Drive west out of Detroit on a Friday afternoon, past Oak Park and Southfield and into the lake-stitched township of West Bloomfield, and you arrive at the present-day heart of Michigan Jewish life. The Jews in West Bloomfield did not appear here by accident. They followed a northwest path out of the city that took the better part of a century, and when it ended it ended among the trees and the water of Oakland County.
The Place
West Bloomfield Township sits in southern Oakland County, about twenty miles northwest of downtown Detroit. It was established in 1833 and covers roughly 31 square miles, nearly an eighth of it water. Locals call it the lake township: Cass Lake, the largest in the county, plus Pine Lake, Orchard Lake and dozens of smaller bodies dot the map.
By the 2020 census the township held 65,888 residents, and it is comfortably affluent, with median household incomes that have long run well above the Michigan average. It is also, by a wide margin, home to the largest Jewish population in the state.
It is an unhurried, green sort of place. The water shapes everything: roads bend around inlets, houses back onto coves, and the whole township carries the feel of a resort that decided to become a suburb. That setting, so different from the dense city streets the community came from, is part of the point of the story. For a fuller picture of the township itself, the local history runs back to its 1833 founding.
How It Became Jewish
To understand why so many Jewish families live in West Bloomfield today, you have to trace a migration that moved steadily northwest across metropolitan Detroit for more than a hundred years.
From Hastings Street outward
Detroit’s Jewish community is old. Temple Beth El, the oldest Jewish congregation in Michigan, was founded in the city in 1850. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jewish life concentrated first around lower and upper Hastings Street, then pushed west toward Oakland Avenue between roughly 1910 and 1940.
This was the classic pattern of a community on the move: each generation settling a little further from the old core, each leaving behind the synagogues and shops it had built. The route was not random. It tracked the same northwest line for decade after decade, as if the whole community were leaning in one direction.
The Dexter-Davison years
By the 1940s the centre of gravity had shifted again, to the Twelfth Street, Linwood and Dexter neighbourhoods on Detroit’s northwest side. The city’s Jewish population swelled to around 85,000, and the Dexter-Davison area became the beating heart of it.
A Dexter-Davison community centre opened in temporary quarters in 1950 and in its permanent building on 15 January 1952. For a brief, dense moment, this stretch of northwest Detroit held synagogues, delis, bakeries and Hebrew schools within walking distance of one another.
People who grew up there still describe it the way New Yorkers describe a lost block of the Lower East Side: a whole world compressed into a few streets, gone within a generation. The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, founded in 1899 and still the community’s central institution, grew up alongside these neighbourhoods and would later follow the families north. Its own long record of the community reads as a map of that movement.
The move to the suburbs
After the Second World War the trail kept moving. Oak Park came first, then Southfield, where Jewish families could buy the brick ranch houses set among trees and open lots that the city could no longer offer. West Bloomfield and neighbouring Farmington Hills followed quickly behind.
The institutions came with the people. The Jewish Community Center on West Maple Road at Drake Road in West Bloomfield was dedicated in 1975 to serve the fast-growing population spreading across the township and into Farmington Hills.
The order mattered. First a few families bought houses on the lakes, then a synagogue announced it was building, then a kosher butcher opened on Orchard Lake Road, and the move became self-reinforcing. By the time the JCC opened its doors, West Bloomfield was no longer a frontier for the community. It was becoming the destination.
The congregations relocate
The synagogues made the same journey. Temple Israel was organised in 1941, in roughly sixty days just before the war, under Rabbi Leon Fram, drawing about 600 founding members. For nearly a decade it met in the auditorium of the Detroit Institute of Arts before opening its first sanctuary in Detroit’s Palmer Park in 1950.
As the community emptied out of the city, the congregation followed. Its current sanctuary on Walnut Lake Road in West Bloomfield was built in 1980 and expanded in 1989. Today Temple Israel counts some 3,500 families, one of the largest Reform congregations in the United States. The arc from Hastings Street to Walnut Lake Road was complete.
Other communities trace similar lines. The Jewish path through Detroit echoes the one in Squirrel Hill in Pittsburgh, another industrial Midwestern city whose Jewish families moved outward together while keeping their institutions tightly bound.
The Landmarks
Temple Israel, 5725 Walnut Lake Road. Built in 1980 and expanded in 1989, this is the spiritual anchor of Reform Judaism in metro Detroit and among the largest Jewish congregations in the country. In 1995 it became the first Reform congregation in America to open a mikveh.
D. Dan and Betty Kahn Jewish Community Center, 6600 West Maple Road. The hub of secular Jewish life in the township, part of the Eugene and Marcia Applebaum Jewish Community Campus. The JCC of Metropolitan Detroit traces its founding to 1926, and the West Bloomfield building has been the centre of family programming for decades.
The Zekelman Holocaust Center, 28123 Orchard Lake Road, Farmington Hills. Just over the township line, this 55,000-square-foot museum and archive stands on the site of the old Orchard Theatre. Ground was first broken for a Holocaust memorial on the Jewish Community Campus at Maple and Drake in West Bloomfield in December 1981 before the centre found its permanent Orchard Lake Road home.
The Jean and Samuel Frankel Jewish Academy, 6600 West Maple Road. Founded in 2000 on the JCC campus, Frankel was the first multi-denominational Jewish high school in Michigan, educating students from across the religious spectrum in one building.
Westside Kosher Butcher and Deli, 6221 Orchard Lake Road. A fixture of the township’s kosher corridor for more than sixty years, the butcher counter and deli have changed hands and names but stayed put on Orchard Lake Road, the spine of Jewish commerce in West Bloomfield.
Yossi’s Israeli Cuisine, 7325 Orchard Lake Road. One of the area’s best-loved kosher kitchens, serving falafel, shawarma, kebabs and the full table of Israeli salads to a steady stream of regulars.
Congregation B’nai Moshe, 6800 Drake Road. A Conservative congregation rooted in the township, one of several synagogues, including Beth Ahm on West Maple Road, that cluster within a few minutes’ drive of the community campus.
Where They Came From
The Jews of West Bloomfield are, overwhelmingly, the descendants of Detroit. Their grandparents and great-grandparents arrived in the city itself, many from Eastern Europe in the great wave of migration around the turn of the twentieth century, settling first near Hastings Street and the factories that drew the whole region.
From there the story is internal migration rather than transatlantic. The community walked itself northwest, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, until the lakes of Oakland County. It is a quieter version of the suburban journey that produced Jewish Skokie outside Chicago and Scarsdale north of New York, postwar communities built by families leaving the old urban core for room and a lawn.
West Bloomfield Today
Today West Bloomfield, together with Bloomfield Hills, Farmington Hills and Southfield, forms the core of metro Detroit Jewish life. A 2018 study commissioned by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit counted about 71,750 Jewish people in the region, the great majority of them clustered in these few Oakland County communities.
Orchard Lake Road still functions as the high street of that world, lined with kosher markets, delis and restaurants, the JCC and the synagogues all within reach of one another. On a given week the township’s calendar runs from Hebrew school pickups to a Shabbat dinner to a film at the community centre.
It is, in the long view, a community that arrived rather than left. Detroit’s Jews spent a century moving outward, and in West Bloomfield, among the trees and the water, the movement finally settled. Communities like Boca Raton in Florida, where many Midwestern Jewish families later retired, owe part of their character to roots planted in places exactly like this. You can read about the Jews of Boca Raton and trace the same families south.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many Jews live in West Bloomfield, Michigan?
The Jews in West Bloomfield are the end point of a century-long migration that moved northwest out of Detroit, from Hastings Street to the Dexter-Davison neighbourhood and then into the Oakland County suburbs after the Second World War. West Bloomfield offered space, good schools and proximity to existing Jewish institutions, and the community moved its synagogues and centres there with it.
How large is the Jewish community in metro Detroit?
A 2018 study by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit counted roughly 71,750 Jewish people in the region. West Bloomfield, Bloomfield Hills, Farmington Hills and Southfield together hold the large majority of that population, with West Bloomfield home to the largest Jewish community in Michigan.
What are the main synagogues in West Bloomfield?
Temple Israel on Walnut Lake Road is among the largest Reform congregations in the United States. Congregation B’nai Moshe on Drake Road and Congregation Beth Ahm on West Maple Road serve the township as well, with the historic Adat Shalom Synagogue just over the line on Middlebelt Road in Farmington Hills.
Where can you find kosher food in West Bloomfield?
Orchard Lake Road is the centre of kosher commerce for the Jews in West Bloomfield. Westside Kosher Butcher and Deli at 6221 Orchard Lake Road and Yossi’s Israeli Cuisine at 7325 Orchard Lake Road are long-standing favourites, alongside kosher markets and bakeries clustered along the same stretch.
What is the Zekelman Holocaust Center?
The Zekelman Holocaust Center at 28123 Orchard Lake Road in neighbouring Farmington Hills is a 55,000-square-foot museum and archive. Its origins lie in West Bloomfield, where ground was first broken for a Holocaust memorial on the Jewish Community Campus in December 1981 before the museum moved to its permanent Orchard Lake Road home.
Is West Bloomfield a good place for Jewish families?
West Bloomfield combines highly regarded public schools, the Frankel Jewish Academy, the D. Dan and Betty Kahn Jewish Community Center and a dense cluster of synagogues and kosher businesses within a few miles. That concentration of institutions is precisely why it has become the heart of Jewish family life in Michigan.
If your family’s story passed through West Bloomfield, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the tenements of Detroit’s Hastings Street to a brick house among the lakes of Oakland County, to wherever you are now.