On a Saturday morning in Merrick, the parking lot at the Merrick Jewish Centre on Fox Boulevard fills early, the bagel line at Bagel Boss on Merrick Road wraps toward the door, and somewhere a grandparent is explaining that this quiet hamlet on the South Shore of Long Island was, not so long ago, a Brooklyn that had simply moved east. The story of the Jews in Merrick is the story of that move: a postwar migration out of the city, across the county line, into a town of lawns and a railway station, where a community built three synagogues and one of Nassau County’s most decorated school districts. It is also, improbably, the town where two boys met in a seventh-grade gym class and grew up to make ice cream.
The Place
Merrick is a hamlet in the Town of Hempstead, in Nassau County, on the South Shore of Long Island. It sits between Bellmore to the west and Freeport to the east, with bays and canals threading down toward the Atlantic and the Merrick station of the Long Island Rail Road’s Babylon Branch carrying commuters straight into Penn Station.
The name comes from the Meroke, an Algonquian-speaking people of the Lenape, who lived along this stretch of marsh and shoreline long before the railroad. By the 2020 census Merrick counted roughly 22,000 residents, with a median household income well above the national figure and more than 60 percent of adults holding a bachelor’s degree or higher.
It is, in short, an affluent commuter suburb with water at its back. And for several generations of Jewish families, it has been home.
How It Became Jewish
Merrick was a small place for a long time. In the 1890s it held perhaps 500 people. The railroad and a wave of local development pushed that toward 5,000 by the 1920s, but the great transformation came after the Second World War, when returning veterans and young families went looking for affordable houses within commuting distance of New York City. Nassau County answered with subdivisions, and the South Shore filled in fast. The same wave that drew Jewish families to Merrick reshaped neighbouring towns into distinct ethnic enclaves, among them the Italian community in nearby Garden City.
The move out of the city
New York City’s Jewish population peaked at around two million in the 1950s, and then it began to spread outward. Second- and third-generation families who had grown up in Brooklyn and Queens, in Flatbush and Midwood and the streets beyond, started buying houses on Long Island. Levittown, just to the north, became the most famous of the new developments, but the pattern repeated across Nassau, and Merrick was squarely in its path.
The appeal was straightforward. A family could leave a walk-up apartment in the city, buy a house with a yard, send the children to strong public schools, and still put the breadwinner on a morning train to Manhattan. For Jewish families in particular, the South Shore offered something more: enough neighbours to sustain a synagogue, a Hebrew school, a kosher bakery, and the ordinary infrastructure of Jewish life without the density of the old neighbourhoods. The same pull reshaped the North Shore as well, where families built the Jewish community in Roslyn around the same postwar promise of houses and good schools.
Building the institutions
The first foundation was laid earlier than the boom. The Merrick Jewish Centre opened in 1929, making it the oldest synagogue in Bellmore and Merrick, a Conservative congregation that would anchor the community through the decades of growth that followed.
The Reform congregation came with the postwar wave. Temple Beth Am held its first Friday evening service on 1 December 1950, in the Empire Fire Hall, before the congregation had a building of its own. In the early years it gathered wherever it could, in a nursery school, the fire hall, even a local Presbyterian church, before moving into its first permanent home in December 1954. It was named, plainly, the Reform Jewish Congregation of Merrick.
Orthodoxy followed in 1962, when Congregation Ohav Sholom was founded as a Modern Orthodox synagogue on South Merrick Avenue. Over the years a second Orthodox shul, Young Israel of Merrick, took root as well, and the two congregations would come to alternate as hosts for the community’s shared learning nights. By the 1970s Merrick held the full spectrum of American Jewish practice, Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox, within a few miles of one another.
The boys from the gym class
The most famous Jewish story to come out of Merrick begins in a seventh-grade gym class in 1963. Ben Cohen, born in Brooklyn and raised in Merrick, and Jerry Greenfield, also Brooklyn-born and Merrick-raised, met that year and became lifelong friends. They attended Hebrew school together, and both had their bar mitzvahs at the local Reform synagogue in town.
Fifteen years later, in 1978, the two opened an ice cream shop in a converted gas station in Burlington, Vermont. Ben & Jerry’s would become one of the most recognisable brands in America, and its founders never hid where they came from: two Jewish kids from a Long Island suburb who had grown up a few houses and a Hebrew-school classroom apart.
Merrick’s roster of notable former residents runs deep beyond them, from the economist Paul Krugman to the singer Debbie Gibson. But Cohen and Greenfield remain the town’s defining pair, proof of how much could grow out of an ordinary suburban childhood on the South Shore.
A community that stayed
What is striking about Merrick is how much of its Jewish life endured rather than emptied. While many postwar suburbs saw their synagogues age and shrink, Merrick’s institutions held on. Temple Beth Am marked its 75th anniversary in October 2025, one of only a handful of synagogues in Nassau County to reach that milestone. When the smaller Shaarei Shalom of neighbouring Bellmore could no longer stand alone, it merged into Temple Beth Am in 2011, and the combined congregation took the name Temple Beth Am, the Reform Jewish Congregation of Merrick and Bellmore.
The Landmarks
Merrick Jewish Centre, 225 Fox Boulevard. Opened in 1929, it is the oldest synagogue in Bellmore and Merrick, a Conservative egalitarian congregation that predates the suburban boom that grew up around it. For nearly a century it has run a Hebrew school and anchored the town’s communal calendar, from Tashlich services to menorah lightings.
Temple Beth Am, 2377 Merrick Avenue. The Reform congregation that came of age with the postwar migration, founded in 1950 and worshipping in fire halls and borrowed rooms before it built its first home in 1954. This is, by the accounts of its most famous alumni, the synagogue where Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were called to the Torah as boys.
Congregation Ohav Sholom, 145 South Merrick Avenue. Founded in 1962, it is Merrick’s Modern Orthodox congregation, a growing shul that hosts community learning and brought a fully observant option to a town that already had Conservative and Reform houses of worship.
Bagel Boss, 2101 Merrick Road. A kosher bakery and caterer that has served the South Shore since 1989, with hand-sliced smoked fish, fresh-baked challahs and babkas, and the rugelach that marks a Sunday morning in a Jewish suburb. It operates under rabbinical supervision and is, for many families, the unofficial kitchen of the neighbourhood.
Sanford H. Calhoun High School, Merrick Avenue. Opened in 1958, Calhoun is one of three high schools in the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District, all of which have earned Gold distinction on the College Board’s Advanced Placement honour roll. The district’s reputation for academics is one of the reasons Jewish families settled and stayed.
The Merrick LIRR station, on the Babylon Branch. The commuter rail line that made the whole town possible, carrying a generation of fathers and now mothers and everyone else straight into Manhattan and back. Without the train, there is no postwar Merrick, and no community to build around it.
Congregation Ohav Sholom and Young Israel, Merrick’s Orthodox corner. Together the town’s two Orthodox shuls sustain a daily observant life, alternating as hosts for the Merrick Beit Medrash learning nights and supporting the kosher grocers and supervised bakeries that keep an Orthodox household running on the South Shore.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Merrick came, overwhelmingly, from the western boroughs of New York City. They were the children and grandchildren of immigrants who had landed on the Lower East Side and then moved to Brooklyn and Queens, settling in neighbourhoods such as Flatbush, Midwood, and the streets of central Brooklyn before the war.
The deeper roots reached back to Eastern Europe, to the towns and cities of the Russian Empire, Poland, and the lands of the old Pale of Settlement, the source of the great Ashkenazi migration to America between the 1880s and the 1920s. By the time those families reached Merrick, they were two or three generations removed from the boat, fully American and looking for a lawn.
The move to the South Shore was less about origin than aspiration. These were families who had made it far enough to want a house, a good school, and a synagogue of their own, and who found all three within a short drive of one another in a Nassau County hamlet near the water.
Merrick Today
Merrick remains a comfortable, established suburb, and its Jewish community remains one of its defining threads. The three synagogues still operate, the Hebrew schools still run, and the kosher counters at the local markets still stock Israeli cold cuts and glatt beef alongside the bagels. When people talk about Yiddishkeit on Long Island, Merrick still comes up in the same breath as the Jewish enclave of the Five Towns, Great Neck on the North Shore, and West Hempstead.
It is, like much of suburban Jewish America, a community more Reform and Conservative than Orthodox, with a strong secular contingent. The grandchildren of the postwar migrants have their own choices to make about how Jewish their lives will be, and many make those choices somewhere other than Merrick, in the city their grandparents left or in suburbs further out.
But the institutions have held. A synagogue that reaches 75 years, in a county where only a handful do, is not a community in retreat. Merrick is older and quieter than it was at its peak in the 1980s, when it neared 30,000 people, yet it is still recognisably the place those Brooklyn families built: a town with a train, a school district to be proud of, and three houses of worship where a kid might still, like Ben and Jerry once did, be called up to the Torah.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Jews first settle in Merrick, New York?
A Jewish presence in Merrick dates at least to 1929, when the Merrick Jewish Centre opened as the area’s first synagogue. The community grew dramatically after the Second World War, as Jewish families moved out of Brooklyn and Queens to the new suburbs of Nassau County, including Merrick on the South Shore.
How many synagogues are there in Merrick?
Merrick is home to several congregations spanning the major movements of American Judaism. These include the Conservative Merrick Jewish Centre, the Reform Temple Beth Am, and the Modern Orthodox Congregation Ohav Sholom, along with Young Israel of Merrick, giving the Jews in Merrick a full range of religious options within a small area.
Are Ben and Jerry of Ben & Jerry’s really from Merrick?
Yes. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were both born in Brooklyn and raised in Merrick, where they met in a seventh-grade gym class in 1963. They attended Hebrew school together and had their bar mitzvahs at the local Reform synagogue before founding Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in Vermont in 1978.
Why did so many Jewish families move to Merrick?
After the Second World War, New York City’s Jewish families sought affordable houses, strong schools, and space outside the crowded boroughs. Merrick offered all three, plus a direct Long Island Rail Road commute into Manhattan, which made it an attractive destination for Jews in Merrick leaving Brooklyn and Queens.
Is there kosher food available in Merrick?
Yes. Bagel Boss on Merrick Road has offered kosher baked goods, smoked fish, and catering under rabbinical supervision since 1989, and several local supermarkets carry kosher sections with Israeli and American cold cuts, glatt kosher meat, and kosher dry goods.
How does Merrick compare to other Long Island Jewish communities?
Merrick is frequently named alongside the Five Towns, Great Neck, and West Hempstead when people describe Jewish life on Long Island. It tends to be more Reform and Conservative in character than the heavily Orthodox enclaves, reflecting the suburban, postwar roots of its Jewish community.
If your family’s story passed through Merrick, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the streets of Brooklyn and the towns of the old Pale of Settlement, to a synagogue on Fox Boulevard and a train into Manhattan, to wherever you are now.