and it began with a piece of land.
The move to LaVista Road
In 1962, under Rabbi Feldman, Beth Jacob bought land on LaVista Road in Toco Hills and built a new home at 1855 LaVista. At the time there were essentially no Jews in the area, Orthodox or otherwise. The synagogue was a wager on a future that did not yet exist.
The wager paid off. Observant families need to live within walking distance of their synagogue, because driving is forbidden on the Sabbath. So as Beth Jacob grew, the streets around it filled with the people who needed to be near it. Membership climbed from 190 families in 1962 to roughly 500 by 1976 and around 560 by 1994.
The eruv that drew the boundary
The single most important addition came in 1992, when Beth Jacob constructed Atlanta’s first community eruv. An eruv is a near-invisible boundary, often run along utility wires and poles, that symbolically encloses an area so that observant Jews may carry keys, push strollers and wheel the elderly to synagogue on the Sabbath, all of which are otherwise forbidden in a public domain.
Building it meant mastering the intricate laws of eruv construction, persuading the city to allow use of its telephone poles, and reaching agreements with the homeowners and businesses whose property the wire would cross. Once it existed, the eruv made family life on Shabbat genuinely possible, and the neighbourhood’s appeal to young families with children deepened sharply.
A community thickens
Where Beth Jacob led, others followed. The neighbourhood now holds a cluster of congregations within a short walk of one another, including Modern Orthodox, Sephardic and Chabad communities alongside the original Orthodox anchor. A separate Persian shul and a Sephardic congregation reflect the variety of Jewish origins that have found their way to these streets, a range unusual for a community of this size in the South. Young Israel of Toco Hills grew from about 150 families in 2008 to roughly 225 by 2014, a stretch in which more than a hundred new families reportedly moved into the neighbourhood inside three years.
Schools came too, the surest sign that a Jewish community intends to stay. Torah Day School of Atlanta, an elementary school, settled into the heart of Toco Hills, and high schools followed for boys and for girls. With kosher groceries, synagogues, schools and a mikvah all reachable on foot, the neighbourhood became self-sustaining.
The Landmarks
Congregation Beth Jacob, 1855 LaVista Road. The vast, sprawling mother synagogue of Orthodox Atlanta and the reason the neighbourhood exists. Founded in 1943 and rooted here since 1962, it is led today by Rabbi Ilan Feldman, son of Emanuel, and houses mikvaot for men and women.
The Spicy Peach, 2887 North Druid Hills Road. A kosher market in the Toco Hills Shopping Center, certified by the Atlanta Kashruth Commission, stocked with the imported and innovative kosher products that make a full Shabbat table possible. It has become a go-to for the neighbourhood’s cooks.
The Kosher Gourmet, on Briarcliff Road. Opened by Steve Gilmer in 1983 after relocating from Virginia-Highland, it was one of the city’s first kosher groceries and an early signal that the community had reached critical mass. Generations of Toco Hills families have bought their holiday provisions here.
Kroger Toco Hills, 2205 LaVista Road. The neighbourhood’s main supermarket runs a glatt-kosher deli, bakery, fish and meat counter, plus the well-known Chai Peking kosher Chinese counter inside the store. It is the everyday workhorse of kosher life here, ordinary and indispensable.
Torah Day School of Atlanta, 1985 LaVista Road. A kindergarten-through-eighth-grade day school in the heart of Toco Hills, educating several hundred boys and girls in separate-gender classes. It moved into its current building in 2003, the kind of permanent investment that anchors families to a place.
The Toco Hills eruv. Not a building but a boundary, strung quietly along the area’s utility poles since 1992. Checked weekly to make sure no break has occurred, it is the unseen infrastructure that lets the whole neighbourhood walk, carry and gather on the Sabbath.
The Toco Hill Shopping Center, LaVista and North Druid Hills. The 1956 strip centre that gave the neighbourhood its name and, decades later, its kosher market. On a Sunday it is an ordinary suburban plaza; on a Friday afternoon it is the last stop before sundown.
Where They Came From
The first families came from across town. Atlanta’s Jewish community had long been centred in the old in-town neighbourhoods near Boulevard and along Ponce de Leon, and Beth Jacob’s own roots lay there before the 1962 move. Toco Hills was, at first, a migration of a few miles, observant families leaving the changing in-town districts for a quiet, leafy, affordable suburb beside Emory.
Later the pull went national. As Atlanta’s Orthodox infrastructure matured, with its eruv, schools and kosher shops, families began arriving from the older Jewish centres of the Northeast, drawn by Sun Belt affordability, professional opportunity and a warm, compact community in which a child could walk to school and a parent could walk to work and to shul. Holocaust survivors, young professionals and large young families settled side by side along the same blocks.
Toco Hills is not the only Jewish address in metro Atlanta. The growth of suburban congregations to the north helped seed the more recently affluent Jewish community in Dunwoody, and the two neighbourhoods together frame the arc of Jewish settlement in the region, from the in-town origins of Toco Hills to the newer suburbs. The same northern suburbs have drawn other striving immigrant communities, among them the Korean families of Johns Creek and the Indian community in Alpharetta, a reminder that Atlanta’s professional-class diaspora map runs in several directions at once. Further afield, the in-town, synagogue-anchored pattern of Toco Hills echoes that of the Jewish community in Meyerland, Houston, another Sun Belt city where observant life clusters tightly around its shuls.
Toco Hills Today
Today Toco Hills is the unmistakable centre of Orthodox life in Atlanta, a place where you can keep a fully observant household without ever needing a car on the Sabbath. The neighbourhood holds multiple synagogues, three Jewish schools, kosher markets, a mikvah and a network of kosher dining within the eruv, and on Saturday mornings the streets belong to people on foot.
It is not a wealthy enclave in the gated-mansion sense. Toco Hills is a neighbourhood of solid mid-century ranch homes, professional families and a few survivors of an older world, and its value lies in proximity rather than display. Houses here are prized less for their square footage than for their distance, in walkable minutes, from Beth Jacob’s doors.
The pressures are the familiar ones of a successful in-town neighbourhood: rising prices, ageing housing stock and the constant question of whether young families can still afford to buy in close enough to walk. So far the community keeps growing, family by family, the same way it always has.
What is striking, six decades on, is how completely the original wager has been won. Beth Jacob built first and trusted that the people would come, and they did, until the synagogue that opened in a neighbourhood with no Jews became the centre of Orthodox life for an entire Southern city. On any given Shabbat morning, the proof is simply the sound of footsteps on LaVista Road.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the Jewish community in Toco Hills, Atlanta?
The Jewish community in Toco Hills is centred along LaVista Road in the North Druid Hills area of DeKalb County, just northeast of Emory University. The anchor is Congregation Beth Jacob at 1855 LaVista Road, with synagogues, schools and kosher shops clustered within walking distance.
Why did Orthodox Jews settle in Toco Hills?
The community grew around Congregation Beth Jacob, which moved to LaVista Road in 1962 when there were no Jews in the area. Because observant Jews must live within walking distance of their synagogue, families settled nearby, and the neighbourhood filled in around the shul over the following decades.
What is the Toco Hills eruv?
The Toco Hills eruv is a symbolic boundary, often run along utility poles, that Beth Jacob built in 1992 as Atlanta’s first community eruv. It allows observant Jews to carry items and push strollers on the Sabbath within the enclosed area, which made the neighbourhood far more practical for young families.
Where can you buy kosher food in Toco Hills?
The neighbourhood has The Spicy Peach kosher market in the Toco Hills Shopping Center on North Druid Hills Road, The Kosher Gourmet on Briarcliff Road, and the Kroger on LaVista Road with its glatt-kosher deli, bakery and the Chai Peking kosher Chinese counter inside.
Are there Jewish schools in Toco Hills?
Yes. Torah Day School of Atlanta, a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, sits at 1985 LaVista Road in the heart of the neighbourhood, and the area is served by Orthodox high schools for boys and for girls along with the broader Atlanta Jewish school network.
Is the Jewish community in Toco Hills still growing?
Yes. The Jewish community in Toco Hills has grown steadily for decades, with congregations like Young Israel expanding from about 150 families in 2008 to roughly 225 by 2014, and dozens of new families continuing to move into the neighbourhood.
If your family’s story passed through Toco Hills, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a converted house on Boulevard to a synagogue on LaVista Road, to wherever you are now.