Cross City Avenue going west out of Philadelphia and the street names turn Welsh, the houses turn to stone, and the sidewalks fill on Saturday mornings with families walking, not driving, to shul. This is Bala Cynwyd, the first stop on the Main Line, and for three generations of Jews in Bala Cynwyd it has been the place you moved to when you made it, and the place you stayed because your neighbours, your rabbi, and your children’s school were all within a fifteen-minute walk.
The Place
Bala Cynwyd sits in Lower Merion Township, Montgomery County, pressed right against the western edge of Philadelphia along City Avenue, which is also U.S. Route 1. Welsh Quakers settled the area in the 1680s and named it after towns back home, which is why a deeply Jewish suburb carries a name almost no newcomer can spell or pronounce on the first try.
The old commercial heart runs along Montgomery Avenue, where buildings date to the early 1800s and SEPTA’s Cynwyd Line still rolls through. The 2020 census counted 9,285 residents in a place defined by stone mansions built between 1880 and the 1920s and the comfortable post-war houses that filled in around them.
It is, by any measure, affluent. What makes it unusual is that the affluence and the observance grew up together.
How It Became Jewish
To understand Jewish Bala Cynwyd you have to start across City Avenue, in a Philadelphia neighbourhood called Wynnefield.
The Wynnefield years
From around 1900, Wynnefield was an upscale, heavily Jewish quarter of West Philadelphia. Its synagogues anchored the social world of upwardly mobile families who had left the crowded immigrant blocks of South Philadelphia and the old downtown for tree-lined streets and detached houses.
The institutions were serious. Har Zion Temple, organised in 1922 in the Wynnefield home of Jacob Brodsky by immigrants mostly from Russia and Germany, broke ground on 54th Street near Wynnefield Avenue in 1924 and grew into one of the most influential Conservative congregations in the country. For half a century Wynnefield was where Philadelphia’s Jewish middle class lived.
Crossing City Avenue
For much of the early twentieth century, the towns of the Main Line did not welcome Jewish buyers. That eased after the Second World War. As restrictions fell, prosperous Wynnefield families began to jump across City Avenue into Merion, Bala Cynwyd, and Wynnewood, trading a city rowhouse block for a suburban lot a mile or two away.
The move accelerated through the 1950s and 1960s. By the mid-1960s Wynnefield was changing, becoming largely African American, and by the 1980s, apart from a small Orthodox remnant, the Jewish population had left. The synagogues followed their members: Har Zion relocated to a new campus in Penn Valley in 1976, and Congregation Beth David moved out to Gladwyne. The centre of gravity had shifted permanently to the Lower Merion side of the line.
Building a community in the suburbs
The Main Line’s first Jewish congregation had actually formed early. In March 1936, ten local businessmen founded the Main Line Hebrew Association, which became Temple Adath Israel of the Main Line. By 1958 the congregation had built a striking twelve-sided sanctuary, designed by the architect Pietro Belluschi, that still stands at the edge of Bala Cynwyd in Merion Station.
The Orthodox story is younger and, in its way, more dramatic. Lower Merion Synagogue began in 1954 with just five families, who used a living room as the sanctuary and the dining room for kiddush after the property on Old Lancaster Road was purchased in 1956. For years it was small. By 1967 it counted roughly fifty families.
Then it grew, and grew. A new building went up in 1980, an original dwelling on the lot was demolished in 2001 to make room for more, and by 2018 membership had passed 450 families, making it the largest Orthodox synagogue in Pennsylvania.
The Orthodox influx
The most recent chapter is the steady arrival of Modern Orthodox families drawn by something specific: a walkable, observant neighbourhood with an eruv, multiple shuls, and schools, all in a township with some of the best public education in Pennsylvania. Over the past few decades, hundreds of Orthodox families have settled in the streets around Montgomery Avenue and Old Lancaster Road, building the kind of dense, foot-traffic community that is usually associated with parts of Brooklyn rather than the leafy Main Line.
It is a different model from the one in the older and larger Jewish presence just to the north and west. Readers tracing the full arc of Lower Merion Jewish life can follow it in our piece on the Jews in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, of which Bala Cynwyd is the most concentrated, most walkable corner.
The Landmarks
Lower Merion Synagogue, 123 Old Lancaster Road. The anchor of Orthodox Bala Cynwyd, grown from five families in 1954 to the largest Orthodox congregation in the state. On Shabbat morning the surrounding streets fill with families walking to its doors, which tells you more about the neighbourhood than any census figure.
Temple Adath Israel of the Main Line, 250 North Highland Avenue, Merion Station. Descended from the 1936 Main Line Hebrew Association, the Conservative congregation worships in a twelve-sided sanctuary designed by Pietro Belluschi and completed in 1958, one of the most architecturally significant synagogue buildings in the region.
Young Israel of the Main Line, 273 Montgomery Avenue. A second Orthodox congregation on the avenue, part of the cluster of minyanim that lets observant families choose a shul within walking distance of home. Its presence is a marker of how dense the community has become.
Citron & Rose Tavern & Market, 261 Montgomery Avenue. A glatt kosher restaurant and market backed by the philanthropist David Magerman, who opened the original Citron & Rose in 2012. It occupies the site of the old Tavern in Bala Cynwyd, a landmark dating to the end of Prohibition, a neat illustration of how the neighbourhood’s commercial life followed its residents.
Kosloff Torah Academy, 50 Montgomery Avenue. An Orthodox girls’ high school on the same avenue as the shuls and the kosher market, part of the web of Jewish schooling that keeps families rooted here through their children’s whole education.
Kohelet Yeshiva, Merion. A Modern Orthodox college-preparatory school offering a dual curriculum of Judaic and general studies for boys and girls, with lower grades added after a 2015 merger. For many families it is the practical reason to live within the Bala Cynwyd eruv rather than further out.
West Laurel Hill Cemetery. The vast Victorian garden cemetery in Bala Cynwyd, listed on the National Register, holds generations of Philadelphia families and is a quiet record of the area’s long, layered history well before the Jewish community arrived.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Bala Cynwyd are, overwhelmingly, a community that came from just over the city line. Their grandparents and great-grandparents were the immigrants from the Russian Empire and Central Europe who landed in South Philadelphia and the old immigrant districts, then moved up and out to Wynnefield as they prospered.
From Wynnefield the path led across City Avenue into Merion, Bala Cynwyd, and Wynnewood. The result is a community with unusually deep local roots: many residents are not transplants from elsewhere in America but the descendants of the same Philadelphia families, having migrated a few miles west over three or four generations.
The newer Modern Orthodox arrivals broaden the picture. They come from other observant centres along the East Coast, drawn by the combination of an eruv, a wall of schools, and Lower Merion’s public reputation. But the gravitational pull is still local, an echo of that original walk out of Wynnefield.
Bala Cynwyd Today
Today Bala Cynwyd is one of the most genuinely walkable Jewish communities in suburban America. Within the eruv, Shabbat means families on foot, shuls within reach, and a Montgomery Avenue commercial strip that carries kosher food, a Jewish bookshop’s worth of community, and the schools that hold it all together.
It coexists comfortably with everything else that makes Lower Merion desirable: the SEPTA lines into Center City, the stone houses, and a public school district that consistently ranks among the best in Pennsylvania, with Cynwyd Elementary, Bala Cynwyd Middle School, and the choice between Lower Merion and Harriton high schools. Plenty of Jewish families here send their children to those public schools; plenty of others choose Perelman, Kohelet, or Kosloff. The two systems run side by side.
What you notice, in the end, is continuity. This is a community that crossed one street, City Avenue, and then spent seventy years putting down roots so deep that the children who grow up walking to Lower Merion Synagogue often come back to raise their own children within the same eruv. For a sense of how other Jewish suburbs took shape, compare the postwar arc of the Jews in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just across the river, or trace the older immigrant world these families came out of in our pieces on the Jews on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the dense Orthodox streets of the Jews in Borough Park, Brooklyn.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Jews in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania?
The Jews in Bala Cynwyd are largely descended from the Jewish community of Wynnefield in West Philadelphia, who crossed City Avenue into the Main Line after the Second World War as housing restrictions eased. Over decades they built shuls, schools, and kosher businesses, creating a walkable observant community that keeps drawing more families.
What is the main synagogue in Bala Cynwyd?
Lower Merion Synagogue at 123 Old Lancaster Road is the central Orthodox congregation, founded by five families in 1954 and now the largest Orthodox synagogue in Pennsylvania with more than 450 member families. Temple Adath Israel of the Main Line serves the Conservative community, and Young Israel of the Main Line is a second Orthodox option on Montgomery Avenue.
Is Bala Cynwyd a Modern Orthodox community?
It has a large and growing Modern Orthodox population centred on Lower Merion Synagogue and Young Israel, supported by an eruv and several day schools. It is also home to Conservative and unaffiliated Jewish families, so it is best described as a broad Jewish community with a strong Orthodox core.
Where do observant Jews in Bala Cynwyd eat and shop?
Montgomery Avenue is the spine of kosher life, anchored by Citron & Rose Tavern & Market at 261 Montgomery Avenue, a glatt kosher restaurant and market. The surrounding township carries additional kosher options, and an eruv lets families carry on Shabbat within the neighbourhood.
What Jewish schools serve Bala Cynwyd?
Families have several day schools nearby, including Kohelet Yeshiva in Merion, Kosloff Torah Academy at 50 Montgomery Avenue, and the Perelman Jewish Day School. Many Jewish families also use the highly rated Lower Merion public schools, including Cynwyd Elementary and Bala Cynwyd Middle School.
How is Bala Cynwyd different from the wider Lower Merion Jewish community?
Bala Cynwyd is the densest, most walkable corner of the larger Lower Merion Jewish world, with shuls, schools, and kosher food concentrated around Montgomery Avenue and Old Lancaster Road. The broader township, covered in our Lower Merion article, includes more spread-out and longer-established Jewish neighbourhoods such as Penn Valley and Wynnewood.
If your family’s story passed through Bala Cynwyd, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the immigrant streets of Philadelphia and the porches of Wynnefield, across City Avenue to the stone houses and shuls of the Main Line, to wherever you are now.