Drive down East Mount Pleasant Avenue on a Saturday morning and you can read the story of the Jews in Livingston, New Jersey in the line of cars left in the synagogue lots, the families walking to shul, the bakery boxes balanced on front seats. This is not an old neighbourhood. Most of it arrived inside a single lifetime, carried west out of Newark, and rebuilt a world here on the gentle hills of western Essex County.
The Place
Livingston is a township of roughly 33,000 people in Essex County, about fifteen miles west of Newark and twenty-five miles from Manhattan. It is comfortably affluent, a town of leafy cul-de-sacs, well-funded public schools, and a tidy commercial spine along Mount Pleasant and Northfield avenues.
For most of its history it was farmland and orchard, a quiet outlying corner of the county named for the Revolutionary-era governor William Livingston. The postwar decades changed it entirely. Subdivisions rose on the old fields, and the families who bought into them were, in extraordinary number, Jewish.
By the early 2000s, the National Jewish Population Survey counted around 11,600 Jews here, close to half the township. That made Livingston one of the most heavily Jewish municipalities in the United States, a distinction it shares with only a handful of American suburbs.
How It Became Jewish
To understand Jewish Livingston you have to start in Newark, fifteen miles east, in a neighbourhood that no longer exists in the form its children remember.
The Weequahic years
For the first half of the twentieth century, the centre of Jewish New Jersey was the Weequahic section of Newark. It was a dense, middle-class world of corner shuls, delicatessens, candy stores, and Weequahic High School, the setting Philip Roth would spend a career writing about. Of the dozens of small synagogues scattered across Newark, the largest share sat in Weequahic.
It was never meant to be permanent, though few who lived it knew that at the time. The Jewish families of Newark were already prosperous enough to dream of lawns and driveways, and the highways built in the 1950s made the dream reachable.
Weequahic gave its children a complete world: the synagogue on one corner, the appetising store on the next, the high school whose teams and graduating classes were almost entirely Jewish. It was the kind of neighbourhood where everyone you passed on the street knew your grandmother. When it dissolved, the people who left did not stop wanting that completeness. They simply went looking for it somewhere with more space.
The move west
The migration began in the 1950s and accelerated through the 1960s, a steady drift of families from the old wards into the western suburbs: Livingston, Short Hills, West Orange, Millburn. The civil unrest that struck Newark in the summer of 1967 marked the breaking point, and the retreat from Weequahic became close to total within a few years.
What set Livingston apart was that the institutions moved too, not just the families. A suburb can fill with Jewish residents and still feel scattered. Livingston instead inherited the actual congregations of old Newark, brick and clergy and Torah scrolls together, and that gave it a centre almost overnight.
The clearest example is Temple B’nai Abraham. Founded in Newark in 1853, it had built a monumental classical-revival sanctuary at Clinton and Shanley avenues in 1924, and under Rabbi Joachim Prinz it became one of American Jewry’s most prominent pulpits. Prinz spoke at the 1963 March on Washington, just before Martin Luther King Jr., and had earlier arranged for King to address his congregation. In 1973 the congregation left that Newark landmark behind and built a new home on East Northfield Road in Livingston.
Building a town of shuls
Other congregations followed the same arc, and new ones were founded for the suburban generation. Within a couple of decades Livingston held a full spectrum of Jewish life, from Reform and Conservative temples to modern Orthodox shuls and a Chabad presence, most of them clustered along the Mount Pleasant Avenue corridor.
That density is what makes the place legible. The synagogues of Livingston, several of them within walking distance of one another, anchor a daily Jewish life that few American suburbs sustain. Families in the Jewish community of nearby Short Hills and across the MetroWest suburbs share the same institutional web.
The regional anchor sits just over the line in West Orange. The JCC of MetroWest, descended from a Newark community centre founded in 1877, moved to Northfield Avenue in 1967 and today reaches tens of thousands of people a year through its early-childhood centre, fitness facilities, theatre, and summer camps. It is the secular town square that complements the shuls.
The Landmarks
Temple B’nai Abraham, 300 East Northfield Road. The congregation that carried the prestige of old Newark west, founded in 1853 and led for decades by the civil-rights rabbi Joachim Prinz. It relocated here in 1973 and remains one of the largest and best-known congregations in the state.
Temple Beth Shalom, 193 East Mount Pleasant Avenue. Livingston’s Conservative congregation, sitting on the avenue that functions as the township’s Jewish main street. Its men’s club and lifecycle calendar make it a fixture of the corridor’s Saturday-morning foot traffic.
Synagogue of the Suburban Torah Center, 85 West Mount Pleasant Avenue. One of two modern Orthodox shuls in town, known locally as SSTC. Its presence, with daily minyanim and an eruv-minded membership, is part of what lets observant families live a walkable Shabbat in a car-built suburb.
Congregation Etz Chaim, Livingston. The township’s second modern Orthodox synagogue, describing itself as a warm centre for Jewish life in Essex County. Between Etz Chaim and Suburban Torah, Livingston supports an Orthodox community larger than most suburbs its size.
LifeTown, 10 Microlab Road. A 53,000-square-foot centre run by the Chabad-affiliated Friendship Circle, opened in 2019. At its heart is Life Village, a miniature indoor downtown of some fifteen storefronts where children and adults with special needs practise everyday skills, a project that has drawn national attention.
JCC of MetroWest, 760 Northfield Avenue, West Orange. Just over the township border, the regional Jewish community centre that grew out of 1870s Newark. It serves as camp, gym, theatre, and gathering place for the whole MetroWest belt, Livingston included.
Fialkoff’s Kosher Pizza, 99 West Mount Pleasant Avenue. The address tells its own story. For years this storefront was the Jerusalem Restaurant, a Livingston kosher staple; today it is a kosher pizzeria, the kind of small business that signals a community large enough to keep a kosher kitchen busy.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Livingston are, overwhelmingly, the children and grandchildren of Newark. Trace the family trees and they run back through Weequahic, Clinton Hill, and the old Third Ward, and from there to the great wave of Eastern European immigration that filled industrial New Jersey between the 1880s and the 1920s.
Those immigrants came largely from the Pale of Settlement, the towns and cities of what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, fleeing poverty and pogrom for the factories and shops of Newark. They built their first American world in the city, and Livingston is, in a real sense, that world’s second draft.
What is unusual about that second draft is how little was lost in translation. Communities that scatter on their way to the suburbs tend to thin out, their synagogues shrinking, their delicatessens closing for want of customers. Livingston did the opposite. Enough families moved in concert, and brought enough of their institutions with them, that the texture of Jewish daily life survived the move and in some ways deepened, with new schools, a mikvah, and an eruv that an older, more dispersed suburb might never have built.
Later arrivals broadened the mix. The MetroWest suburbs drew Jewish families from across the New York metropolitan area, and over time included Israelis, Soviet émigrés, and others, much as the longer-established communities of Jewish Teaneck and Jewish Scarsdale did across the region. But the foundational story is the Newark exodus, repeated street by street.
Livingston Today
Livingston today is a settled, prosperous suburb where Jewish life is woven into the ordinary texture of the place rather than confined to a quarter. The public schools are consistently among the state’s strongest, and Livingston High School has sent out a striking roster of well-known graduates, among them the actor Jason Alexander, who grew up in town and finished there in 1977, alongside Chris Christie, Harlan Coben, and Chelsea Handler.
The township is also visibly diversifying. Recent counts show a large and growing Asian-American population, Indian, Chinese, and Korean families now make up a substantial share of the township, and the schools and shopping centres reflect that change. The Jewish proportion, near half in the early-2000s surveys, sits within a town that is no longer majority anything in the simple sense it once was.
What has not changed is the institutional weight. The shuls along Mount Pleasant Avenue still fill on Shabbat, the kosher storefronts still turn over, and LifeTown still draws visitors from far beyond Essex County. Livingston remains, by most measures, one of the most Jewish suburbs in America, a place that did not just attract a community but adopted one whole, and gave it room to grow. It is a quieter cousin to the dense urban enclaves like Jewish Borough Park in Brooklyn, the suburban answer to the same long American story.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Jewish community in Livingston, New Jersey?
Early-2000s survey figures counted roughly 11,600 Jews in Livingston, close to half the township’s population. That ranks the Jews in Livingston, New Jersey among the highest-share Jewish communities of any municipality in the United States.
Why did so many Jewish families move to Livingston?
The community is largely the product of postwar migration out of Newark, especially the Weequahic section, which accelerated through the 1960s and after the 1967 unrest. Families sought suburban homes and good schools, and crucially their Newark congregations relocated to Livingston with them.
What are the main synagogues in Livingston?
They include Temple B’nai Abraham on East Northfield Road, the Conservative Temple Beth Shalom on East Mount Pleasant Avenue, the modern Orthodox Synagogue of the Suburban Torah Center and Congregation Etz Chaim, and a Chabad presence. Most cluster along the Mount Pleasant Avenue corridor.
What is LifeTown in Livingston?
LifeTown is a 53,000-square-foot centre on Microlab Road, run by the Chabad-affiliated Friendship Circle and opened in 2019. Its centrepiece is a miniature indoor town where people with special needs practise real-world life skills.
Is Temple B’nai Abraham connected to Newark?
Yes. Founded in Newark in 1853 and long led by Rabbi Joachim Prinz, the congregation built a landmark 1924 sanctuary there before relocating to Livingston in 1973. Its history is a direct thread between old Jewish Newark and the Jews in Livingston, New Jersey today.
Where can you find kosher food near Livingston?
Kosher options sit along Mount Pleasant Avenue, including Fialkoff’s Kosher Pizza at the former Jerusalem Restaurant address, with more establishments nearby in West Orange. The kosher supermarket, bakery, and restaurant scene serves the surrounding MetroWest suburbs.
If your family’s story passed through Livingston, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the corner shuls of Weequahic in Newark to the synagogues along Mount Pleasant Avenue, to wherever you are now.