On a Friday afternoon in Cedarhurst, the rhythm of Central Avenue changes hours before sundown. Bakeries sell out of challah, the kosher butchers wrap their last orders, and the shops that line the half-mile strip begin to dim their windows. By the time the Sabbath arrives, the Jews in Cedarhurst have turned a small Nassau County village into one of the most concentrated centres of Orthodox life in the New York region.
The Place
Cedarhurst is a village of barely two-thirds of a square mile on the South Shore of Long Island, tucked inside the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County. It sits at the western edge of the area known as the Five Towns, the cluster of villages and hamlets that grew up around five consecutive stops on the Long Island Rail Road’s Far Rockaway Branch.
The 2020 census counted 7,374 residents, up almost twelve per cent from a decade earlier, a rare instance of a built-out suburb growing rather than shrinking. That growth has a clear engine: Orthodox families moving in, raising children, and staying. The same forces have reshaped the wider district, including the Jewish community in neighbouring Woodmere and the area as a whole, which we cover in our profile of the Jews of the Five Towns.
Central Avenue runs through the heart of it, and for much of the twentieth century it was known across Long Island as a luxury shopping street. The boutiques have largely given way to kosher restaurants, Judaica shops and grocers, but the prosperity that first drew the wealthy here never really left.
How It Became Jewish
To understand the Jews in Cedarhurst, you have to start with the railroad and the rich. The line reached the area in 1869, and a decade later a group of young sportsmen founded the Rockaway Hunting Club, one of the oldest country clubs in the United States, on land that was then part of Cedarhurst.
The club brought money, and money brought a name. In 1884, the hamlet then called Ocean Point was renamed Cedarhurst, partly at the request of the hunt club, and a post office opened under the new name. The village formally incorporated in 1910. For decades this was a retreat for Manhattan’s elite, and Central Avenue became, in the local phrase, the Rodeo Drive of Long Island.
The first synagogue, 1928
Jewish settlement in the Five Towns began modestly and against the grain. In 1928, a small group founded Congregation Derech Yosher, “the Way of Righteousness,” at 131 Washington Avenue in neighbouring Lawrence. It is regarded as the first Orthodox synagogue in Nassau County.
The congregation later took the name Congregation Beth Sholom, and in 1949 it broke ground on a permanent home at 390 Broadway in Lawrence, where it still stands. In those early years the Orthodox were a minority among a largely Reform and Conservative Jewish population that had begun summering and then settling along the South Shore.
The postwar decades
The decisive shift came after the Second World War. As Jewish families left Brooklyn and the Bronx for the suburbs, the Five Towns offered large houses, good schools and an existing Jewish presence. The Orthodox community grew steadily through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, adding shuls, day schools and the communal institutions that observant life requires. The pattern echoed the suburban Jewish migrations that produced communities like the Jews of Port Washington and the Jews of Harrison across the New York metropolitan region.
One striking arrival captured the breadth of that migration. In 1953, a group of Sephardic Jews from the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean founded the United Sephardim of Brooklyn, drawing together families from Monastir and Kastoria in what is now North Macedonia and Greece, and from Ankara in Turkey. In 1962 they incorporated as the Sephardic Temple and broke ground that June on Branch Boulevard in Cedarhurst.
The building, designed by architect Bert Bassock with a domed roof inspired by Byzantine forms, opened in March 1964. It remains one of the most distinctive synagogues in the village and a reminder that the Jews of the Five Towns trace their roots not only to Eastern Europe but to the Ottoman world.
The schools take hold
Nothing anchored the community more firmly than its schools. The Hebrew Institute of Long Island had served the Rockaway and Five Towns area since the mid-1930s, and the Hillel School was founded in Lawrence in 1957.
In 1978 these efforts consolidated into the Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, universally known as HAFTR. Two years later, in 1980, HAFTR purchased the old Number 3 public school building in Cedarhurst, and the village gained a yeshiva at its centre. A community that educates its children locally tends to stay, and Cedarhurst did.
The Orthodox tide
Over the past quarter century the change has accelerated. As older Reform and Conservative families aged or moved away, younger Orthodox families filled in behind them, and the institutional balance of the Five Towns tipped decisively toward Orthodoxy.
An eruv, the symbolic boundary that permits carrying on the Sabbath, now encircles the community. The number of Orthodox synagogues across the Greater Five Towns far outstrips the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist congregations combined. Central Avenue’s transformation from luxury boutiques to kosher commerce is the most visible sign of a deeper demographic shift.
The Landmarks
Congregation Beth Sholom, 390 Broadway, Lawrence. The oldest Orthodox synagogue in Nassau County, founded in 1928 as Congregation Derech Yosher. Rabbi Kenneth Hain led the congregation from 1988 until his retirement in 2022, a tenure that spanned the community’s transformation from a modest minority into a major Orthodox centre.
Sephardic Temple, 775 Branch Boulevard, Cedarhurst. Founded by Balkan and Turkish Jews who first organised in Brooklyn in 1953, the congregation opened its domed Cedarhurst home in 1964. Its Hebrew name, Kahal Kadosh Emeth Ve’Shalom, weaves together “truth” and “peace” from the two original Brooklyn synagogues.
Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, 389 Central Avenue, Lawrence. Founded in 1978, HAFTR enrols well over a thousand students from prekindergarten through twelfth grade. Its high school sits in Cedarhurst, in a building the academy bought from the local school district in 1980, putting Jewish education at the village’s geographic heart.
Gourmet Glatt, 137 Spruce Street, Cedarhurst. The kosher supermarket that anchors weekly life for thousands of families, stocking fresh glatt kosher meat, prepared foods and groceries from around the world. On Thursday afternoons before a holiday the aisles fill to a standstill, a barometer of the community’s size.
Central Avenue. Once the Rodeo Drive of Long Island, the half-mile commercial strip is now lined with kosher restaurants, bakeries and Judaica shops. Establishments such as The Shoppe at 550 Central Avenue and Upper Crust at 442 Central Avenue serve a clientele that empties out entirely from Friday afternoon to Saturday night.
Andrew J. Parise Cedarhurst Park. The village green, with its gazebo, playground and sprayground, hosts a summer concert series begun in 1996 under Mayor Benjamin Weinstock. The Tuesday evening concerts draw residents of every background, a public square in a village otherwise organised around private religious life.
Cedarhurst station, Long Island Rail Road. One of the five Far Rockaway Branch stops that gave the Five Towns their name. Generations of commuters have ridden it into Manhattan, and the line that built the village in the 1860s still binds it to the city today.
Where They Came From
The Ashkenazi majority of Cedarhurst’s Jews descend from the great waves of Eastern European immigration that filled Brooklyn and the Lower East Side in the early twentieth century. Their move to the Five Towns was the classic American second migration: from the dense Jewish neighbourhoods of the city to the lawns and day schools of the suburbs, especially after 1945.
The Sephardic strand has a different map. Those families came from the Ladino-speaking Jewish communities of the former Ottoman Empire, from Monastir and Kastoria in the southern Balkans and from Ankara in Anatolia, communities devastated by the Holocaust whose survivors regrouped first in Brooklyn and then on Long Island.
It is the same instinct that drew observant families to walkable enclaves elsewhere, from Cleveland Heights in Ohio to Manalapan in New Jersey. What unites both streams is the choice to live somewhere Jewish life could be lived fully and visibly. The eruv, the schools, the kosher grocers and the synagogues within walking distance are not amenities here. They are the reason the community exists where it does.
Cedarhurst Today
Cedarhurst today is a village that runs on a Jewish calendar. The pace of the week bends toward Shabbat, the shops close early on Fridays, and the streets fill with families walking to synagogue in clothes pressed for the occasion. For an observant family, almost everything needed for daily life sits within a few walkable blocks.
That concentration brings pressures as well as comforts. Housing is expensive and tightly held, traffic on Central Avenue can be punishing, and the rapid Orthodox growth has at times strained relations with longtime neighbours over schools, development and local politics. These are the ordinary frictions of a community that has changed quickly and is still changing.
Yet the village green still hosts its summer concerts, the railroad still carries commuters to the city, and Central Avenue still hums six days a week. Cedarhurst is a small place that has become, improbably, one of the centres of Orthodox Jewish America, and it wears that role with a kind of unhurried confidence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is Cedarhurst, New York, such a major Jewish community?
The Jews in Cedarhurst built a self-sustaining Orthodox infrastructure over the twentieth century: synagogues, day schools, kosher grocers and an eruv all within walking distance. That density makes fully observant life practical, which in turn draws more observant families, especially over the past few decades.
What are the Five Towns, and where does Cedarhurst fit?
The Five Towns are a cluster of villages and hamlets on Long Island’s South Shore, named for five consecutive stops on the Long Island Rail Road’s Far Rockaway Branch. They include Hewlett, Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere and Inwood, with Cedarhurst at the commercial heart of the area.
When did Jews first settle in the Cedarhurst area?
The first Orthodox synagogue in the area, Congregation Derech Yosher in neighbouring Lawrence, was founded in 1928 and is considered the oldest in Nassau County. The Jewish population grew most rapidly after the Second World War and again over the past twenty-five years.
What is there to do on Central Avenue in Cedarhurst?
Central Avenue, once known as the Rodeo Drive of Long Island, is now lined with kosher restaurants, bakeries, Judaica shops and grocers. It is the commercial spine of the Jews in Cedarhurst and empties out completely from Friday afternoon to Saturday night for the Sabbath.
Are there Sephardic Jews in Cedarhurst as well as Ashkenazi?
Yes. The Sephardic Temple on Branch Boulevard was founded by Jews from the Balkans and Turkey, from communities such as Monastir, Kastoria and Ankara, who first organised in Brooklyn in 1953 and opened their domed Cedarhurst synagogue in 1964.
How large is Cedarhurst?
Cedarhurst is a small incorporated village of about two-thirds of a square mile in Nassau County’s Town of Hempstead. The 2020 census counted 7,374 residents, an increase of nearly twelve per cent over the previous decade, driven largely by Orthodox family growth.
If your family’s story passed through Cedarhurst, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a storefront shul on Washington Avenue, or a domed sanctuary built by survivors from Monastir and Ankara, to the Sabbath quiet of Central Avenue, to wherever you are now.