The story of the Jews in Plainview begins in a potato field. In 1950 this corner of the Town of Oyster Bay held barely 1,155 people, most of them farmers selling cucumbers to the pickle plants in Hicksville and Farmingdale. A decade later more than 35,000 lived here, a great many of them young Jewish families who had packed up apartments in Brooklyn and Queens and driven east to claim a lawn of their own.
The Place
Plainview is a hamlet in Nassau County, Long Island, set inside the Town of Oyster Bay and bordered by Syosset, Woodbury, Hicksville, Bethpage and Old Bethpage. It shares its school district and much of its identity with neighbouring Old Bethpage, the two names joined on the welcome signs along the main roads.
It sits in the same belt of affluent Jewish suburbs as neighbouring Syosset and Jericho, and by any measure it is a prosperous place. The median household income sits at roughly $181,000 and the median family income above $211,000, with a poverty rate under one percent. The houses are mostly mid-century capes and splits that have been expanded, dormered and rebuilt over seventy years of careful ownership.
For the people who grew up here, Plainview is shorthand for a particular kind of suburban Jewish childhood: Hebrew school on weekday afternoons, the JCC pool in summer, and a high school that quietly ranks among the best in the state. It produced its share of names, too. The television writer Chuck Lorre, born Charles Levine, and the artist Robert Longo both came out of the local high school in 1970, the kind of detail residents still trade with quiet pride.
How It Became Jewish
The land is older than the name. Robert Williams, a settler from Wales, bought acreage here in 1648, and the wider tract passed to Thomas Powell in 1695 as part of the Bethpage Purchase. The settlement was long called Manetto Hill, a name drawn from a Native American word for the high ground above the surrounding plain.
In 1885 residents petitioned for a post office and were refused, the story goes, because a similar name was already in use upstate. They chose Plainview instead, a plain description of a plain landscape. For another sixty years it stayed exactly that: farmland.
From potatoes to subdivisions
Plainview grew cucumbers until blight ruined the crop in the early 1900s, after which the farmers switched to potatoes. Then came the war, and after it a second blight, and a generation of returning GIs who wanted out of the crowded city. The farmers sold, the builders came, and the fields disappeared under streets of nearly identical houses in the Levittown mould.
The arithmetic of that change is startling. Between 1950 and 1960 the population multiplied more than thirty times over. The buyers were overwhelmingly young couples, and on Long Island in the 1950s a large share of those young couples were Jewish, the children and grandchildren of immigrants who had come through the Lower East Side, Brownsville, Bensonhurst and Flushing. The same migration filled Merrick to the south and the older streets of Great Neck on the North Shore. You can read the full history of the hamlet on Wikipedia.
Building the synagogues
A new community needs places to gather, and Plainview built them fast. By the mid-1960s congregations were forming in living rooms and rented halls before raising buildings of their own. The Plainview Synagogue traces its start to 1964, when Rabbi Gutman Baras and Rebbetzin Chana Baras began holding services in a house on Manetto Hill Road, determined to make a warm home for every Jew who walked in.
The Manetto Hill Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation, was established in 1969 on the road that gave the area its old name. The Plainview Jewish Center, also Conservative, grew into one of the larger congregations on this stretch of the Island. By 1985 there were enough Reform families to found Temple Chaverim, which met first in homes, then a church, then the Mid-Island Y JCC before settling at its own building.
Each denomination found its footing here within a single generation, an unusually complete spread for a hamlet of this size. Where an older Jewish community might have argued for decades over a single shul, Plainview simply built one of each, because the families arriving in the 1950s and 1960s came from every corner of New York Jewish life and wanted somewhere that felt like home.
An Orthodox community within the suburb
What began as a largely Conservative and Reform suburb later grew a substantial Orthodox layer. Today more than 250 Orthodox families anchor a self-contained world of three synagogues, an eruv that lets families carry on Shabbat, a mikvah, and daily minyanim morning and evening.
The community supports its own school, Mercaz Academy, a coeducational yeshiva day school, alongside the Young Israel of Plainview and the Sephardic Synagogue of Plainview. It is, by the descriptions of those who live in it, a deliberately modest and tight-knit world built within the larger affluent suburb.
The Landmarks
Plainview Jewish Center, 95 Floral Drive West. The largest of the Conservative congregations, it serves families from Plainview, Old Bethpage, Hicksville, Bethpage, Syosset and Woodbury. It pairs the full programming of a big synagogue with the feel of a smaller one, and its religious school has carried generations of local children to bar and bat mitzvah.
Manetto Hill Jewish Center, 244 Manetto Hill Road. Founded in 1969 on the road that preserves the hamlet’s older name, this Conservative congregation became, by its own account, the first synagogue in Eastern Nassau County to adopt a voluntary “give from the heart” model of dues, a small but telling sign of its community-first temperament.
Temple Chaverim, 1050 Washington Avenue. Plainview’s Reform congregation, established in 1985, took its name from the Hebrew word for friends. It spent its early years renting space before building its own home, and remains the Reform anchor for the surrounding hamlets.
Young Israel of Plainview, 132 Southern Parkway. A modern Orthodox congregation at the centre of the hamlet’s Orthodox growth, it offers daily minyanim and sits within walking distance of the eruv and mikvah that make full Shabbat observance possible here.
Mercaz Academy. The coeducational Orthodox day school that lets observant families educate their children without leaving the area, a keystone for any growing Orthodox community and a reason many young families have chosen Plainview over towns without a local yeshiva.
ZuckerBakers, Plainview. A family-owned kosher pareve bakery established in 2008 that handcrafts nut-free and dairy-free goods in-house. Together with the dedicated kosher kitchen, bakery and takeout counter at the local ShopRite, it means a Shabbat table can be set without a long drive.
Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School. The district’s single high school, named for the president, ranks in the top five percent of New York public schools, with math and reading proficiency well above eighty percent. For decades it has been one of the quiet reasons Jewish families chose Plainview, and kept choosing it.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Plainview did not arrive from across an ocean. They came from across the city line, mostly from Brooklyn and Queens, in the two decades after the Second World War.
Their parents and grandparents were the Eastern European immigrants of the great migration, Russian, Polish, Lithuanian and Galician Jews who had landed on the Lower East Side and spread into Brownsville, Bensonhurst, Flatbush and Flushing. Plainview was the next move outward, the suburban chapter of a journey that had already crossed the Atlantic.
That history is why Plainview’s Jewish life is so denominationally broad. The families who came carried every shade of practice from secular to strictly observant, and within a generation each found or built an institution of its own.
It also explains the texture of the place. Plainview never had the old-money formality of the North Shore Gold Coast towns; it was, and largely remains, a community of strivers one or two generations removed from immigrant poverty, who measured success in a paid-off mortgage, a child at a good college, and a synagogue within an easy drive.
Plainview Today
Plainview at the 2020 census held about 27,100 people, slightly fewer than at its mid-century peak but far more settled. It remains a heavily Jewish hamlet, though it is changing: its Asian population has grown to roughly one in five residents, and East Asian families now share the schools, the parks and the main roads that earlier generations of Jewish families built up.
The Jewish institutions persist and, in the Orthodox case, grow. The Conservative and Reform congregations that defined the 1960s and 1980s continue, while the Orthodox community keeps adding families drawn by the eruv, the mikvah, the day school and the relative affordability of homes compared with the famously expensive Five Towns and Roslyn.
The town has also known recent grief that bound the community closer. Omer Neutra, a young man raised in Plainview, was taken on 7 October 2023, and his name is now spoken in its synagogues alongside the more ordinary milestones of suburban Jewish life. It is a reminder that this is not a museum piece but a living community, still writing its story on the same ground where potatoes once grew.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Plainview, New York a Jewish community?
Yes. The Jews in Plainview have been a defining part of the hamlet since the postwar building boom of the 1950s, and Plainview supports Orthodox, Conservative and Reform congregations along with kosher food, a mikvah, an eruv and a yeshiva day school. It remains one of Nassau County’s well-established Jewish suburbs.
When did Jewish families move to Plainview?
Mostly between 1950 and 1960, when the hamlet grew from about 1,155 people to more than 35,000 as farmland was sold for housing. Many of the new residents were young Jewish families leaving Brooklyn and Queens for a suburban home of their own.
What synagogues are there in Plainview?
Plainview has several. The Plainview Jewish Center and Manetto Hill Jewish Center are Conservative, Temple Chaverim is Reform, and the Young Israel of Plainview, Plainview Synagogue and Sephardic Synagogue of Plainview serve the Orthodox community.
Is there kosher food in Plainview?
Yes. ZuckerBakers is a kosher pareve bakery established in 2008, and the local ShopRite operates a dedicated kosher kitchen, bakery and takeout counter. The Orthodox community is also served by an eruv and a mikvah within walking distance.
Why did Jewish families choose Plainview over other Long Island towns?
Affordable mid-century homes, an excellent school district topped by JFK High School, a short Long Island Rail Road commute to Manhattan, and a full set of synagogues all drew Jewish families. For Orthodox families specifically, the eruv, mikvah and Mercaz Academy day school made full observance possible without leaving town.
How good are the schools in Plainview?
Very. The Plainview-Old Bethpage Central School District’s John F. Kennedy High School ranks in the top five percent of New York public schools, with math and reading proficiency above eighty percent, far ahead of state averages. Strong schools have long been part of why Jewish families settle here.
If your family’s story passed through Plainview, or any of the places Jewish families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the tenements of Brooklyn and Queens to a split-level on former potato farmland in Nassau County, to wherever you are now.