On a Saturday morning in Bexley, the sidewalks along East Broad Street fill with families walking to shul, dressed for Shabbat, nodding to neighbours they have known for decades. The Jews in Bexley, Ohio did not arrive here by accident. They moved east, congregation by congregation, out of the old downtown streets of Columbus and into this compact, leafy enclave that has become the heart of Jewish life in central Ohio.
The Place
Bexley is a small, affluent city entirely surrounded by Columbus, squeezed into roughly 2.5 square miles between Alum Creek to the west and Gould Road to the east. It grew up around Capital University, which moved to its present site in the 1870s, and around the country estates that wealthy Columbus residents built along Broad Street in the late nineteenth century.
Incorporated as a village in 1908 and a city in 1932, Bexley today holds a little over 14,000 residents on tree-lined streets, with a celebrated public school system and a walkable Main Street. Median household incomes sit comfortably in the six figures.
It is the kind of place where the architecture is admired and the schools are the reason people stay. For a sizeable share of those families, it is also the place where a synagogue is within walking distance.
That walkability is not incidental. A community that keeps Shabbat needs to live close to where it prays, and Bexley’s small footprint, its grid of older streets and its concentration of congregations made it the natural answer for observant Columbus Jews. The town’s compactness, often described as one of its charms, is part of why it became a Jewish centre.
How It Became Jewish
The story of Jewish Bexley begins not in Bexley at all, but a few miles west, in the streets of central Columbus where the community first put down roots.
The First Arrivals
Columbus was founded in 1834. Jewish settlement followed quickly: as the history of the Jews in greater Columbus records, the Nusbaum and Gundersheimer families, Bavarian immigrants, arrived around 1840. They were the leading edge of the German-Jewish migration that would establish the community’s earliest institutions, including the congregation that became Temple Israel, founded in 1846 as Bene Jeshurun.
These first families settled near downtown. By the turn of the twentieth century, a second wave of Eastern European immigrants had thickened the population, and the Jewish neighbourhood clustered around Washington Avenue and the streets near High.
Washington Avenue and the Old Shuls
Congregation Agudas Achim, established in 1881 as an Orthodox shul, anchored this early community. For years it occupied a corner at Washington Avenue and Donaldson Street, first in a frame building and then in a brick edifice that older members remembered for its abundance of electric lights.
This was a walking neighbourhood of barns, open lots and outdoor water pumps, as one rabbi’s family recalled of their arrival around 1904. It was dense, immigrant and observant, the kind of place where the shul was the centre of everything.
Bexley itself was still mostly open country then, a scattering of country estates and the new Capital University campus east of Alum Creek. Few of the immigrant families on Washington Avenue would have imagined that within two generations this quiet suburb would hold their synagogues, their school and their bakery. The distance felt enormous, even if it was only a few miles.
The Move East
The pattern that reshaped Jewish life in dozens of American cities reshaped it here too, the same eastward arc that carried families to Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh and out to Skokie outside Chicago. As families prospered, they looked eastward, toward Bryden Road in the Near East Side, the wealthy “Silk Stocking District” of grand homes, and then further still, across Alum Creek into Bexley.
The shift accelerated after the Second World War. As the Columbus Jewish Historical Society records, many Jews moved east into Bexley, Berwick and Eastmoor in those years. The old Washington Avenue neighbourhood, later cut through by freeways and redevelopment, faded.
The congregations followed their members. Temple Israel, which had built on Bryden Road in 1904, opened a striking modernist building at 3100 East Broad Street in 1959, designed by the architect Percival Goodman. Agudas Achim completed its own move with a new building at Broad and Roosevelt in 1951.
Older members of Agudas Achim remembered the awkward years of transition, when the family had already settled in Bexley but the shul had not yet followed. One recalled that the synagogue at Washington Avenue was too far to walk from Bexley on Shabbat, so they would drive partway, park, and walk the rest. The opening of the Broad Street building closed that gap and tied home and synagogue back together.
A Corridor of Synagogues
What emerged was something unusual: a single stretch of East Broad Street lined with synagogues, within an easy walk of one another. Agudas Achim, by then turning Conservative after declining to install a mechitzah, sat alongside Temple Israel, Ahavat Shalom and the institutions that gathered nearby.
Around them grew the supporting architecture of Jewish life. The Jewish Community Center settled on College Avenue. Beth Jacob, the city’s principal Orthodox congregation, took root on the same street. The result was a community where you could live, pray, learn and shop within a few square miles, on foot if you kept Shabbat, much as the Jews of Borough Park in Brooklyn built their lives around walkable streets.
By the early 2010s, the greater Columbus Jewish community numbered roughly 25,500, ranking it among the largest in the country and the third largest in Ohio. Much of its institutional heart sat in and around Bexley.
The Soviet Wave
The community grew sharply in the last quarter of the twentieth century, rising about 60 percent between 1975 and 2000. A significant part of that growth came after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, when roughly 1,400 Jewish immigrants from the former USSR resettled in Columbus, many drawn into the orbit of the established eastern neighbourhoods.
The Landmarks
Congregation Agudas Achim, 2767 East Broad Street. Founded in 1881 and Orthodox for most of its life, Agudas Achim moved to Bexley in 1951 and later became Conservative. Its members keep the historic Old Agudas Achim cemetery, off Alum Creek Drive, as a link to the community’s downtown beginnings.
Temple Israel, 3100 East Broad Street. Tracing its origins to 1846, this Reform congregation built its current modernist sanctuary in 1959 to a design by Percival Goodman, the most prolific synagogue architect of mid-century America. The move here marked the community’s final shift to the far east side.
Beth Jacob Congregation, 1223 College Avenue. The community’s central Orthodox synagogue, Beth Jacob recently renovated its sanctuary and dedicated a new Torah, a sign of an Orthodox population that has held its ground rather than dispersed.
Ahavas Sholom. A century-old Orthodox congregation in the heart of Bexley, it remains one of the small, traditional shuls that give the neighbourhood its walkable Sabbath character.
The Columbus Community Kollel, Main Street. Founded in 1995 to provide a centre of Jewish learning for the whole community, the Kollel sits on Bexley’s Main Street and has become a fixture of daily Torah study and adult education.
Sammy’s New York Bagels. Run by Sam Pullano, who once delivered bagels around Manhattan, this Bexley bakery turns out tens of thousands of kettle-boiled bagels a week, supplies local delis and institutions, and keeps a fully kosher, meat-free operation.
Columbus Torah Academy, 181 Noe Bixby Road. The community’s Orthodox day school serves students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, the educational backbone for families who want a Jewish schooling alongside Bexley’s well-regarded public system.
Where They Came From
The oldest Bexley families descend from the Bavarian and broader German-Jewish migration of the 1840s, the Nusbaums and Gundersheimers and the founders of Bene Jeshurun. They were merchants and shopkeepers who arrived when Columbus was barely a decade old.
A larger wave came from Eastern Europe around the turn of the twentieth century, the Yiddish-speaking immigrants who filled the Washington Avenue streets and built the Orthodox shuls. Their descendants formed the core of the postwar move into Bexley.
The most recent arrivals came from the former Soviet Union after 1991, refuseniks and their families resettling in a city that already had the synagogues, the school and the social agencies to receive them.
Bexley Today
Bexley remains the centre of gravity for Jewish life in central Ohio, even as families have also spread into New Albany, Gahanna and other suburbs. In that respect it mirrors the Jewish community of Beachwood on the other side of the state, a compact suburb that became the anchor of a metropolitan Jewish world. The walkable corridor of synagogues, the JCC, the Kollel and the kosher bagels are still here, and the proximity of it all is precisely why observant families keep choosing these streets.
It is not a closed community. Bexley is small, expensive and diverse, and the Jewish presence shares its sidewalks with Capital University students, longtime Episcopalian neighbours and newcomers drawn by the schools. The local Jewish press describes it, without much exaggeration, as a sweet place to be Jewish.
What endures is the geography of belonging. A family that moved east three generations ago from a frame shul on Washington Avenue can now walk their grandchildren to a synagogue on Broad Street, past the bakery and the library, in a neighbourhood built, quietly and deliberately, to make that walk possible.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Jews settle in Bexley, Ohio?
The Jews in Bexley, Ohio arrived through an eastward migration out of central Columbus. As families prospered through the twentieth century, they moved from the old Washington Avenue neighbourhood toward Bryden Road and then into Bexley, with the move accelerating after the Second World War.
What synagogues are in Bexley?
Bexley and the adjacent stretch of East Broad Street are home to several congregations, including Agudas Achim at 2767 East Broad Street, Temple Israel at 3100 East Broad Street, the century-old Orthodox Ahavas Sholom, and Beth Jacob on College Avenue.
How large is the Jewish community in Columbus?
The greater Columbus Jewish community numbered roughly 25,500 in the early 2010s, ranking among the largest in the United States and the third largest in Ohio. Much of its institutional life is concentrated in and around Bexley.
Is there kosher food in Bexley?
Yes. Sammy’s New York Bagels operates a fully kosher, meat-free bakery in Bexley, and other kosher-certified options have served the neighbourhood, supporting the observant families who live within walking distance of the synagogues.
What is the Columbus Community Kollel?
The Columbus Community Kollel, founded in 1995, is a centre of Jewish learning on Bexley’s Main Street. It offers Torah study and adult education and has become an important part of the neighbourhood’s daily Jewish life.
Where do Jewish children go to school in Bexley?
Many families use Bexley’s highly regarded public schools, while those seeking a religious education send children to Columbus Torah Academy on Noe Bixby Road, an Orthodox day school serving kindergarten through twelfth grade.
If your family’s story passed through Bexley, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a frame shul on Washington Avenue to a synagogue on East Broad Street, to wherever you are now.