Drive the brick-walled lanes of New Albany on a Saturday morning and the town reads like a Georgian dream of Ohio: white sash windows, columned porticos, hedgerows clipped to the inch. Yet behind the symmetry sits one of the most consequential Jewish stories in the American Midwest. The Jews in New Albany did not arrive by accident. They followed institutions, money, and one famously private retail magnate eastward, and in three short decades turned a 19th-century farming village into a centre of Jewish life for the entire Columbus region.
The Place
New Albany sits about 20 minutes northeast of downtown Columbus, in Plain Township, Franklin County. It was founded in 1837 by Nobel Landon and William Yantis, who split the land into 50-by-100-foot lots, and incorporated in 1856 with roughly 50 residents.
For 150 years it stayed that small. Then, in the 1980s, Columbus native Leslie Wexner, the retail billionaire behind The Limited, Victoria’s Secret, and Bath & Body Works, began quietly buying farmland here. The town he built is now the wealthiest suburb in Ohio, with a median household income of roughly $238,000 by 2024 and a population around 11,000.
The look is deliberate. Wexner’s New Albany Company chose Georgian architecture for its timeless feel, drawing on Williamsburg, the James River plantations, and the villages of the English Cotswolds. Locals once nicknamed the project “Wexley,” a blend of Wexner and Bexley, the older Columbus suburb that had long been the heart of Jewish life.
How It Became Jewish
To understand the Jews in New Albany you have to start in Bexley, and you have to start with one man.
The Bexley century
Columbus has had an organised Jewish community since the 19th century. After the Second World War, families moved east from the central city into Bexley, Berwick, and Eastmoor, and Bexley in particular became the gravitational centre of Jewish Columbus. Its synagogues, the Jewish Community Center on College Avenue, and its kosher tables anchored generations, much as Beachwood did on the other side of the state for Cleveland’s Jews. (For more on the history of the Jews in greater Columbus, the record runs deep.)
The story of the Jews in New Albany is, in large part, the story of what happened when Bexley filled up. As one resident put it to the Columbus Jewish News, Bexley “is contained, and it really can’t get any bigger,” while New Albany “has the opportunity and the space to get bigger.” The eastward drift that had carried Jewish families from downtown to Bexley simply kept going. It is the same suburban logic that drew Jewish families to Creve Coeur outside St. Louis and to so many other planned, prosperous edges of Midwestern cities.
Wexner builds a town
Leslie Wexner was the catalyst. Born in Dayton and raised in Columbus, he founded The Limited in 1963 and built one of the great American retail empires from central Ohio. In the 1980s and 1990s he began assembling thousands of acres around the old village of New Albany, working with his friend, the developer Jack Kessler, through the New Albany Company.
Wexner did not simply build houses. He built a country club with a Jack Nicklaus golf course, a private school feeder system, a corporate business park, and a town centre, all stitched together with white fencing and leisure trails. He also built his own vast estate here. New Albany became, in effect, a community designed around the people Wexner knew: corporate executives, professionals, philanthropists, and friends, a number of them Jewish.
The Wexner Foundation
Wealth alone does not make a Jewish community. Institutions do. In 1983 Wexner established the Wexner Foundation, headquartered in New Albany, with the explicit mission of developing Jewish professional and volunteer leaders in North America and public leaders in Israel.
Its flagship, the Wexner Heritage Program, gives young Jewish volunteer leaders a two-year course of intensive study, with evening seminars and summer institutes in the United States and Israel. More than 2,300 leaders from some 35 cities have passed through it. From an office in a planned Ohio suburb, the foundation has shaped the leadership of synagogues, federations, and Jewish organisations across the continent.
That a town of 11,000 should host one of the most influential Jewish leadership institutions in America is, in itself, the headline of the New Albany story.
The institutions arrive
Through the 1990s and 2000s the bricks of community life followed the families. Temple Beth Shalom, the Reform congregation founded in 1977, settled into New Albany at 5089 Johnstown Road, with Rabbi Howard Apothaker, who has served the congregation since 1980. Rabbi Lenette Goldman joined as associate rabbi and director of education in 2017.
Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann and his wife Esther began their Chabad work in the New Albany area in 1998, eventually building the Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center, a multimillion-dollar campus with a 150-seat synagogue, a social hall, Hebrew school classrooms, and LifeTown, an indoor mock city where children with disabilities practise everyday skills. The Columbus Jewish Day School opened in 1998 and now sits at 150 East Dublin-Granville Road, the same address that houses the New Albany branch of the Jewish Community Center’s early childhood programme.
Synagogue, school, Chabad, and JCC: within a generation, New Albany had assembled the full infrastructure of Jewish life that Bexley had taken a century to build.
The Landmarks
The Wexner Foundation, New Albany. The quiet engine of the whole story. Founded in 1983 and headquartered here, the foundation runs the Wexner Heritage Program and other fellowships that have trained more than 2,300 Jewish leaders across North America. It is arguably New Albany’s most significant export, and it is invisible from the road.
Temple Beth Shalom, 5089 Johnstown Road. The Reform congregation, founded in 1977, that anchors organised Jewish worship in New Albany. Its motto, “Joyful, Personal, Welcoming,” is painted on the sign out front, and Rabbi Howard Apothaker has shepherded the community since 1980, a tenure measured in generations rather than years.
Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center, New Albany. The Chabad campus built by Rabbi Areyah and Esther Kaltmann, who began their work in the area in 1998. Beyond its 150-seat synagogue and social hall, it houses LifeTown, a realistic indoor city where children with disabilities rehearse the ordinary tasks of life. It is one of the most distinctive Jewish institutions in central Ohio.
Columbus Jewish Day School, 150 East Dublin-Granville Road. A small, intensive K-5 school founded in 1998, with a student-teacher ratio of about five to one. Its presence in New Albany was an early signal that young Jewish families were not just visiting the suburb, they were raising children here.
New Albany Market Square. The Georgian town centre at the heart of the suburb, home to local businesses and the New Albany branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. It is the public living room of a community otherwise spread across leisure trails and gated lanes, and the place where the town’s careful design is most visible.
New Albany Country Club. The private club at the town’s southwest edge, with a golf course designed by Jack Nicklaus. More than recreation, it was a social spine of Wexner’s planned community, the kind of institution around which an affluent professional class, Jewish and otherwise, organised its weekends.
Jeanne B. McCoy Community Center for the Arts. A 35,000-square-foot performing arts venue with a roughly 800-seat auditorium, named for a civic benefactor. It hosts the cultural programming that a wealthy, educated town expects, and it sits within walking distance of the school campuses and town centre.
Where They Came From
The Jews of New Albany are, overwhelmingly, an internal migration rather than an immigrant one. Their roots trace through Bexley, Berwick, and Eastmoor, the postwar Jewish neighbourhoods of east Columbus, and before that through the central city where Columbus Jewry first organised in the 1800s.
Reach back further and the family stories run, as so many Ashkenazi American stories do, to Central and Eastern Europe: German Jewish merchants who came in the 19th century, and the larger wave from the Russian Empire, Poland, Lithuania, and the Pale of Settlement who arrived between the 1880s and the 1920s. Columbus’s older congregations carry those origins in their names and their liturgical styles.
What pulled this established community to New Albany was not a foreign port but a domestic opportunity: space, schools rated among the best in Ohio, corporate jobs, and a deliberately built town with Jewish institutions already in place. The same combination of top schools and corporate growth has reshaped nearby suburbs too, drawing the Indians to Dublin, Ohio on the metro’s northwest edge. It is a migration of success, one generation building outward from the comfort of the last.
New Albany Today
Today New Albany and neighbouring Gahanna are routinely described as standing out as centres of Jewish life in greater Columbus, alongside the older anchor of Bexley. The community here is affluent, professional, and institutionally complete: a Reform temple, a Chabad campus, a day school, and a JCC presence, all within a few brick-lined miles.
It is also a community shaped by an unusual benefactor. Leslie Wexner’s name is on the foundation, on the leadership programmes, and indelibly on the town itself. His later years brought public controversy through his past association with Jeffrey Epstein, and some Jewish leaders connected to his foundation have grappled openly with that legacy. New Albany’s Jewish story is inseparable from his fortune, for better and for more complicated.
What remains, on the ground, is quieter and more durable than any one man. It is a synagogue that has kept the same rabbi for more than forty years, a Chabad centre teaching disabled children to cross a make-believe street, a small school with five children to a teacher, and families who chose this carefully drawn town because it had room, and welcome, to grow into. For the related Columbus-area story, see our piece on the Jews in Bexley, Ohio, the older heart from which much of New Albany’s community drifted east.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a Jewish community in New Albany, Ohio?
Yes. The Jews in New Albany form one of the most institutionally complete Jewish communities in greater Columbus. The suburb is home to Temple Beth Shalom, the Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center, the Columbus Jewish Day School, a JCC early childhood programme, and the headquarters of the Wexner Foundation.
What synagogues serve New Albany?
Temple Beth Shalom, a Reform congregation founded in 1977, is located at 5089 Johnstown Road and is led by Rabbi Howard Apothaker. The Lori Schottenstein Chabad Center, directed by Rabbi Areyah Kaltmann, offers Orthodox-affiliated worship with a 150-seat synagogue, classes, and the LifeTown programme.
Why did Jewish families move to New Albany?
The Jews in New Albany largely migrated east from Bexley and other established Columbus neighbourhoods, which had little room left to grow. New Albany offered space, top-rated schools, corporate jobs, and Jewish institutions that arrived in the 1990s and 2000s, making it an attractive next step for an already-rooted community.
What is the connection between Leslie Wexner and New Albany?
Leslie Wexner, the retail billionaire behind The Limited and Victoria’s Secret, effectively built modern New Albany. Through the New Albany Company he developed the Georgian-style planned town, and in 1983 he founded the New Albany-headquartered Wexner Foundation, which trains Jewish leaders across North America.
Is there a Jewish school in New Albany?
Yes. The Columbus Jewish Day School, founded in 1998, operates at 150 East Dublin-Granville Road, serving young students with a small student-teacher ratio. Chabad’s Hebrew school and the New Albany branch of the JCC’s early childhood programme also serve Jewish families locally.
How wealthy is New Albany, Ohio?
Very. New Albany is the wealthiest suburb in Ohio, with a median household income of roughly $238,000 by 2024 and more than 75% of adults holding college degrees. This affluence underwrites the professional, philanthropic character of the Jewish community that has settled there.
If your family’s story passed through New Albany, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the shtetls of Eastern Europe to the Jewish streets of Bexley, to the brick lanes of New Albany, to wherever you are now.