They call themselves the SY. Not Syrian, not Sephardic, just two letters spoken with the easy shorthand of people who all know exactly who they are. From the 1960s onward, if you walked the service roads of Ocean Parkway between Avenue T and Kings Highway on a Saturday morning, you would see it: men in suits walking to synagogue, the smell of kibbeh and lahmajeen drifting from kitchens, Arabic loanwords woven through Brooklyn English. The Syrian Jews in Gravesend, Brooklyn built one of the most tightly knit Jewish communities in America, and they did it within a few square miles of South Brooklyn.
Gravesend and Ocean Parkway: The Place
Gravesend sits in southern Brooklyn, bordered by Bensonhurst to the west, Midwood to the east, and the boardwalk towns of Coney Island and Brighton Beach to the south. Its spine is Ocean Parkway, the wide tree-lined boulevard Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux designed in the 1870s, running five miles from Prospect Park down to the sea.
The F and Q trains thread the neighbourhood, but the parkway itself is the address that matters here. The housing runs from grand detached homes on the parkway to brick rowhouses and apartment blocks on the numbered avenues. It reads, today, as an affluent and intensely residential pocket organised around its synagogues.
How Gravesend Became Syrian Jewish
Before the Syrian Jews
Gravesend is one of the six original towns of Brooklyn, chartered in 1645 under Lady Deborah Moody, an English nonconformist who secured one of the first land grants in the colonies held by a woman. For two and a half centuries it was farmland and a quiet town at the edge of the bay.
When the Syrian Jews arrived, they were not the first Jews in the area. South Brooklyn already held Ashkenazi families, and the Sephardic newcomers settled first elsewhere in the borough before consolidating here. The story of how they got to Ocean Parkway runs through two earlier neighbourhoods.
The Syrian Jews Arrive
The first Syrian Jews recorded in the United States were Jacob Dwek and Ezra Sitt, both of Aleppo, who sailed from Liverpool aboard the Germania and landed in 1892. The real wave began around 1907 and 1908, when economic decline in Syria, Ottoman military conscription, and rising hostility pushed families out of Aleppo and Damascus toward New York.
Like nearly every immigrant group of that era, they landed first on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The early arrivals worked as peddlers, opened the first Syrian Jewish stores and restaurants, and founded a burial society and the charity Maoz Laebyon. You can read the wider tenement story in our piece on the Jews of the Lower East Side in Manhattan.
The community split along city lines from the start. The Aleppans, known as Halabis, and the Damascenes, known as Shamis, did not always mix easily, with the Halabis conscious of Aleppo’s long history as a centre of Jewish learning. Over time both groups would fuse into a single Brooklyn community, but the Aleppan majority set its tone.
Gravesend at Its Peak
In the 1920s the community moved en masse to Bensonhurst, where it established a cemetery, two synagogues, a Talmud Torah, and a ritual bath. Magen David of Bensonhurst, erected in 1921 at 2017 67th Street, became the flagship synagogue and the heart of community life through the 1940s and 1950s.
The next move came in the 1940s and 1950s. The wealthiest families began buying homes in the Ocean Parkway section, and the whole community gradually followed. The institution that anchored the shift was Congregation Shaare Zion, which started in 1941 as a minyan in a home at 1756 Ocean Parkway and opened its great sanctuary in Gravesend in 1960.
Education held the community together as much as prayer. Magen David Yeshivah, founded in 1946 in Bensonhurst by community leader Isaac Shalom, gave Sephardic children a dual Jewish and secular schooling at a time when most attended public school. Chain migration did the rest: each family that found a footing on the parkway pulled cousins and in-laws into the same few blocks, until the neighbourhood was effectively one extended family.
The Edict and the Change
The single fact that most shaped the community’s cohesion was not a building but a ruling. In 1935 the Brooklyn rabbinical court, with Rabbi Jacob Kassin among its leaders, issued the Edict, a ban on accepting converts and on marriage with anyone outside the community. It was reaffirmed in 1946 and 1972.
The Edict was framed as a defence against intermarriage and assimilation, and within the community it is treated as the boundary that has kept it intact for generations. It remains controversial to outsiders and central to insiders, and any honest portrait of the SY has to name it plainly.
Unlike many Brooklyn enclaves, this one did not fade or disperse. Where Italian Bensonhurst and Jewish Brownsville thinned over the decades, the Syrian Jews of Gravesend grew denser and more rooted, generation after generation, on the same parkway.
The Landmarks of Syrian Jewish Gravesend
Congregation Shaare Zion, 2030 Ocean Parkway. The flagship of the community and one of the largest Sephardic synagogues in North America. Its main sanctuary opened for the High Holy Days in 1960 seating more than two thousand, and on an ordinary Shabbat it still draws well over a thousand worshippers. It serves primarily the Aleppan, or Halabi, families.
Magen David Synagogue, 2017 67th Street. The former flagship in Bensonhurst, built in 1921. The building was named a New York City landmark in 2001 and listed on the National Register of Historic Places by 2004, and it remains in daily and Shabbat use as the older heart of the community.
Magen David Yeshivah, 2130 McDonald Avenue. Founded in 1946, the premier Syrian Jewish day school in Brooklyn. It marked its 75th anniversary in 2025 with an exhibit titled Magen David Yeshivah, The First 75 Years, and now spans an elementary school, a high school on Bay Parkway, and an early childhood centre.
The Sephardic Community Center, 1901 Ocean Parkway. The community’s own version of a JCC, recently rebuilt into a sports and fitness complex with an early childhood centre and lounges for teens, adults, and seniors. It is the secular gathering place that complements the synagogues.
Ocean Parkway itself. The boulevard is the community’s main street in everything but name. Its service roads fill with families walking to shul on Shabbat, and the homes nearest the synagogues command some of the highest prices in Brooklyn precisely because of that proximity.
The Aleppo kitchen. Not a single address but a tradition kept in hundreds of homes and storefronts. Poopa Dweck’s 2007 cookbook Aromas of Aleppo turned the community’s recipes into a record, and the food, from kibbeh to lahmajeen tangy with Aleppan tamarind, remains the most reliable map of where these families came from.
Where the Gravesend Syrian Jews Came From
The community has two homelands, both in Syria. The majority trace to Aleppo, the Halabis, whose city sat on the trade routes between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates and was for centuries a renowned centre of Sephardic learning. A minority trace to Damascus, the Shamis, with smaller threads reaching back to Beirut and the wider Levant.
What pulled them out was a combination of economic collapse in late Ottoman Syria, conscription, and growing insecurity. The same Sephardic world that scattered after 1492 produced other American enclaves too, from the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews of Seattle to communities woven through Brooklyn’s wider Jewish map, including the Hasidic heart of the Jews of Borough Park. There is even an Arabic-speaking echo a generation earlier: the Christian Syrians and Lebanese who built Little Syria in Lower Manhattan, a different community from the same corner of the world.
Gravesend Today
The Syrian Jewish community in New York now numbers around 38,000, with roughly half in Brooklyn, concentrated in this affluent pocket of Gravesend and Midwood. Around a third of Jewish adults in Gravesend identify as Sephardic or Mizrahi, and the neighbourhood holds the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the United States.
The merchant culture that funded the move to Ocean Parkway is still visible in the family names behind retail and garment businesses, from the old Century 21 department stores to electronics and import trades. Each summer a large share of the community decamps to Deal on the New Jersey shore, a migration that began in the 1960s and 1970s and turned a quiet beach town into a second Syrian Jewish capital.
This is not a fading enclave being remembered after the fact. It is a community several generations deep and still growing, where a child on Ocean Parkway today learns the same melodies, eats the same kibbeh, and walks to the same synagogues as a grandparent did. Aleppo is gone to them as a place, but it is very much alive as a way of living.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Syrian Jews settle in Gravesend, Brooklyn?
The Syrian Jews in Gravesend, Brooklyn arrived after earlier stops on the Lower East Side and in Bensonhurst, drawn to the grand homes along Ocean Parkway as the community grew wealthier in the 1940s and 1950s. The opening of Congregation Shaare Zion in Gravesend in 1960 anchored the move, and chain migration pulled extended families into the same blocks.
Is Gravesend still a Syrian Jewish neighbourhood today?
Yes. Gravesend and adjacent Midwood hold the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the United States, much of it Syrian, with around a third of Jewish adults in Gravesend identifying as Sephardic or Mizrahi. Unlike many Brooklyn enclaves, this one has grown denser over the generations rather than dispersing.
What are the most famous Syrian Jewish landmarks in Gravesend?
Congregation Shaare Zion at 2030 Ocean Parkway is the flagship and one of the largest Sephardic synagogues in North America. Other key institutions include the historic Magen David Synagogue, Magen David Yeshivah, and the Sephardic Community Center on Ocean Parkway.
Where in Syria did the Gravesend Syrian Jews come from?
Most trace their roots to Aleppo, where they are known as Halabis, with a minority from Damascus, known as Shamis. Aleppo was a historic centre of Sephardic Jewish learning, and its trade-route cuisine, including the use of tamarind, still defines the community’s food in Brooklyn.
When did Syrian Jews first arrive in New York and Brooklyn?
The first recorded Syrian Jews reached the United States in 1892, but mass arrival began around 1907 and 1908. They settled first on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, moved to Bensonhurst in the 1920s, and consolidated along Ocean Parkway in Gravesend from the 1940s through the early 1970s.
If your family’s story passed through Gravesend, or any of the places the Syrian Jews made home, from the courtyards of Aleppo and Damascus to Ocean Parkway and the summer streets of Deal, Atlas of Home can help you trace that journey. Explore your story →
Sources and further reading: Syrian Jewish communities of the United States (Wikipedia) and Congregation Shaare Zion (Wikipedia).