On a Friday evening in Port Washington, you can stand on Shore Road and watch the light go gold over Manhasset Bay while, a few streets back, three congregations turn toward the same Sabbath. The Jews in Port Washington did not arrive with the Gold Coast millionaires who built their mansions out on the Sands Point peninsula. They came later, quietly, by commuter train, and built something the old estates never had: a community of neighbours who stayed.
The Place
Port Washington sits on the Cow Neck Peninsula in the Town of North Hempstead, a hamlet of roughly 18,000 people on Nassau County’s North Shore. It looks west across Manhasset Bay toward Manhattan, twenty-odd miles and a thirty-five minute train ride away.
In the 1870s it was a sand-mining town, with the largest sandbank east of the Mississippi and barges that carried its grit into the concrete of a rising New York City. Today the median household income runs north of $170,000, the harbour is full of sailboats, and the schools are among the best on Long Island.
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of comfortable commuter town where mid-century Jewish families went looking for grass, good schools, and a synagogue within walking distance.
How It Became Jewish
The Jewish story in Port Washington is a postwar story. The grand Gold Coast era that F. Scott Fitzgerald turned into The Great Gatsby, with Sands Point standing in for the WASP old guard of East Egg, was largely closed to Jews. The wealthy Jewish families of the 1920s gathered instead around Kings Point and Great Neck, Fitzgerald’s louder, newer West Egg.
Port Washington’s Jewish community grew on different ground: not inherited estates but new split-levels, professional incomes, and the Long Island Rail Road.
1933: The First Congregation
The first synagogue arrived in the teeth of the Depression. In 1933 a small group of families founded Temple Beth Israel, affiliating with the Conservative movement. It remains the oldest synagogue in Port Washington.
The early congregation rented space at the corner of Shore Road and Main Street, then in 1938 bought its own building at 138 Bayview Avenue. It was a modest start, a few dozen families holding services in a town still better known for its sand barges than its sanctuaries.
1952: The Suburban Wave
The real growth came after the war, when the great northward migration out of Brooklyn and the Bronx reached the North Shore. In 1952, twenty-five families came together to start a second congregation, The Community Synagogue, also known as Temple Beth Am, the House of the People.
Their first service was held on 9 February 1952 in an American Legion hall, with a borrowed Torah, a borrowed ark, and a part-time rabbi named Jay Kaufman. The next year they appointed their first full-time rabbi, Dr. Eugene Borowitz, who would go on to become one of the most important theologians of American Reform Judaism, teaching for decades at Hebrew Union College.
1956: The Court Battle for The Chimneys
What happened next is the most telling chapter in the community’s history. In 1956 The Community Synagogue moved to claim a piece of the very Gold Coast that had once shut Jews out. The congregation bought The Chimneys, a 24.5-acre 1920s estate on the Sands Point peninsula, and converted it into a house of worship.
The purchase ended in a landmark court battle before the congregation could take possession. They won. A Reform synagogue planted itself on the manicured lawns of East Egg, and the architect Stanley Katz later expanded the old mansion with hexagonal additions designed to honour its lines. The building was dedicated on 1 June 1957.
The 1960s: Building in Stone and Glass
By the early 1960s both congregations were growing fast enough to build for permanence. Temple Beth Israel commissioned the celebrated Modernist architect Percival Goodman, a prolific designer of postwar American synagogues, to design a new home on Temple Drive. It was completed in 1960 and dedicated in 1962.
The Community Synagogue, meanwhile, had grown to some 200 families by the late 1950s. It was so full that around sixty families broke away to found Temple Judea in neighbouring Manhasset, a sign of just how quickly Jewish Port Washington was filling out.
The 1990s: A New Orthodox Presence
For decades Port Washington’s Jewish life was Conservative and Reform. That changed in 1991, when Chabad of Port Washington was founded under the guidance of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, led by Rabbi Shalom Moshe Paltiel. Operating from Shore Road, it brought a visible Hasidic and outreach presence to a town that had not had one, and it has grown steadily ever since.
Alongside it, the community broadened to include the Reconstructionist movement and progressive Reform options, so that by the turn of the century a single small hamlet held congregations spanning nearly every branch of American Jewish life.
The Landmarks
Temple Beth Israel, Temple Drive. The oldest synagogue in Port Washington, founded in 1933 and Conservative in affiliation. Its Modernist sanctuary, designed by Percival Goodman and dedicated in 1962, is a quiet landmark of postwar synagogue architecture, the work of an architect who shaped dozens of American congregations.
The Community Synagogue, 160 Middle Neck Road, Sands Point. Founded in 1952, this Reform congregation famously bought The Chimneys, a 1920s Gold Coast estate, in 1956 after a court fight, and worships there still. It has grown from twenty-five founding families to roughly 825 member households.
Chabad of Port Washington, 80 Shore Road. Founded in 1991 and led by Rabbi Shalom Moshe Paltiel, Chabad brought a Hasidic and outreach presence to the North Shore community. It anchors the more traditional end of Jewish life in the hamlet.
Port Jewish Center. A progressive Reform congregation serving Port Washington, part of the dense weave of synagogues that lets a town of 18,000 support worship across the full denominational spectrum.
The Sands Point Preserve, 127 Middle Neck Road. The 216-acre former estate land that includes Hempstead House and Falaise, the surviving heart of the Gold Coast. It is the world the early Jewish families looked across at, and on whose edge The Community Synagogue eventually built.
Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School, 101 Campus Drive. Named for the superintendent who led the district from 1920 to 1953, Schreiber ranks among the top five percent of New York high schools. Its reputation is one of the main reasons Jewish professional families chose Port Washington over comparable towns, and why they stayed to raise children here.
Manhasset Bay and Shore Road. The waterfront that gives the town its name and its light. Shore Road runs the length of the harbour and past Chabad, a working main artery of a community that has always lived with one eye on the water and one on the city across it.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Port Washington came overwhelmingly from New York City: second and third generation families whose grandparents had landed in the tenements of the Lower East Side, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, the children of Eastern European immigrants from the great pre-1924 waves out of Russia, Poland, and Galicia.
The move to Port Washington was the classic American Jewish suburban arc. From the crowded immigrant neighbourhoods of the city, the postwar generation followed the commuter rail outward to the North Shore, chasing space, schools, and respectability, the same path that filled nearby Roslyn, Great Neck, and the towns of central Nassau.
The community that resulted was, and remains, largely Ashkenazi, professional, and firmly in the Conservative and Reform mainstream of American Judaism, with the later additions of Chabad and Reconstructionist congregations broadening the picture.
For the families who made the same journey to neighbouring towns, the story of the Jews in Great Neck and the Jews in Roslyn rhymes closely with Port Washington’s own.
Port Washington Today
Today Port Washington holds one of the more remarkable concentrations of Jewish institutional life on Long Island for its size. A hamlet of around 18,000 people supports Temple Beth Israel, The Community Synagogue, Chabad, the Port Jewish Center, a Reconstructionist congregation, and more, spanning Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, and Hasidic Judaism within a few square miles.
It is a community defined less by visible signs, there is no kosher restaurant row here as in some towns, than by membership and continuity. The synagogues are large and active, the Hebrew schools full, and the bar and bat mitzvahs that move through Schreiber’s halls each year are woven into the rhythm of the whole town.
Port Washington remains, importantly, distinct from its other great heritage community. The town has long been home to one of the largest Greek populations in New York, a story told in the Greeks in Port Washington, and the two communities have grown up side by side along the same harbour. The Jewish community is its own thread: less a single neighbourhood than a network of congregations, schools, and families who chose this corner of the North Shore and made it home.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Jews first settle in Port Washington?
The organised Jewish community in Port Washington dates to 1933, when a small group of families founded Temple Beth Israel during the Depression. The Jews in Port Washington grew most rapidly after World War II, as families moved out from New York City along the Long Island Rail Road.
What are the main synagogues in Port Washington?
The oldest is Temple Beth Israel (Conservative, 1933). The Community Synagogue (Reform, 1952) worships in a converted Gold Coast estate in Sands Point, Chabad of Port Washington (1991) serves the more traditional community, and the Port Jewish Center is a progressive Reform congregation.
Is the Jewish community in Port Washington the same as the Greek community?
No. Port Washington is home to two large heritage communities that grew up side by side: one of New York’s largest Greek populations and a substantial Jewish community. They share the same harbour and schools but have distinct institutions and histories.
Why did Jewish families move to Port Washington?
The Jews in Port Washington were drawn by the same things that drew other professional families: excellent public schools, especially Paul D. Schreiber Senior High School, a short commute to Manhattan, and an affluent, leafy setting on the North Shore of Nassau County.
What is The Chimneys in Sands Point?
The Chimneys is a 24.5-acre 1920s estate that The Community Synagogue purchased in 1956, after a landmark court battle, and converted into a house of worship. It placed a Reform synagogue on the Gold Coast peninsula that had once excluded Jewish residents.
How large is the Jewish community in Port Washington today?
Port Washington has roughly 18,000 residents and supports several thriving congregations; The Community Synagogue alone counts around 825 member households. The wider Roslyn and Port Washington area is recognised as a major centre of Conservative and Reform Jewish life on Long Island.
If your family’s story passed through Port Washington, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the tenements of Brooklyn and the Bronx, to a split-level on the North Shore and a synagogue overlooking Manhasset Bay, to wherever you are now.