Stand on Broadway in Hewlett on a Friday afternoon and you can feel the week begin to fold inward. Bakeries empty their last challah, the kosher butcher on Peninsula Boulevard locks up early, and a hush settles over the maple-shaded streets before sundown. The story of the Jews in Hewlett, New York, is written into that rhythm, a story of a quiet Long Island railroad hamlet that became one of the most concentrated and observant Jewish enclaves in the United States.
The Place
Hewlett sits in the southwestern corner of Nassau County, on the South Shore of Long Island, roughly 20 miles from Manhattan. It is one of the so-called Five Towns, the cluster of villages and hamlets that also includes Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere and Inwood, all within the Town of Hempstead.
At the 2020 census the Hewlett census-designated place counted 7,262 residents, with a median age just shy of 42. The surrounding incorporated villages, Hewlett Harbor, Hewlett Bay Park and Hewlett Neck, are wealthier still, with Hewlett Harbor reporting a median household income above $183,000.
The hamlet takes its name from the Hewlett family, English settlers whose forebear George Hewlett was born in England in 1634 and helped negotiate the founding of nearby Hempstead. For two centuries this was farmland, a stretch of the south shore given over to fields and salt marsh. The railroad changed everything.
How It Became Jewish
Hewlett did not begin as a Jewish town. It became one slowly, then all at once, over roughly seven decades. To understand the transformation you have to start with the train.
The railroad and the early suburb (1869 to 1940s)
In July 1869 the South Side Railroad of Long Island opened a stop here called Cedar Grove. By October it had been renamed Hewletts. The depot built in 1870 still stands, and according to the historical record of the line it is the oldest railroad station on Long Island, the only surviving building put up by an LIRR predecessor.
That station pulled Hewlett out of its agricultural past. A 45-minute ride to Manhattan turned potato fields into a commuter suburb of comfortable houses, and by the early 20th century Hewlett had become a leafy enclave of professionals who worked in the city and slept on the South Shore. The station still offers free, unrestricted parking, a small inheritance from the days when the railroad, not the highway, defined the place.
Jewish families were present in the wider Five Towns before the Second World War, but in modest numbers. The decisive arrival came later, carried in on the same trains that had built the place.
The postwar wave (1945 to 1960s)
After 1945 the Five Towns absorbed a transformative influx. Jewish families from Brooklyn and Queens, many of them the children of immigrants, moved east as the highways and rail lines made commuting easy, looking for lawns, good schools and room to raise families.
They were joined by Holocaust survivors and European refugees who settled in Hewlett and neighbouring Lawrence through the 1950s. These newcomers did not simply join an existing community. They built one, deepening its religious life and its institutions year by year.
The most consequential institution arrived in September 1956, when Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetsky founded the Yeshiva of South Shore in Hewlett. It was the first yeshiva on Long Island, and the story of its founding has become local legend: Kamenetsky asked a boy why he commuted daily all the way from Cedarhurst, and the boy answered that his community had no yeshiva of its own. Within a few years it had one, and the road to an Orthodox Hewlett ran straight through that classroom.
The Orthodox surge (1970s to today)
For a generation the Five Towns Jewish community was largely Reform and Conservative, the suburban Judaism of postwar America. Then, beginning in earnest in the 1980s, the Orthodox population grew rapidly, bringing new day schools, new congregations, kosher restaurants and groceries, and a visibly observant street life.
The balance tipped. Across the Five Towns today the Orthodox synagogues far outnumber the others, and in some of the villages observers estimate that as much as three-quarters of the population is Jewish. Hewlett, with its yeshiva and its commercial spine along Peninsula Boulevard and Broadway, sits near the centre of that world.
The shift is the same one that reshaped places like Jewish Lawrence and Cedarhurst next door, where a once mixed suburban Judaism gave way to a dense Orthodox infrastructure. Hewlett shares that trajectory while keeping a slightly quieter, more residential character than the bustling Cedarhurst shopping strip.
The Landmarks
Hewlett station, Franklin Avenue between Broadway and West Broadway. The depot that started everything. Built in 1870 and unchanged ever since, it is the oldest railroad station on Long Island and the only surviving structure raised by a predecessor of the LIRR. Every weekday it still carries Hewlett commuters to Penn Station in about 45 minutes, the same journey that first made the hamlet a suburb.
Yeshiva of South Shore, Hewlett. Founded by Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetsky in September 1956 as the first yeshiva on Long Island, this boys’ school anchored Orthodox life on the South Shore. Generations of Five Towns families have passed their sons through its classrooms, and Rabbi Chanina Herzberg led it for nearly four decades until his death in 2018.
Chabad of Hewlett, 44 Everit Avenue. Under Rabbi Nochem and Rivkie Tenenboim, this Chabad centre serves Hewlett, Hewlett Harbor and Hewlett Bay Park as an affiliate of Chabad of the Five Towns. Its programmes run from after-school kids’ clubs to a Sunday-morning Tefillin Club, welcoming Jews of every level of observance.
Reconstructionist Congregation Beth Emeth of the South Shore, formerly 36 Franklin Avenue. Founded in 1994 as the only Reconstructionist synagogue on the South Shore, Beth Emeth represented Hewlett’s liberal Jewish current. It left its Franklin Avenue home in 2012 and consolidated with Central Synagogue of Nassau County in Rockville Centre in 2016, a small mirror of the wider denominational shift.
Laffa Bar and Grill, 1326 Peninsula Boulevard. A glatt kosher Middle Eastern and Mediterranean grill that opened in 2019 in the space once occupied by Ahuva’s Grill. Supervised by the Vaad Hakashrus of the Five Towns and Rockaway, it is one of the everyday gathering points where the neighbourhood eats out without leaving its dietary world behind.
Five Towns Kosher Meats, 1324 Peninsula Boulevard. The butcher’s counter next door, the kind of shop that empties out fast on a Thursday and Friday as families lay in meat for Shabbat. Storefronts like this one turn a residential suburb into a self-sufficient Jewish town.
Grant Park, Hewlett. The community’s green lung, a Nassau County park with a pond and an ice-skating rink that overlooks the water. On Sunday afternoons it fills with the same families whose week is otherwise organised around school, synagogue and the laws of the table.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Hewlett did not come, in the main, directly from Europe. They came from a few miles to the west, from the dense Jewish neighbourhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, in the great postwar suburban migration that scattered second- and third-generation American Jews across Long Island.
Their grandparents had arrived a generation earlier, mostly from Eastern Europe, from the shtetls and cities of what is now Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, in the immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Hewlett was the third American address in that family story, after the Lower East Side or Brownsville and before the lawn on the South Shore.
Layered onto that base were the Holocaust survivors who settled in Hewlett and Lawrence in the 1950s, carrying the religious seriousness of pre-war European Jewry. Their presence helped push the community toward the observant, institution-building character it has today, and it is one reason the Five Towns developed a yeshiva culture earlier and more thoroughly than most American suburbs.
Hewlett Today
Hewlett today is prosperous, settled and unmistakably Jewish, without being a monoculture. The 2020 census recorded a population that was around 72 per cent white, with notable Asian, Black and Hispanic minorities, and the schools of the Hewlett-Woodmere district serve a mix of public-school and yeshiva families living side by side.
The Orthodox infrastructure is now mature. The kosher corridor on Peninsula Boulevard, the yeshivas, the Chabad house and the eruv-shaped rhythm of the week give the hamlet the texture of a small Jewish city, even as it keeps the manicured calm of an affluent commuter suburb. House prices and incomes are high, and the surrounding Hewlett villages are among the wealthiest places in New York State.
It is not the only such suburb, and Hewlett’s residents know it. Families here have ties to the older Jewish suburbs of Port Washington on the North Shore, and to the great midwestern enclaves like Cleveland Heights and Shaker Heights in Ohio, where similar postwar communities grew. What sets the Five Towns apart is the sheer density and the intensity of observance, the sense that the entire local economy and calendar are organised around Jewish life.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Jews in Hewlett, New York?
The Jews in Hewlett are the result of a postwar migration from Brooklyn and Queens that filled the Five Towns with Jewish families seeking lawns, schools and an easy commute. From the 1950s onward, and especially after the 1980s, an Orthodox community built yeshivas, synagogues and kosher businesses that drew still more observant families to the area.
What are the Five Towns?
The Five Towns are a cluster of villages and hamlets in the southwestern corner of Nassau County on Long Island: Hewlett, Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere and Inwood. They are known as one of the most heavily Jewish and Orthodox suburban areas in the United States.
How old is the Hewlett railroad station?
The current Hewlett station building dates to 1870, making it the oldest railroad station on Long Island and the only surviving structure built by a predecessor of the Long Island Rail Road. The stop first opened in 1869 as Cedar Grove before being renamed Hewletts.
What was the first yeshiva in the area?
The Yeshiva of South Shore, founded in Hewlett by Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetsky in September 1956, was the first yeshiva on Long Island. It became a cornerstone of Orthodox Jewish life in the Five Towns and remains a major boys’ school today.
Is Hewlett a wealthy area?
Yes. Hewlett and especially its incorporated villages of Hewlett Harbor, Hewlett Bay Park and Hewlett Neck are among the more affluent places in Nassau County, with Hewlett Harbor reporting a median household income above $183,000. The Jews in Hewlett live in one of the wealthier suburban corridors in New York State.
Where can you find kosher food in Hewlett?
Hewlett has a kosher commercial strip along Peninsula Boulevard, including Laffa Bar and Grill at 1326 Peninsula Boulevard and Five Towns Kosher Meats next door at 1324. The wider Five Towns area supports a dense and growing selection of kosher restaurants, bakeries and groceries.
If your family’s story passed through Hewlett, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a shtetl in Eastern Europe to a tenement in Brooklyn, to a maple-lined street off Broadway in the Five Towns, to wherever you are now.