On a Saturday morning in the village of Lawrence, the streets go quiet in a particular way. Cars stay in driveways, families walk to shul in their good clothes, and the kosher bakeries on the avenue have already closed for Shabbat. The Jews in Lawrence, New York have turned this nineteenth-century summer retreat into one of the most concentrated and observant Jewish enclaves in suburban America, the gravitational centre of a corridor everyone here simply calls the Five Towns.
The Place
Lawrence sits at the south-western tip of Nassau County, on the South Shore of Long Island, hard against the Queens border and Reynolds Channel. It is the most westerly of the Five Towns, the cluster that also includes Cedarhurst, Woodmere, Hewlett and Inwood.
The village was incorporated on 13 September 1897 and takes its name from three brothers, Alfred, Newbold and George Lawrence, who began buying up farmland here in the 1850s. They were building a country resort for wealthy New Yorkers, complete with a train station, broad avenues and grand summer estates.
That inheritance of old money still shapes the place. The 2020 census counted 6,809 residents in a village of leafy lots, waterfront homes and a country club, where the median household income runs well into six figures and many houses trade above a million dollars.
How It Became Jewish
Lawrence did not start out as a Jewish village. It began as a Protestant playground of hunt clubs and seaside hotels. The Rockaway Hunt Club opened at its present site in 1884, the same year a hotel rose in the waterfront section known as the Isle of Wight, and for decades the area was synonymous with Gilded Age leisure rather than synagogues.
The first Jewish families, 1900s to 1940s
Jewish life arrived from the west, drifting in from the Rockaway peninsula across the channel in Queens. Far Rockaway and Arverne had become summer destinations for German and Eastern European Jewish families from the city, and some of them began settling permanently on the Long Island side.
Temple Israel, the institution that anchors this early period, was founded in 1908 as Temple Israel of Far Rockaway before it became Temple Israel of Lawrence. It is among the oldest Jewish congregations on Long Island, and its presence marked the moment the community stopped being seasonal and started putting down roots.
The Reform and Conservative decades, 1940s to 1980s
For most of the twentieth century, Lawrence was a town of established, largely Reform and Conservative Jewish families. They were professionals and businesspeople who had succeeded in the city and wanted the lawns, the schools and the respectability of the suburbs.
Temple Israel embodied that era. Its Spanish-style domed sanctuary, designed by the architect S. Brian Baylinson and dedicated in 1930, was celebrated nationally as one of the finest suburban synagogue buildings in the country. It still stands at 140 Central Avenue, a landmark of a more genteel, less stringently observant Jewish suburbia.
The Orthodox migration, late 1980s onward
The Lawrence of today was made in the last four decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, a large wave of Modern Orthodox families moved into the village and the wider Five Towns, drawn by a combination of factors that, taken together, were close to irresistible for the observant.
The yeshivas and kosher infrastructure of Far Rockaway lay just across the border. The housing stock was substantial and the public reputation excellent. Above all, a critical mass of Orthodox institutions was already forming, and Orthodox life depends on density: a walkable distance to a synagogue, a school within reach, a butcher and a baker who keep kosher.
That density built on itself. Each new family made the next family’s decision easier, and each new synagogue, day school and kosher shop lowered the cost of moving in. Within a generation the centre of gravity shifted from Reform Lawrence to Orthodox Lawrence.
The schools were both cause and consequence. The Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, known universally as HAFTR, was founded in 1978 and grew into a sprawling Modern Orthodox campus, with its Lower School at 33 Washington Avenue and its Middle School at 44 Frost Lane in Lawrence. Around it gathered yeshivas, girls’ schools and a thicket of smaller congregations.
By the time the Jewish Community Study of New York surveyed the Five Towns, the numbers told the story plainly. The wider Five Towns area was home to roughly 24,000 Jewish adults and 15,000 Jewish children across about 10,000 households, and among Jewish adults some 69 per cent identified as Orthodox, with only 8 per cent Conservative and 14 per cent Reform. The Reform majority of the mid-century had become a small minority.
The Landmarks
Temple Israel of Lawrence, 140 Central Avenue. Founded in 1908 and housed since 1930 in a Spanish-style domed sanctuary by architect S. Brian Baylinson, this is the elder statesman of Lawrence Jewry. Once the largest Reform congregation on Long Island, it remains a Reform anchor in a now-Orthodox landscape, a reminder of who came first.
Congregation Beth Sholom, 390 Broadway. Founded in 1928, Beth Sholom is among the most established Orthodox shuls in the Five Towns. For decades it has been a fixed point of communal life, the kind of synagogue whose calendar of minyanim and shiurim quietly organises the week for families nearby.
Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway (HAFTR), Lower School at 33 Washington Avenue. Founded in 1978, HAFTR is the flagship Modern Orthodox day school of the area. Its campus is spread across the village, with the Middle School at 44 Frost Lane and an Early Childhood division on Central Avenue, and its growth tracked the Orthodox arrival almost exactly.
Central Avenue, the commercial spine. Running through Lawrence into neighbouring Cedarhurst, Central Avenue is the high street of the Five Towns. Kosher groceries, Judaica shops, bakeries and restaurants line it, and on a Thursday afternoon before Shabbat it is one of the busiest kosher shopping corridors in the New York suburbs.
The Lawrence Yacht and Country Club. A relic of the village’s resort origins, the country club and its golf course, acquired by the village in 1938, sit beside Reynolds Channel. It is a visible thread back to the Hunt Club era, now woven into a town whose social life revolves more around the synagogue than the green.
Hicks Beach and the channel waterfront. The village purchased Hicks Beach in 1952 to preserve the wetlands along Reynolds Channel. The marshy southern edge of Lawrence remains a quiet counterpoint to the dense residential streets, a stretch of open water and grass at the very edge of one of America’s most observant suburbs.
Old Lawrence, the Back Lawrence estates. The original section of the village still holds some of the large summer homes built for nineteenth-century New Yorkers. Many estates have been subdivided, but enough survive to show what the Lawrence brothers were selling: a country idyll that, a century later, an entirely different community would make its own.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Lawrence trace two overlapping origins. The first is the great Ashkenazi migration from Germany and Eastern Europe that filled New York City between the 1880s and the 1920s, families who later climbed out of the Lower East Side and Brooklyn into the comfortable suburbs of the South Shore.
The second is far more local. Much of the modern Orthodox community came not from across the ocean but from across the channel, from Far Rockaway and the Queens neighbourhoods where Orthodox institutions had already taken hold. The move to Lawrence was a short hop into more space and better housing, carried out by people who wanted to keep walking distance to the yeshiva.
In recent years the Orthodox population has been reinforced by families moving out from Brooklyn neighbourhoods such as Flatbush, and by the natural growth of large observant families. The result is a community that is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi and Orthodox, layered over the older Reform and Conservative families who remain.
This pattern of suburban Orthodox concentration repeats across the country, from the synagogue belts of the Midwest to the planned communities of the mid-Atlantic. You can read parallel stories in the Jewish community of Cleveland Heights, Ohio and its neighbour Shaker Heights, or in Owings Mills, Maryland, each a suburb that observant families turned into a centre of Jewish life.
Lawrence Today
Today Lawrence is, by reputation and by the rhythm of its streets, an Orthodox village. The pace of the week is set by Shabbat and the holidays. Eruv wires are strung along the poles, day-school children fill the sidewalks at three o’clock, and the kosher restaurants of the Central Avenue corridor define where families eat out.
It is also an affluent and sometimes contested place. The village retains its old wealth and its country club, and tensions over school board control and resources between the observant majority and longer-standing residents have surfaced here as they have across the Five Towns. Prosperity and density together make for a community that is confident, organised and occasionally at odds with itself.
What is not in doubt is its permanence. The summer resort the Lawrence brothers laid out has become something they could never have imagined: a year-round centre of Jewish life, where the same broad avenues that once carried carriages to the Hunt Club now carry families on foot to shul. For tens of thousands of people across the Five Towns, Lawrence is simply home.
The same story of Jewish suburban settlement on the edge of a great city plays out elsewhere in the New York region, from the North Shore enclave of Port Washington to Harrison in Westchester and the growing communities of Manalapan, New Jersey. Each is a chapter in the same migration outward from the city’s old Jewish neighbourhoods.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Lawrence, New York a Jewish town?
Yes. The Jews in Lawrence, New York form the dominant community, and the village is the western anchor of the Five Towns, a heavily Orthodox Jewish area on Long Island’s South Shore. Surveys of the wider Five Towns have found roughly 69 per cent of Jewish adults identify as Orthodox.
What are the Five Towns?
The Five Towns are Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere, Hewlett and Inwood, a cluster of villages and hamlets in the Town of Hempstead, Nassau County. They share a dense Jewish communal life, with dozens of synagogues, day schools and a concentrated kosher shopping district along Central Avenue.
When did Jews move to Lawrence?
Jewish families began settling from the early twentieth century, with Temple Israel founded in 1908. For much of the century Lawrence was a Reform and Conservative town, but a large Modern Orthodox migration beginning in the late 1980s transformed it into the predominantly Orthodox community it is today.
What is the oldest synagogue in Lawrence?
Temple Israel of Lawrence, founded in 1908 as Temple Israel of Far Rockaway, is among the oldest Jewish congregations in the area. Its Spanish-style domed sanctuary at 140 Central Avenue was dedicated in 1930 and was once celebrated as a leading suburban synagogue building.
Why did Orthodox Jews choose Lawrence?
The Orthodox families who shaped modern Lawrence were drawn by proximity to the yeshivas and kosher businesses of nearby Far Rockaway, strong housing and schools, and a growing critical mass of Jewish institutions. Because Orthodox life requires walkable access to a synagogue, each new family and shul made the village more attractive to the next.
Where do people shop kosher in Lawrence?
The main kosher shopping corridor runs along Central Avenue through Lawrence and into neighbouring Cedarhurst, lined with kosher groceries, bakeries, Judaica stores and restaurants. It is one of the busiest kosher commercial districts in the New York suburbs, especially in the hours before Shabbat.
If your family’s story passed through Lawrence, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the tenements of the Lower East Side and the yeshivas of Far Rockaway, to a Spanish-domed sanctuary on Central Avenue, to wherever you are now.