Drive the Northern State Parkway east past Exit 42, where the trees close in and the lots stretch to an acre or more, and you reach a place where Jewish life on Long Island moved when it stopped being a city story and became a suburban one. The Jews in Dix Hills did not arrive here by accident. They came looking for room, and they found it in a Suffolk County hamlet of wooded hills, big houses, and quiet roads named for the families who once farmed them.
The Place
Dix Hills is an unincorporated hamlet in the Town of Huntington, in Suffolk County, roughly 40 miles east of Manhattan. It covers nearly 16 square miles of gently rolling land, with the Long Island Expressway running straight through its middle and the Northern State Parkway curving along its northern edge.
The name is older than any of its current residents. It traces to Dick Pechegan, a member of the Secatogue people whose planted fields gave the hilly tract its shortened name, “Dix Hills,” by the early twentieth century, according to local histories of the hamlet.
Today it is one of the most affluent communities in Suffolk County. The median household income runs well past $200,000, most homes sit above the million-dollar mark, and the median age is close to 48. It is a place built for families who have already arrived somewhere, professionally and otherwise.
How It Became Jewish
To understand the Jews in Dix Hills, you have to understand the direction Jewish New York was travelling in the second half of the twentieth century. The arrow pointed east, and it pointed at Long Island.
The Great Migration East
After the Second World War, Jewish families left the apartments of Brooklyn and the Bronx and Queens in extraordinary numbers. They bought houses with the help of the G.I. Bill, and they filled the new developments rising across Nassau County first.
The growth was staggering. Between 1940 and 1960, Nassau County’s Jewish population grew by roughly 1,770 percent. From the end of the war through 1970, more than a hundred synagogue buildings went up on Long Island, a building boom with few parallels in American Jewish history.
By the 1960s, Nassau was filling up and growing expensive, and the same families who had once traded a Brooklyn walk-up for a Levittown ranch began looking further east still. The earlier-arriving North Shore enclaves, the deeply rooted Jewish community of Great Neck and the Jewish families who settled in Roslyn, had largely been built out and bid up. Suffolk County, with its larger lots and lower prices, became the next frontier. Dix Hills sat right at the leading edge of that wave.
Farmland Into Subdivisions
Dix Hills had stayed farmland until after the war. The turn began around 1941, when the developer J. Franklin Bradley bought a model ranch house from the 1939 New York World’s Fair and moved it to the hamlet to anchor a new housing development.
Through the 1950s and 1960s the potato fields and woods gave way to subdivisions. The Long Island Expressway reached Exit 52 at Commack Road in 1963, and once the highway arrived, the commuter calculus changed. A lawyer or a doctor or an accountant could live on an acre in Dix Hills and still reach Manhattan or the courts of Nassau within the hour.
Building a Congregation
Jewish families do not simply move to a place. They build the institutions that let them stay, and the central one is always a shul.
In 1968, Judy and Allan Glaser and more than seventy other families came together to found the Dix Hills Jewish Center. The founders fondly called themselves the Mayflower Group, 65 families settling a new place. They began in what congregants remember as the little pink house on Deer Park Avenue.
In 1975 the congregation moved into its permanent home at 555 Vanderbilt Parkway, an occasion marked by a Torah processional that older members still recall. Rabbi Nathaniel Steinberg led the community from 1970 to 1991, and Rabbi Howard Buechler has led it since.
The arc of that congregation tells you what happened to Jewish Suffolk over the decades. In recent years the Dix Hills Jewish Center absorbed both the Suffolk Jewish Center and the Commack Jewish Center, two nearby congregations whose members aged and thinned. Consolidation, not collapse: the families are still here, gathering under one roof instead of three.
A Second Front: Chabad
The other engine of Jewish Dix Hills runs on a different fuel. In 1994 Rabbi Yakov Saacks established the Chai Center, a Chabad-Lubavitch outpost that has grown into one of the busier Jewish addresses in western Suffolk. It sits at 501 Vanderbilt Parkway, a short walk from the older Conservative shul.
The two represent the two main currents of suburban Jewish life: the established, egalitarian Conservative congregation that came with the first wave, and the outreach-driven Chabad presence that arrived later to draw in the unaffiliated. Together they have kept the hamlet’s Jewish life from drifting toward the secular default of comfortable suburbs.
The Landmarks
Dix Hills Jewish Center, 555 Vanderbilt Parkway. The hamlet’s anchor congregation, founded in 1968 by the families who called themselves the Mayflower Group. Its egalitarian Conservative services count men and women equally in the minyan, and its daily morning and evening prayer quorums are, in the words of the congregation, the heart and soul of the place.
The Chai Center, 501 Vanderbilt Parkway. Rabbi Yakov Saacks’s Chabad center, established in 1994 and now a hub for holiday programmes, adult education, and teen outreach. It put a second, more traditional pole into a community that had been served by a single Conservative shul for a generation.
Half Hollow Hills High School East, 50 Vanderbilt Parkway. The larger of the district’s two high schools and, for many Jewish Dix Hills families, the real reason they bought here. Its Eugene Orloff Auditorium seats 2,200, the second-largest not-for-profit theatre on Long Island, and the school calendar quietly bends around the Jewish holidays each autumn.
Half Hollow Hills High School West, 375 Wolf Hill Road. Opened in 1975 as the district grew, Hills West shares the academic reputation that draws education-minded families to the hamlet. The two Hills schools are routinely ranked among the strongest public high schools in Suffolk County.
Vanderbilt Parkway. The road that carries most of Jewish Dix Hills runs along the route of the old Long Island Motor Parkway, America’s first highway built solely for cars, opened by William K. Vanderbilt II in 1908. A surviving stretch of the historic roadbed still runs through the hamlet, an unlikely thread of Gilded Age history beneath the modern synagogues.
Dix Hills Bagels, 703 Old Country Road. The Sunday-morning ritual of a suburban Jewish neighbourhood needs a bagel counter, and this one has long served the families coming off the parkway. It is the kind of unglamorous fixture that tells you a community actually lives somewhere, rather than just sleeping there.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Dix Hills are, overwhelmingly, the children and grandchildren of New York City’s immigrant Jewish neighbourhoods. The family lines run back through Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens, and before that to the shtetls and cities of Eastern Europe, to Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and the lands of the old Pale of Settlement.
The path to Dix Hills was rarely direct. The typical family came in two hops: first out of the five boroughs to a starter house in Nassau County in the 1950s or 1960s, then east again to Suffolk when they wanted more land and more house than Nassau could offer at the price.
That two-step migration is why Dix Hills feels less like a transplanted city neighbourhood and more like a destination. People did not move here to recreate Flatbush. They moved here because they had already left Flatbush behind, and wanted somewhere to raise the next generation with a lawn, a good school, and a shul down the road.
The same instinct drew Jewish families to other corners of the island. Some settled the denser, more observant world of the Jewish enclaves of the Five Towns on Nassau’s South Shore, while others followed the parkways east to the Jewish neighbourhoods of Syosset, just one town to the west of Dix Hills. The map of Jewish Long Island was drawn one good school district at a time.
Dix Hills Today
Dix Hills today is a settled, prosperous, and ageing community. The median age near 48 tells the honest story: many of the families who arrived in the building boom raised their children here, sent them off to college and careers, and stayed in the big houses. The consolidation of three local congregations into one is the institutional shadow of that demographic fact.
At the same time, the hamlet has grown markedly more diverse. The most recent counts put the Asian American share of Dix Hills at around 17 percent, a generation of new professional families drawn by the same Half Hollow Hills schools that once drew the Jewish ones. The Jewish presence is no longer the single defining thread it might once have seemed, but it remains woven deeply into the place.
What endures is the infrastructure of Jewish life: two living congregations on Vanderbilt Parkway, a Chabad centre running full of children’s programming, school calendars that still pause for the High Holy Days, and bagel counters busy on Sunday mornings. Dix Hills is no longer a frontier. It is what the frontier became once the families who reached it decided to stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Dix Hills a Jewish community?
Dix Hills has a long-established and substantial Jewish community, anchored by the Dix Hills Jewish Center and the Chai Center Chabad on Vanderbilt Parkway. The Jews in Dix Hills are largely descended from New York City Jewish families who moved east to Long Island after the Second World War, though the hamlet today is religiously and ethnically mixed.
When did Jewish families move to Dix Hills?
The major wave came in the 1960s and 1970s, as Jewish families moved east from a crowding Nassau County into Suffolk’s larger, cheaper lots. The Dix Hills Jewish Center was founded in 1968, a reliable marker of when the community had grown large enough to need its own shul.
What synagogues are in Dix Hills?
The two main congregations are the Dix Hills Jewish Center, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue at 555 Vanderbilt Parkway founded in 1968, and the Chai Center, a Chabad-Lubavitch centre at 501 Vanderbilt Parkway established in 1994. In recent years the Dix Hills Jewish Center absorbed the former Suffolk and Commack Jewish Centers.
Why did Jews move to Long Island after World War II?
Postwar Jewish families left the apartments of Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens for suburban homes, helped by the G.I. Bill and cheap new developments. Nassau County’s Jewish population grew by nearly 1,770 percent between 1940 and 1960, and when Nassau filled and grew expensive, families pushed further east into Suffolk County and hamlets like Dix Hills.
What makes Dix Hills affluent?
Dix Hills is one of Suffolk County’s wealthiest communities, with median household income above $200,000 and most homes valued over a million dollars. It draws professional families with large wooded lots, an easy commute via the Long Island Expressway and Northern State Parkway, and the highly regarded Half Hollow Hills public schools.
What school district serves Dix Hills?
Dix Hills is served by the Half Hollow Hills Central School District, which also covers neighbouring Melville. Its two high schools, Half Hollow Hills East and West, both located in Dix Hills, are consistently ranked among the strongest on Long Island and are a major reason the Jews in Dix Hills and other families settle here.
If your family’s story passed through Dix Hills, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a tenement in Brooklyn to an acre on Vanderbilt Parkway, to wherever you are now.