On a Friday afternoon in eastern Cherry Hill, the corner of Springdale and Kresson Roads runs busy with cars turning into the Weinberg Campus. A Conservative synagogue that seats two thousand sits a short drive away on Kresson, a Reform congregation anchors Springdale, and the Katz Jewish Community Center hums with swimmers and toddlers and grandparents. The Jews in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, did not arrive here all at once. They came east, congregation by congregation, out of a declining river city, and rebuilt a whole Jewish world in a township that until the 1960s was mostly farmland.
The Place
Cherry Hill sits in Camden County, directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, the first New Jersey suburb most Philadelphians reach heading east on Route 70. For nearly three centuries after Quaker settlers arrived in the late 1600s it was farm country, incorporated in 1844 as Delaware Township, a quiet patchwork of gristmills and carriage shops.
The name changed in 1961, borrowed from the old Cherry Hill Inn that developer Eugene Mori had branded across hotels and apartments. That same October the Cherry Hill Mall opened, the first enclosed shopping mall in the eastern United States.
Today the township holds nearly 79,000 people, with a 2010 median family income of about $105,786 and one of the most respected public school systems in South Jersey. It is comfortable, leafy and suburban, and it is the heart of organised Jewish life for the entire region below Trenton.
How It Became Jewish
To understand Jewish Cherry Hill you have to start across the river and across the county line, in Camden, a city that no longer holds the community it once did.
Camden first, around 1890
The earliest known Jewish settlers in Camden, mostly small merchants, arrived around 1890. In 1894 they incorporated the Orthodox Congregation Sons of Israel, its first home at 335 Liberty Street in downtown Camden. It became the oldest synagogue in South Jersey, and by the turn of the century as many as seven temples stood in the city.
In 1924 a Conservative congregation, Beth El, formed in the Parkside neighbourhood. Camden in those decades was a working industrial city, home to RCA Victor and Campbell Soup, and its Jewish families were woven into the shops and streets of Parkside and the avenues around Kaighn. It was a smaller, river-city cousin to the immigrant Jewish quarters that grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the same decades.
The move east, the 1950s and 1960s
By the early 1950s Jewish families began leaving the city for the suburbs, part of the same postwar exodus that doubled Cherry Hill’s population from about 5,800 in 1940 to over 10,000 by 1950. Some came directly from Camden, others from the rowhouse blocks of South Philadelphia, drawn across the bridges by new houses, lawns and schools. It was the same suburban pull that, a generation later, drew observant families to North Jersey towns like Teaneck and warm-weather retirees toward Boca Raton.
The congregations did not chase them at first. When Temple Beth Sholom organised in 1940 it built on the White Horse Pike in Haddon Heights, hoping departing Camden families would settle nearby. They mostly did not. The families kept going east, toward Cherry Hill.
So the synagogues followed. Congregation Beth El, founded in Parkside in 1921, relocated to Cherry Hill in 1968. Sons of Israel, whose congregants had already planted roots in the township, bought its site on Cooper Landing Road in 1969 and moved into the new building in September 1971. By 1969 only an estimated 1,400 Jews remained in urban Camden, a fraction of the dense, walkable Jewish neighbourhoods that once defined places like Borough Park in Brooklyn. The centre of gravity had shifted, for good.
Building suburban Jewish Cherry Hill
Cherry Hill did not just receive transplanted congregations, it grew new ones. Temple Emanuel was established in 1950 as the township’s first Reform congregation. M’kor Shalom, also Reform, followed in 1974 as the community kept expanding.
Through the 1970s and 1980s the township’s Jewish population swelled enough that the older institutions outgrew their buildings. Temple Beth Sholom, which had reached more than 600 families in Haddon Heights, moved into a Cherry Hill sanctuary seating 2,000 in 1989. Temple Emanuel relocated to a new building on the township’s east side in 1992.
A campus of its own
The capstone came in 1997, when the Betty and Milton Katz Jewish Community Center opened a new building on the Weinberg Campus at the corner of Springdale and Kresson Roads, across from Temple Emanuel. The JCC had been founded in the 1940s with facilities in Camden and Pennsauken, and the new home answered the growth Cherry Hill had seen since the 1970s. Philanthropist Lewis Katz named the centre in memory of his parents. The Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey, founded in 1922, makes its headquarters in the township, coordinating the agencies that serve Camden, Burlington and Gloucester counties.
The Landmarks
Temple Beth Sholom, 1901 Kresson Road. The largest of Cherry Hill’s congregations, Conservative, with a sanctuary that seats two thousand and roughly a thousand member families. Rabbi Albert L. Lewis served here for forty-four years before becoming rabbi emeritus, and the congregation traces its line back to a 1940 founding in Haddon Heights.
Congregation Sons of Israel, Cooper Landing Road. South Jersey’s oldest synagogue, Modern Orthodox, incorporated in Camden in 1894 and rooted in Cherry Hill since the early 1970s. Today it counts about 200 families and remains the anchor of Orthodox life in the township.
Congregation Kol Ami, 1101 Springdale Road. The Reform congregation formed in 2022 from the merger of Temple Emanuel, Cherry Hill’s first Reform synagogue from 1950, and M’kor Shalom, founded in 1974. Its building sits on the township’s east side, across from the Katz JCC.
Betty and Milton Katz Jewish Community Center, Weinberg Campus, Springdale and Kresson Roads. Opened in 1997, the social and recreational heart of the community, with pools, fitness, preschool and cultural programmes. Its affiliated JCC Camps at Medford, established in 1942, is among the largest Jewish day camps in North America.
Chabad Lubavitch of Camden County, Cherry Hill. The local Chabad house extends Orthodox outreach, education and holiday programming across the county, part of the layered religious life that runs from Reform through Orthodox within a few square miles.
Cherry Grill, Barclay Farms Shopping Center, 1301 Route 70 East. A Keystone-K certified kosher restaurant serving Chinese and steakhouse fare, one of the visible markers of kosher Cherry Hill along the Route 70 corridor that also includes the Kosher Experience counter at the ShopRite on Route 70 West.
Cherry Hill High School East. One of the township’s two traditional public high schools and long a point of pride for Jewish families who moved here for the schools as much as the houses, feeding a district of roughly 10,700 students.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Cherry Hill are, overwhelmingly, the children and grandchildren of Camden and South Philadelphia. The deeper roots reach back to the great wave of Eastern European immigration around the turn of the twentieth century, the merchants and tradespeople who built the Orthodox shuls of downtown Camden in the 1890s.
Their American story is a two-step migration. First from the shtetls and cities of the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe to the industrial Delaware Valley, settling in Parkside and along Kaighn Avenue. Then, two or three generations later, a short hop east across the river and the county line into the new suburbs.
It is why the community is broadly American and English-speaking rather than freshly immigrant, and why its institutions feel established rather than improvised. The synagogues that fill Cherry Hill were not founded here. They were carried here.
Cherry Hill Today
Cherry Hill remains the largest Jewish community in South Jersey, the regional centre for the tricounty area whose Jewish population estimates range from the upper thirties into the forties of thousands. The full denominational spectrum lives within a short drive: Reform at Kol Ami, Conservative at Beth El and Beth Sholom, Modern Orthodox at Sons of Israel, and Chabad outreach across the county. For a sense of how a different South Jersey Jewish community took shape, the story of Jews in Aventura, Florida traces a parallel suburban arc.
Jewish education has its own footprint, from synagogue religious schools to the kosher kitchens of day schools like Kellman Brown Academy, which began in Cherry Hill before moving to neighbouring Voorhees. The Katz JCC and the Federation give the community an institutional backbone that few suburbs its size can match.
It is not a community frozen in place. Cherry Hill is changing, its Asian American population growing sharply and Korean businesses rising along the same Route 70 that holds the kosher shops. But the Jewish presence here is settled and self-sustaining, a community that already made its great move once and chose to stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Jews in Cherry Hill, New Jersey?
The Jews in Cherry Hill, New Jersey are largely descended from Camden and South Philadelphia families who moved to the suburbs after World War II. As the Jewish population of Camden declined through the 1950s and 1960s, its synagogues and institutions relocated east to Cherry Hill, making it the regional centre of Jewish life in South Jersey.
What is the oldest synagogue in Cherry Hill?
Congregation Sons of Israel is the oldest, and the oldest synagogue in all of South Jersey. It was incorporated in downtown Camden in 1894 and relocated to Cherry Hill around 1969 to 1971, following its congregants east.
How large is the Jewish community in the Cherry Hill area?
Cherry Hill anchors the largest Jewish community in South Jersey. Estimates for the surrounding Camden, Burlington and Gloucester county area place the total Jewish population in the upper tens of thousands, with the Jewish Federation of Southern New Jersey headquartered in the township.
What synagogues are in Cherry Hill?
Cherry Hill has congregations across the denominational spectrum, including Temple Beth Sholom and Congregation Beth El (Conservative), Congregation Kol Ami (Reform, formed in 2022 from Temple Emanuel and M’kor Shalom), Congregation Sons of Israel (Modern Orthodox), and a Chabad Lubavitch presence serving Camden County.
Is there kosher food in Cherry Hill?
Yes. The Route 70 corridor includes kosher options such as Cherry Grill in the Barclay Farms Shopping Center and a Kosher Experience counter at the ShopRite on Route 70 West, alongside the kosher kitchens maintained by local Jewish day schools.
What is the Katz JCC in Cherry Hill?
The Betty and Milton Katz Jewish Community Center opened in 1997 on the Weinberg Campus at Springdale and Kresson Roads. Founded in the 1940s with earlier facilities in Camden and Pennsauken, it offers recreation, preschool and cultural programmes and operates the JCC Camps at Medford.
If your family’s story passed through Cherry Hill, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Orthodox shuls of Camden’s Parkside to the synagogues along Kresson Road, to wherever you are now.