The smell reaches the sidewalk before the sign does. Warm semolina, melting cheese, syrup soaked into shredded pastry: knafeh, pulled hot from a tray behind a window on Main Street in South Paterson. Outside, the storefronts read in two alphabets at once, Arabic stacked above English, and a green-white-black-and-red flag hangs from more than one awning. This is the heart of the Palestinians in Paterson, the densest cluster of Palestinian life anywhere in the United States, built five blocks at a time along a single New Jersey street.
South Paterson: The Place
South Paterson sits in the lower wedge of the city, hemmed by Route 19 to the west, the Passaic River to the east, and Interstate 80 to the north. Its southern edge runs right up against the Clifton line, so close that the community spills across it without noticing the border. The spine of it all is Main Street, a working commercial corridor of two- and three-story buildings with shops below and apartments above. The housing around it is dense and practical: frame two-families, brick walk-ups, the kind of blocks that absorb new arrivals and let them get a footing.
How South Paterson Became Little Palestine
Before the Palestinians
The Arabic on Main Street is older than most people assume. It goes back to silk. Paterson was the Silk City, the country’s textile capital, and when the silk trade collapsed in Mount Lebanon in the 1890s, families from Greater Syria came looking for the looms.
They arrived around 1890 and many started at the bottom, as peddlers walking country roads with cases of thread, lace, and small goods. The ones who saved bought into the mills. By the early 1900s, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants owned roughly 35 silk mills in the city, and by the 1920s the great majority of Paterson’s Syrians worked in silk.
This first layer was largely Lebanese and Syrian, and it laid down the groceries, the import houses, and the churches that the next wave would inherit. The bones of an Arab neighborhood were already in place. Palestinians would come and fill them.
The Palestinians Arrive
A small Palestinian presence took root in South Paterson as early as the 1930s, threaded into the existing Arab community. The first generation wrestled with English and with a culture that was not yet built for them. They were a minority within a minority.
The turning point came in 1967. After the Six-Day War and the occupation of the West Bank, Palestinians began leaving in far greater numbers, and a change in U.S. immigration law in the mid-1960s had just opened the door wider. South Paterson, with its Arabic-speaking shops and its cheap, dense housing, was the obvious landing place.
Christian families from Ramallah came first, many through the 1950s and 60s. Muslims from Ramallah’s neighboring towns followed close behind. The pattern was classic chain migration: one family sponsored the next, a cousin found a relative an apartment and a job, and the same few West Bank towns slowly reassembled themselves on a New Jersey street.
Little Palestine at Its Peak
Through the 1980s the wave reached its high mark, and into the 1990s and 2000s the community kept thickening. Estimates put the Palestinian population of the Paterson area somewhere around 15,000, with the broader Arab community of South Paterson well above 20,000. By either count it is one of the largest concentrations of Palestinian Americans in the country.
Daily life ran on Main Street. You could buy a sponsorship document and a sack of Nabulsi cheese on the same block, get a haircut, fill a prescription, and carry home a tray of sweets for a wedding. Arabic was the language of the sidewalk. Children went to Paterson public schools by day and to Arabic and Quran classes on weekends.
The institutions deepened as the numbers grew. Mosques and churches anchored the religious life. In 2014, the community opened the Palestinian American Community Center just over the Clifton line, a permanent home for dabke troupes, tatreez embroidery classes, oral-history projects, and youth soccer. The Palestinians in Paterson were no longer a minority within a minority. They were the neighborhood.
The Change
What changed was not decline but recognition. The community grew confident and visible, and the city began to reflect it back. Paterson became, by some accounts, the first American city to raise the Palestinian flag over its city hall, and it set aside a Palestinian American Day on the municipal calendar.
Then came the street. On March 29, 2022, the City Council voted 8 to 1 to co-name a five-block stretch of Main Street, from Gould Avenue to Buffalo Avenue, as Palestine Way. The resolution was sponsored by Alaa “Al” Abdelaziz, the city’s first Palestinian-American councilman.
The signs went up on May 15, 2022, a date chosen deliberately. May 15 is marked by Palestinians as the anniversary of the Nakba, the 1948 displacement. As many as two thousand people filled the street for the unveiling. The following year, in June 2023, Paterson signed a sister-city agreement with Ramallah itself, closing the loop between the West Bank town and the New Jersey street that so many of its families had moved to.
The Landmarks of Little Palestine
Nablus Sweets, 1050 Main Street. Named for the West Bank city that gave the world its most famous dessert, this sweet shop has been pulling knafeh since 1996. The Nabulsi style, soft white cheese under a crust of orange-tinted shredded pastry and syrup, is the reason people drive in from three states away. For a Paterson Palestinian, a tray from here is the default offering at every engagement and holiday.
Al-Basha, 1076 Main Street. Serving since 1998 and run with proud Palestinian roots, Al-Basha is one of the corridor’s anchor restaurants, the place for generous platters of shawarma, mixed grills, and falafel. Its walls carry Palestinian artwork and recipes handed down through the family. On a weekend night the tables fill with three generations at once.
Nouri Brothers Shopping Center, 999 Main Street. Open since 1978, Nouri Brothers is the pantry of the neighborhood, a sprawling grocery with an olive bar, walls of spices, imported cheeses, fresh bread, and a glass case of sweets. It also keeps a counter of 21-karat gold, the kind families buy for weddings. It is one store doing the work of an entire downtown.
Palestine Hair Salon, 965 Main Street. The bright yellow sign, Arabic beside English, is one of the most photographed storefronts on the strip. A salon does not usually make a list of landmarks, but this one carries the neighborhood’s name on its face. It is the kind of ordinary business whose mere existence, in its own language, told arriving families they had reached the right place.
Jerusalem Pharmacy. A neighborhood drugstore named for the city at the center of the Palestinian story, the Jerusalem Pharmacy was singled out by the council as one of the businesses that earned Main Street its Palestine Way designation. It is the unglamorous infrastructure of belonging: where elders fill prescriptions and can do it in their first language.
Palestine Way, Main Street from Gould Avenue to Buffalo Avenue. The five-block co-named stretch is itself the community’s proudest landmark, unveiled before a crowd of thousands on Nakba Day in 2022. The green street signs turned an informal nickname into something official. Stand at Gould and look south, and every block is a small Palestinian economy.
The Palestinian American Community Center, 388 Lakeview Avenue, Clifton. Founded in 2014 just across the city line, the PACC is the community’s living room, home to dabke dance, embroidery, language classes, a youth soccer program, and an oral-history project recording the elders before their memories are lost. Under longtime executive director Rania Mustafa it has become the institutional spine of Palestinian Paterson. It anchors a community that had churches and mosques but wanted a secular home of its own.
Where the Paterson Palestinians Came From
Trace the families back and you keep landing in the same small triangle of the central West Bank: Ramallah, its twin town of Al-Bireh, and neighboring Beitunia. These three towns sit so close together they function as one urban area, and the earliest emigration drew heavily from Ramallah’s Christian families in the 1950s, with Muslim families from the surrounding towns following after 1967.
It is why Paterson is nicknamed Little Ramallah, not Little Palestine alone. The pull was not abstract. It was a brother already working a mill job, an aunt with a spare room, a village network that knew which Main Street landlord would rent to a newcomer. The same logic that built the Arab community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn built this one: people followed the people they trusted, town by town, until a piece of the homeland had moved across an ocean.
South Paterson Today
The Palestinians in Paterson are now well into their second and third generation, and the community has long since left the bottom rung. Its members run businesses and own homes, and they fill professional roles across the city, on the council, in the courts, and in the schools. The kids who grew up doing weekend Arabic homework now run the shops their grandparents opened.
Main Street still carries the freight of the neighborhood. The bakeries, the grocers, the halal butchers, the hookah lounges, and the sweet shops draw food pilgrims from across the region, and the broader Arab presence, Syrian bakeries like the decades-old Fattal’s among them, gives the corridor its full texture. Mayor Andre Sayegh, in office since 2018 and the city’s first Arab-American mayor, of Lebanese and Syrian descent, has called Paterson the capital of Palestine in America. It is a slogan, but the street earns it.
Paterson sits in a small constellation of Arab American strongholds, each with its own character. It is often measured against the Lebanese community in Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Arab concentration in the country, and the nearby Yemeni community in Hamtramck. What Dearborn is to Lebanese America, South Paterson is to Palestinian America: the place the rest of the diaspora measures itself against.
What sets this place apart is that it never had to become a memory. The flag still goes up over City Hall, the knafeh trays still leave the counter warm, and the children still know which towns their families came from. The story of the Palestinians in Paterson is not an elegy. It is a chapter that is still being written, in two alphabets, on a street that now carries its name.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Palestinians settle in Paterson?
The Palestinians in Paterson were drawn by an Arab community that already existed there from the silk-mill era, which meant Arabic-speaking shops, churches, and cheap, dense housing. After the 1967 war displaced many West Bank families, chain migration did the rest, as relatives sponsored relatives into South Paterson. The neighborhood offered work, an established network, and a place that already felt partly like home.
Is South Paterson still Palestinian today?
Yes. South Paterson remains one of the largest Palestinian American communities in the country, now into its second and third generation, with thriving businesses along Main Street and Palestine Way. The Palestinians in Paterson have expanded into professional and civic life while keeping the corridor’s Palestinian and Arab character intact.
What are the most famous Palestinian landmarks and food in Paterson?
The best-known spots include Nablus Sweets at 1050 Main Street, famous for Nabulsi-style knafeh since 1996, the restaurant Al-Basha at 1076 Main Street, and Nouri Brothers grocery at 999 Main Street, open since 1978. The five-block Palestine Way stretch of Main Street and the Palestinian American Community Center in nearby Clifton are the community’s signature institutions.
Where did the Paterson Palestinians come from?
Most trace their roots to the central West Bank, above all the city of Ramallah and its neighboring towns of Al-Bireh and Beitunia. Ramallah’s Christian families emigrated first in the 1950s, with Muslim families from the surrounding towns following after 1967. The connection is so strong that Paterson is nicknamed Little Ramallah.
When did Palestinians first arrive in Paterson?
A small Palestinian presence existed in South Paterson as early as the 1930s, within the older Lebanese and Syrian community that arrived for the silk industry around 1890. The major wave came after the 1967 Six-Day War and peaked through the 1980s. Growth continued through the 1990s and 2000s, building the community visible today.
If your family’s story passed through South Paterson, or through Ramallah, Al-Bireh, or any of the towns the Palestinians carried with them, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey: from the West Bank to Main Street, to wherever you are now.