Drive north on University Drive past the manicured medians and the low-slung shopping plazas, and you reach a city that was farmland inside living memory. The Jews in Coral Springs, Florida did not inherit an old neighbourhood with a worn shul on the corner. They built one from scratch, on land that grew beans and peppers until the bulldozers came, and they did it in a single generation.
The Place
Coral Springs sits in the northwest corner of Broward County, about twenty miles inland from the Atlantic, wedged between the Everglades and the older coastal cities of Pompano Beach and Fort Lauderdale. It was chartered on 10 July 1963, a master-planned city conjured almost entirely by one developer rather than grown from a crossroads or a port.
The look is deliberate. Strict sign ordinances, uniform landscaping rules and tight building codes give the place an ordered, green calm that residents either love or find slightly airless. The 2020 census counted 134,394 people inside its sixteen square miles.
What the numbers do not capture is how much of the city’s family life, in its first decades, was Jewish.
How It Became Jewish
The story of Jewish Coral Springs is inseparable from the story of the city itself, because both were essentially invented in the same window of time. There was no historic Jewish quarter here for newcomers to join. There was a development plan and a lot of empty acreage.
A city ordered out of farmland
Coral Ridge Properties, the firm behind the city, bought 3,869 acres from the Lyons family on 14 December 1961 for roughly one million dollars. The builders James S. Hunt and Joe Taravella set out to design a city for 50,000 residents from the ground up. The first sale of 536 building lots, on 22 July 1964, netted 1.6 million dollars, and the company soon expanded its holdings to sixteen square miles.
For families looking to leave the Northeast in the 1970s, this was an unusual offer: not a retirement condo on the beach, but a brand new suburb with schools, parks and big single-family lots, built for raising children rather than for spending one’s last winters.
The synagogue that arrived before the city was finished
The most telling fact about Jewish Coral Springs is the date on its first congregation. Temple Beth Orr was chartered in 1972, barely a decade after the city itself and years before Coral Springs reached anything like its mature size. A Reform congregation whose name means House of Light, it set up on Riverside Drive, just north of Royal Palm Boulevard, and grew alongside the streets being laid around it.
The sequence matters. In most American suburbs the Jewish institutions follow the families by a generation. In Coral Springs the synagogue and the subdivisions rose together, which is part of why Jewish life here feels woven into the civic fabric rather than tucked behind it.
The great suburban migration west
By the 1970s and 1980s the coastal strip of Broward, places like Hollywood and the older condo belt, was filling up and ageing. Younger Jewish families, many of them children of the New York and New Jersey arrivals of an earlier wave, looked inland for space. Coral Springs, Tamarac, Sunrise and later Parkland absorbed that westward push.
The city itself was growing at a furious pace, adding more than 35,000 residents per decade through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. A large share of those new households were Jewish families from the Northeast who wanted a yard, a good school district and a synagogue within a short drive. They found all three.
Building the institutions
Once the families arrived, the rest followed quickly. Chabad established multiple centres across the city, on West Atlantic Boulevard, on North University Drive and on Coral Ridge Drive, each anchoring a different corner of town. Conservative families gravitated to long-standing congregations just over the line in Margate and Tamarac that had served northwest Broward since the late 1950s.
The Jewish Federation of Broward County eventually opened an outreach presence in the Coral Springs and Parkland area, a quiet acknowledgement that the centre of gravity for Jewish Broward had shifted inland and north. By the 2000s, what had been raw subdivision was one of the county’s recognised Jewish family suburbs.
The Landmarks
Temple Beth Orr, 2151 Riverside Drive. Chartered in 1972, this is the city’s founding Jewish congregation, a Reform synagogue that pointedly set out to remove barriers to membership and welcome interfaith and single-parent families. It has since become part of the Broward Central Synagogue family, marking half a century of continuous Jewish worship in a city not much older than that.
Chabad of Coral Springs, 3925 North University Drive. One of several Chabad houses across the city, it offers the daily-life machinery of observant Judaism: services, classes, holiday programmes and a Hebrew school. Its location on the city’s main north-south spine puts it within easy reach of most neighbourhoods.
Chabad Jewish Center, 11325 West Atlantic Boulevard. Serving the southwest quadrant of the city, this centre is one reason a family can find a Chabad minyan without crossing town. The spread of separate Chabad houses, rather than a single large one, is itself a measure of how distributed the Jewish population became.
Mesivta of Coral Springs, 3251 NW 101st Avenue. Founded in 2008, this Orthodox boys yeshiva draws teenage students from around the world to study Torah, Talmud and halacha. That a residential study academy could take root here speaks to how far the city travelled from its bean-field beginnings to a place with genuine institutional Jewish depth.
Soref JCC at the Heron Lakes Family Center. Operating since 2005 as the Coral Springs and Parkland arm of the Soref JCC, a beneficiary agency of the Jewish Federation of Broward County, it runs preschool, summer camp and after-school programmes. For young families it functions as the everyday Jewish front door, the place where the next generation first meets the community.
Coral Square, 9469 West Atlantic Boulevard. The city’s enclosed mall opened in October 1984 with roughly 945,000 square feet of retail. It is not a Jewish landmark, but it is the kind of communal living room where a new suburb learns to be a town, and where generations of local families, Jewish ones very much included, spent their Sundays.
Coral Springs Center for the Arts, 2855 Coral Springs Drive. The city’s 1,471-seat theatre is the civic stage on which much of communal life plays out, from concerts to lectures to the kind of cultural programming a large Jewish population helps sustain. It anchors the municipal complex that gives this planned city its centre.
Where They Came From
The Jewish families of Coral Springs are overwhelmingly a Northeastern transplant population, the children and grandchildren of the great twentieth-century Jewish settlement of New York and New Jersey. Many arrived in two stages: first the family move to South Florida’s coastal towns, then a second move inland and west to the new suburbs once children and space became the priority.
That two-step pattern explains the texture of the place. Accents and loyalties still trace back to Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island and the New Jersey suburbs, but the daily life is pure Sun Belt: cars, cul-de-sacs and an outdoor calendar that runs all year.
Broward County as a whole held an estimated 234,000 Jews at its late-1990s peak, and a 2016 Federation study counted around 149,000, with the inland northwest, Coral Springs and Parkland among the communities holding their share even as older coastal pockets thinned.
Coral Springs Today
Coral Springs is no longer a young Jewish suburb in the way it was in 1985. The city has grown strikingly diverse: the non-Hispanic white share fell from about 70 percent in 2000 to under 37 percent by 2020, as Hispanic and Caribbean families became a large part of the city. The Jewish community is now one thread in a much more varied weave.
But it is a durable thread. The synagogues remain busy, Chabad keeps multiplying its footprint, the Mesivta has expanded its campus, and the Soref JCC programmes still fill with local children. Many families who arrived in the building-boom decades have stayed and watched their grandchildren enrol in the same preschool.
What endures is the original bargain that drew people here: good schools, a safe and orderly city, and a Jewish life close enough to walk or drive to without ceremony. It is a quieter Jewish geography than the famous coastal enclaves, less visible from the highway, but no less real to the people who built it out of farmland.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a large Jewish community in Coral Springs, Florida?
Yes. Coral Springs, together with neighbouring Parkland, is one of the recognised Jewish family suburbs of northwest Broward County. The Jews in Coral Springs, Florida built up over the city’s rapid growth from the 1970s onward and are served by multiple synagogues, several Chabad centres and a JCC family centre.
What is the oldest synagogue in Coral Springs?
Temple Beth Orr, chartered in 1972, is the city’s founding Jewish congregation. It is a Reform synagogue on Riverside Drive and is now part of the Broward Central Synagogue family, having served Coral Springs for more than fifty years.
Where did Coral Springs Jewish families come from?
Most are Northeastern transplants, especially from the New York and New Jersey metropolitan areas. Many came in two stages, first to South Florida’s coastal towns and then inland to Coral Springs and Parkland as they sought larger homes and good schools for raising children.
What Jewish schools and programmes are in Coral Springs?
The Mesivta of Coral Springs, founded in 2008, is an Orthodox boys yeshiva on NW 101st Avenue. The Soref JCC operates the Heron Lakes Family Center, running preschool, camp and after-school programmes for the Coral Springs and Parkland community since 2005.
Why did Coral Springs attract so many Jewish families?
The city was a master-planned community built from the ground up in the 1960s and 1970s, offering new single-family homes, strong schools and an orderly environment. Those features matched what Jewish families leaving the ageing coastal condo belt were looking for, which helped the Jews in Coral Springs, Florida grow alongside the new subdivisions.
How does Coral Springs compare to other South Florida Jewish areas?
It is more suburban and family-oriented than the high-rise coastal enclaves. Compared with beachfront Jewish hubs further east, Coral Springs offers inland single-family living, while sharing the same Northeastern roots as communities in places like Aventura and Delray Beach.
If your family’s story passed through Coral Springs, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the apartments of Brooklyn and the suburbs of New Jersey, to the new streets carved out of Broward farmland, to wherever you are now.
Read more from the Atlas of Home Roots series on Jewish South Florida: Jews in Boca Raton, Jews in Bal Harbour, and the Russian-Jewish enclave of Sunny Isles Beach. For the city’s own record, see the Coral Springs, Florida history and the City of Coral Springs history archive.