Drive east on Route 110 past the glass headquarters of Canon and Estee Lauder, turn off onto a quiet residential road, and you arrive at the other Melville: the one where the Jews in Melville, New York raised their children, joined a synagogue, and traded a Queens apartment for a lawn. For sixty years this Suffolk County hamlet has been a destination for professional Jewish families pushing east along Long Island, far enough from the city to feel like the country, close enough to commute back.
It is easy to mistake Melville for an office park with a zip code. The corporate corridor is real, and it is enormous. But behind it sits one of the oldest organised Jewish suburban communities on Long Island, founded by fifty families in a storefront and now anchored by three congregations and a Chabad.
The Place
Melville is a hamlet and census-designated place in the Town of Huntington, in Suffolk County, roughly forty miles east of Manhattan. The 2020 census counted 19,284 residents across about twelve square miles, with a median household income near $155,000. It was farmland into the twentieth century, known earlier as Sweet Hollow and as Samuel Ketcham’s Valley.
What changed everything was the highway. The Long Island Expressway reached Melville around 1962, and the Town of Huntington had already nearly tripled in population during the 1950s. Industrial zoning along Broadhollow Road, the local name for Route 110, turned the western edge into a business hub while the rest filled with subdivisions and good schools.
Today the daytime population swells by well over a hundred per cent on workdays, a measure of how many people drive in to the Route 110 corridor that locals call Long Island’s economic spine. The families who live here send their children to the Half Hollow Hills district, one of the reasons they came.
How It Became Jewish
The Jewish story in Melville is a suburban one, and it begins almost exactly when the highway did. There was no old Jewish quarter here, no immigrant tenement. There was farmland, then a freeway exit, then fifty families who decided they wanted a synagogue of their own.
The storefront congregation, 1960
In 1960 fifty founding families established what they called the South Huntington Jewish Center. They had no building. Services were held in a storefront on Route 110, and the High Holidays were observed at the Sweet Hollow Presbyterian Church, the borrowed sanctuary that so many young suburban congregations relied on in those years.
In 1962, the same year the expressway arrived, the congregation acquired the land it still sits on, with the help of two members remembered by name in its own history, Ruby Wagner and Leon Lazar. A ground-breaking was held with town dignitaries. The Conservative synagogue would expand three times over the coming decades.
A second wave, 1968 and 1969
Within a decade two more congregations took root in the same eastward push of Jewish families through central Long Island. In 1968 the Dix Hills Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation, was founded by Judy and Allan Glaser with more than seventy families, holding its first services in the dining room of a nearby preschool. The neighbouring community in Dix Hills grew so closely intertwined with Melville’s that the two are usually told as one story, though they remain distinct hamlets. You can read more about the parallel community in our piece on the Jews in Dix Hills, New York.
In 1969 came Temple Beth Torah, a Reform congregation, founded by Jay and Barbara Moelis with forty other families. Like its older neighbour, it began without walls. Friday services were held at the King of Kings Lutheran Church while the religious school met on Saturday mornings, and the congregation later occupied a small house on Carman Road before completing its own building in 1976.
That borrowed-sanctuary arrangement produced one of the warmer footnotes in the area’s history. For years Temple Beth Torah and King of Kings held a joint Thanksgiving service that alternated between the two houses of worship, with church members reading from the Hebrew scriptures and temple members reading from the Christian texts.
Chabad arrives, 1990
The most recent institutional layer came in 1990, when the Melville and Huntington Chabad Center was established to serve a Jewish population it now describes as roughly twenty thousand strong across the wider Huntington area. Chabad brought an Orthodox presence and an explicitly come-as-you-are approach, drawing Jews of every level of observance to classes, holiday events, and Shabbat dinners.
By the 1990s, then, Melville and its immediate neighbours held the full Long Island spread: Reform, Conservative, and Chabad, all within a few minutes of one another, all serving families who had arrived in the same generation-long migration out of the boroughs.
Why families kept coming
The engine underneath all of this was the same one that built the rest of suburban Jewish Long Island. Families left Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx for space, safety, and schools, moving first to the Nassau communities and then, as those filled and prices rose, pressing further east into Suffolk. Melville sat at a sweet spot: genuinely suburban, with a top-rated school district, yet still commutable to the city and increasingly to the offices on its own doorstep.
This is the same eastward arc that produced the Jewish communities in Syosset and Jericho a few exits west. Melville was simply the next stop the line for many of those same families, or their grown children looking for a house of their own.
The Landmarks
Melville Jewish Center, 2600 New York Avenue. The community’s founding congregation, born in 1960 as the South Huntington Jewish Center and renamed in January 2022 to match the hamlet it serves. Rabbi Morris Shapiro led it for twenty-three years, followed by Rabbi Ian S. Jacknis for twenty-eight years from 1993. It remains a Conservative congregation affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.
Temple Beth Torah, 35 Bagatelle Road. Melville’s Reform congregation, founded in 1969 and housed in its own building since 1976. Its early decades of shared worship with King of Kings Lutheran Church, including the alternating Thanksgiving service, are among the most quietly remarkable interfaith stories on Long Island.
Chabad of Melville and Huntington, 498 Sweet Hollow Road. Established in 1990, the local Chabad describes itself as one of New York’s most unorthodox Orthodox synagogues, a deliberately open door for Jews of all backgrounds. It runs a Hebrew school, adult education, and the big public Chanukah and Purim celebrations that have become neighbourhood fixtures.
Dix Hills Jewish Center, 555 Vanderbilt Parkway. Just over the line in the twin hamlet of Dix Hills, this Conservative congregation founded in 1968 has long served Melville families too. Its first services were held in a preschool dining room while members raised money for a building of their own.
Half Hollow Hills High School East, 50 Vanderbilt Parkway. The school that drew many Jewish families to Melville and Dix Hills in the first place. The district split into two high schools in 1979, and its East campus has been a fixture of family decisions about where to settle ever since.
The Route 110 corridor, Broadhollow Road. The economic backbone that gives Melville its second identity. Home to the US headquarters of Canon, Nikon, Henry Schein, MSC Industrial Direct, and Leviton, plus major operations of Estee Lauder, it employs the parents who fill the synagogue parking lots on a Friday night.
Walt Whitman Birthplace, 246 Old Walt Whitman Road, Huntington Station. Just to the north in West Hills, the 1819 farmhouse where the poet was born is a state historic site. It is a reminder that this corner of Suffolk was rural country long before it was either an office park or a suburb, and the road that bears Whitman’s name runs straight through Melville.
Where They Came From
The Jews who built Melville did not arrive directly from Europe. They came from New York City, mostly from Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, the children and grandchildren of the great Eastern European immigration that filled the city’s Jewish neighbourhoods between the 1880s and the 1920s.
Their grandparents had come from the shtetls and cities of the Russian Empire, Poland, Galicia, Lithuania, and Romania. Their parents grew up in the dense Jewish districts of the outer boroughs. They themselves were the suburban generation, the ones with cars and mortgages who turned Long Island potato fields into split-levels.
The Jewish population of Long Island expanded dramatically after both world wars, accelerating wildly in the postwar building boom. Melville received its share of that wave a little later than the Nassau towns, as families pushed east in search of newer houses and bigger lots, settling a hamlet that had been farmland within living memory.
Melville Today
Melville today is comfortable, established, and quietly Jewish in the way of long-settled suburbs. The dramatic growth is over. The congregations that began with fifty or seventy families now manage the realities of any mature suburban synagogue: ageing founders, members whose grown children have moved away, and the steady work of staying relevant to a new generation.
The Melville Jewish Center marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2010 and changed its name in 2022, a small act of rootedness, choosing to be named for the place it had served for six decades. Rabbi Cara Weinstein Rosenthal joined the congregation in 2024. Chabad, the newcomer of 1990, has become an institution in its own right.
The Half Hollow Hills schools still draw young families, Jewish and otherwise, and the kosher options of the wider Huntington and Plainview area remain within easy reach. Melville is no longer a frontier of Jewish settlement. It is a settled place, the kind of suburb where a family can live an entire Jewish life within a few minutes’ drive, which is exactly what those first fifty families set out to build.
If your family’s story passed through Melville, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Brooklyn walk-up to a split-level off Route 110, to wherever you are now.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Jews live in Melville, New York?
There is no separate official census of Jews in Melville, New York, but the local Chabad describes serving a Jewish community of roughly twenty thousand across the wider Huntington area. Melville itself had 19,284 residents in 2020, and Jewish families have been a substantial presence since the 1960s.
When did the Jewish community in Melville begin?
The organised Jewish community in Melville dates to 1960, when fifty founding families established the South Huntington Jewish Center, meeting first in a storefront on Route 110. It acquired land for a permanent building in 1962, the same year the Long Island Expressway reached the area.
What synagogues are in Melville?
Melville is served by the Melville Jewish Center, a Conservative congregation founded in 1960, and Temple Beth Torah, a Reform congregation founded in 1969. Chabad of Melville and Huntington, established in 1990, provides an Orthodox presence, and the nearby Dix Hills Jewish Center serves many Melville families.
Why did Jewish families move to Melville?
Jewish families moved to Melville as part of a long eastward migration out of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx in search of space, safety, and good schools. The Half Hollow Hills school district and the area’s commutability, later reinforced by the Route 110 job corridor, made it especially attractive.
Is Melville part of Dix Hills?
No. Melville and Dix Hills are distinct hamlets, both in the Town of Huntington and both within the Half Hollow Hills school district. They are so closely linked that their Jewish histories are often told together, but they remain separate places with their own congregations.
What is Melville known for besides its Jewish community?
Melville is best known for the Route 110 corporate corridor, often called Long Island’s economic spine, which hosts the US headquarters of Canon, Nikon, Henry Schein, and others. It also borders the West Hills birthplace of poet Walt Whitman, a state historic site dating to 1819.