On a Saturday morning along Murray Avenue, the sidewalk fills with people who are not in a hurry. Families in good coats walk to shul. A man carries a bakery box tied with string. Outside the kosher market, two old friends stop to argue gently about the weather, the way they have for forty years. This is the everyday rhythm of the Jews of Squirrel Hill, a Pittsburgh neighborhood that has kept the same Saturday cadence for the better part of a century.
Squirrel Hill is not a museum of Jewish life. It is the living thing itself, a place where the bookstore, the bagel counter, the day school and a dozen synagogues all sit within an easy walk of one another. To understand how this corner of the East End became one of the most enduring Jewish neighborhoods in America, you have to start with a hill, a streetcar, and a quiet migration that took thirty years.
Squirrel Hill: The Place
Squirrel Hill sits on a broad plateau in Pittsburgh’s East End, roughly four square miles of leafy streets named for the gray squirrels that once overran the woods here. Two commercial spines, Forbes Avenue and Murray Avenue, cross near the heart of the neighborhood and carry most of its daily life. Green space presses in on every side, with Schenley Park to the west, donated to the city in 1889, and Frick Park to the east, opened in 1927.
The housing tells the story of a streetcar suburb that grew up fast. Grand homes line Fifth Avenue, while block after block of solid brick rowhouses and twins fill in the middle, built for the families who arrived once the trolleys did.
How Squirrel Hill Became Jewish
Before the Jews
For most of the nineteenth century, Squirrel Hill was farmland and forest at the edge of a booming steel city. The Murdoch Farms section in the northwest worked as a nursery and dairy into the early 1900s, and much of the plateau belonged to the estate of Mary Elizabeth Croghan Schenley, the Pittsburgh heiress whose family donated Schenley Park to the city in 1889.
Everything changed in 1893, when electric trolleys began running along Forbes and Murray Avenues. The northern half of the neighborhood developed quickly after that, and a business district took shape around the streetcar lines. By the 1930s the old farmland had become an affluent city neighborhood, well served by transit and within an easy ride of downtown.
None of this was yet a Jewish place. The first Jewish Pittsburgh grew up several miles away, in a crowded immigrant quarter called the Hill District.
The Jews Arrive
Pittsburgh’s Jewish community took root in the Hill District in the 1870s, close to the rail station where new arrivals stepped off the train. Over the next two generations the Hill became a dense Jewish world, with something like twenty-five synagogues at its peak, Yiddish theater, hundreds of shops, and the settlement houses that helped immigrants find their feet. The Council of Jewish Women opened the Columbian School and Settlement there in 1895, and the six-story Irene Kaufmann Settlement House, funded by the Kaufmann department store family, was dedicated in 1911.
The move to Squirrel Hill began in the 1920s. Eastern European Jewish families started leaving the Hill District, along with Oakland and Homestead, for the new houses and clean air on the plateau. The pull was real estate and the streetcar; some of the push came from crowding and from the changing makeup of the old quarter. As the historian Eric Lidji of the Rauh Jewish Archives has put it, this was not a single exodus but a slow consolidation, families and congregations drifting toward one another over ten or fifteen years.
The numbers track the shift. In 1940, sixteen of Pittsburgh’s thirty-three synagogues still stood on the Hill. By 1957, only one remained, the rest closed or relocated to Squirrel Hill and the East End. The Jews of Squirrel Hill had gathered themselves into a single walkable neighborhood, and they have stayed there ever since.
Squirrel Hill at Its Peak
By the years after World War II, Squirrel Hill had become the unquestioned center of Jewish life in western Pennsylvania. Murray and Forbes filled with kosher butchers, delicatessens, bakeries, bookshops and Jewish restaurants, and the side streets filled with synagogues of every denomination, Orthodox, Conservative and Reform, often within a few blocks of one another.
What set the neighborhood apart was its staying power. Squirrel Hill has been roughly a third Jewish since the years around World War I, a stretch of about a century, and a 2017 community study by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center counted close to fifty thousand Jewish adults and children in the greater Pittsburgh region, up seventeen percent from 2002. Around forty percent of Squirrel Hill’s residents are Jewish, and roughly a quarter of the region’s Jewish households sit inside the neighborhood. A geographic Jewish hub of this size, still anchored within a major city’s limits, is unusual to the point of being unique in North America.
It was an ordinary, multi-generational kind of life, which is exactly what made it remarkable. One of its quiet residents was Fred Rogers, who lived on Northumberland Street in the 1960s while he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and built his children’s television work nearby. Mister Rogers’ neighborhood, it turns out, was a real one, and it was here.
The Change
For decades the story of the Jews of Squirrel Hill was a story of remarkable continuity. That continuity was pierced on the morning of October 27, 2018, when a gunman entered the Tree of Life building during Shabbat services and killed eleven worshippers from three congregations that shared the space. It was the deadliest antisemitic attack in the history of the United States.
The eleven were Joyce Fienberg, Richard Gottfried, Rose Mallinger, Jerry Rabinowitz, Cecil Rosenthal, David Rosenthal, Bernice Simon, Sylvan Simon, Daniel Stein, Melvin Wax and Irving Younger. They were neighbors and regulars, the people who showed up early to set out the prayer books. The grief reached far beyond the neighborhood, but it landed first on these few streets.
What followed was, in its way, a continuation of everything that came before. Neighbors of every faith filled the sidewalks, the phrase “Stronger Than Hate” appeared across the city, and the surviving congregations kept meeting, some of them hosted by Rodef Shalom and a nearby Episcopal church. The community chose to rebuild rather than leave.
The Landmarks of Jewish Squirrel Hill
Tree of Life, Wilkins and Shady Avenues. Founded in 1864 by members who broke from Rodef Shalom, Tree of Life became the first Conservative congregation in western Pennsylvania and moved to its Squirrel Hill home in the early 1950s. Its building is now the site of a major rebuilding led by the architect Daniel Libeskind, with a worship space planned for the High Holidays in 2027 and the full campus, including a memorial and museum, slated to follow.
Congregation Poale Zedeck, 6318 Phillips Avenue. Begun in 1881 by Hungarian Jewish immigrants in a rented downtown room, Poale Zedeck laid its Squirrel Hill cornerstone in 1928 and dedicated the building in September 1929, making it the neighborhood’s first Orthodox synagogue. Its handsome sanctuary still hosts Orthodox worship today.
Beth Shalom Congregation, 5915 Beacon Street. One of Squirrel Hill’s anchor Conservative congregations, Beth Shalom dedicated the first part of its building in 1923 and completed its main sanctuary by 1931, early proof that the Jewish community had truly arrived on the plateau. It remains an active congregation serving hundreds of families.
The Jewish Community Center, 5738 Forbes Avenue. The JCC traces its roots to the Irene Kaufmann Settlement that served immigrants on the Hill, and it followed the community to Squirrel Hill, opening its Forbes Avenue building in the late 1950s. Today the brick complex holds a fitness center, performance hall, classrooms and the American Jewish Museum.
Murray Avenue Kosher, 1916 Murray Avenue. A working kosher grocery and takeout counter on the neighborhood’s main street, it is the kind of everyday place that keeps a community observant and fed. On a Friday afternoon the line runs out the door as families gather what they need before Shabbat.
Pinsker’s, 2028 Murray Avenue. For generations Pinsker’s has been the neighborhood’s Judaica shop, the place for prayer books, candlesticks, mezuzahs and the small ritual objects of Jewish life. It is a quiet landmark, the sort of store that outfits a household for every holiday on the calendar.
Rodef Shalom, on Fifth Avenue at the neighborhood’s edge. Founded in 1856 as the oldest Jewish congregation in western Pennsylvania, Rodef Shalom built its grand Fifth Avenue temple in 1907 as Jewish Pittsburgh moved east. In 2018 it opened its doors to the displaced congregations from Tree of Life, an old institution sheltering its neighbors.
Where the Squirrel Hill Jews Came From
The earliest Jewish Pittsburghers were largely German Jews who arrived in the mid-1800s and founded congregations like Rodef Shalom. The great wave that filled the Hill District and then built Squirrel Hill came later, from the late nineteenth century onward, out of the Russian Pale of Settlement, Lithuania, Galicia and the lands of Austria-Hungary. They were leaving poverty, conscription and pogroms, and they carried with them the small-town religious world of Eastern Europe, which they rebuilt synagogue by synagogue on the plateau.
A further chapter arrived in the closing decades of the twentieth century, when Pittsburgh’s Jewish federation helped resettle hundreds of Soviet Jews through the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, many of whom made Squirrel Hill home. In recent years the neighborhood’s Orthodox community has grown as well. The result is a place layered with origins, a single neighborhood holding several waves of the Jewish journey at once. Readers tracing similar paths may find echoes in the stories of the Jews of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and of the other immigrant communities that built industrial Pittsburgh, from the Slovaks to the Carpatho-Rusyns.
Squirrel Hill Today
Squirrel Hill remains what it has long been, a stable, walkable, openly Jewish neighborhood in the body of a major American city. The synagogues still ring the bells of the Jewish week, the kosher shops on Murray still draw their Friday crowds, and the day schools still fill with children whose grandparents walked these same blocks. The Brandeis study confirmed what residents already knew, that this community is not shrinking but holding and even growing.
The rebuilding of the Tree of Life site, rising slowly behind construction fencing, is the neighborhood’s most visible work in progress. It is meant to hold a sanctuary, a memorial and a place of learning, and its very existence is a statement that the community intends to stay where it has always been. The choice to build on the same ground rather than move elsewhere says a great deal about how Squirrel Hill understands itself.
Among the immigrant neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, from Italian Bloomfield to the old Slavic mill towns, Squirrel Hill stands out for one simple thing, that it never dispersed. A century after the first families came up from the Hill, the children of Squirrel Hill are still walking to shul on Saturday morning, and they intend to keep walking.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Jews settle in Squirrel Hill?
The Jews of Squirrel Hill moved up from Pittsburgh’s older immigrant quarter, the Hill District, beginning in the 1920s. They were drawn by new brick housing, cleaner air and the electric streetcars that ran along Forbes and Murray Avenues, and by the 1950s the migration had made Squirrel Hill the center of Jewish Pittsburgh.
Is Squirrel Hill still a Jewish neighborhood today?
Yes. Around forty percent of Squirrel Hill’s residents are Jewish, a share that has held roughly steady for about a century, and a 2017 Brandeis University study found the regional Jewish community growing rather than shrinking. Active synagogues, kosher groceries and Jewish day schools still anchor daily life.
What are the famous Jewish landmarks in Squirrel Hill?
The best known is the Tree of Life congregation, founded in 1864, whose building is now being rebuilt. Other landmarks include the Orthodox Congregation Poale Zedeck on Phillips Avenue, Beth Shalom on Beacon Street, the Jewish Community Center on Forbes Avenue, and the kosher shops along Murray Avenue.
Where did the Squirrel Hill Jews come from?
Early German Jews arrived in the mid-1800s, but most families trace back to the great Eastern European migration from the Russian Pale of Settlement, Lithuania, Galicia and Austria-Hungary in the decades around 1900. Later arrivals included Soviet Jews resettled in Pittsburgh from the 1970s through the early 1990s.
When did Jews first arrive in Squirrel Hill?
Jewish families began moving to Squirrel Hill in large numbers in the 1920s, coming from the Hill District, Oakland and Homestead. The neighborhood had become the established heart of the Jews of Squirrel Hill and of Jewish Pittsburgh by the years just after World War II.
Every family that walked up the hill from the old quarter carried a name, a village, and a story worth keeping. Yours is worth keeping too.