On a Friday evening in Westport, the cars turn off the Post Road and up Coleytown Road, past the stone wall and the long low sweep of Temple Israel, and the parking lot fills the way it has since 1959. The Jews in Westport, Connecticut, did not arrive with pushcarts or steamer trunks. They came up the New Haven Line in good suits, from Manhattan apartments and Madison Avenue offices, looking for a town with a beach, a good school, and room for their children to grow.
The Place
Westport sits on Long Island Sound at the mouth of the Saugatuck River, in the heart of Fairfield County’s Gold Coast. It was settled around 1648, incorporated in 1835, and grew rich first on shipping and onions, then on something less tangible: proximity to New York, fifty miles down the line.
By the 1920s it had become an artists’ and writers’ colony, a bohemian summer haven that drew the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and home to the Famous Artists School whose illustrators shaped the look of mid-century American advertising. That creative streak never left. Today Westport is one of the wealthiest towns in Connecticut, with a population near 28,600 and a median household income that tops a quarter of a million dollars, according to census figures for the town.
It is a town of leafy lanes and a tidy downtown, of the Westport Country Playhouse and Compo Beach, where the line between New York money and New England restraint is drawn very carefully indeed.
How It Became Jewish
For most of American history, Jews lived in cities. In Fairfield County before the Second World War, the Jewish communities were anchored in Stamford, Norwalk, and Bridgeport, the working manufacturing towns where immigrants and their children had built shuls and shops. The smaller suburbs to the north and east, Westport among them, were largely closed to them.
The Postwar Arrival
What changed was the war, and what came after it. Returning veterans and a generation of younger families wanted lawns and good schools, and the suburbs of Fairfield County opened, slowly and unevenly, to Jewish buyers.
Westport had a particular draw. The advertising men, the illustrators, the magazine editors and television writers who worked in Manhattan found in Westport a town that already prized creative people. A family could keep a foot on Madison Avenue and a house near the Sound, and the children could ride bikes to the beach.
Temple Israel, 1948
By 1948 enough Jewish families had settled in the area to want a congregation of their own. Community leaders, among them the attorney Leo Nevas, founded Temple Israel, one of the first Reform congregations in the region.
For its first decade the congregation had no building. An early plot of land near what is now Whole Foods proved unsuitable, and services were held wherever space could be found. In 1959 the cornerstone was finally laid on Coleytown Road, and the synagogue that still stands there was dedicated that May.
A Pulpit in the Civil Rights Era
Under Rabbi Byron T. Rubenstein, who led Temple Israel from 1959 to 1982, the synagogue became something more than a suburban house of worship. Rubenstein turned the pulpit toward the great moral argument of the decade, and the speakers he drew to Coleytown Road reflected it: James Baldwin, the anthropologist Margaret Mead, and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., who preached there in 1964.
That same year Rubenstein travelled to St. Augustine, Florida, and was arrested alongside sixteen other rabbis in what remains the single largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history. For a congregation barely five years into its new building, it was a statement of what kind of Jewish community Westport intended to be: outward-looking, engaged, unafraid to put its convictions on the public record in a town not always comfortable with that.
Growth and Branching
For decades Temple Israel was the only synagogue in town, and as the Jewish population grew it grew with it, expanding the sanctuary and the religious school. By the late twentieth century the congregation counted hundreds of member families.
Then the community began to branch. In 1987 a group led by Lewis and Isabel Sperber founded The Conservative Synagogue, holding its first service on the sixth of March that year in office space above a Baskin-Robbins on Bay Street, the room provided by the same Leo Nevas who had helped start Temple Israel. As a gesture of kinship, Temple Israel lent its new neighbour a Torah scroll that travelled between the two congregations for years.
The Modern Orthodox Beit Chaverim and Chabad Lubavitch of Westport followed, until a town that had once had no synagogue at all supported four distinct Jewish communities, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, and Hasidic outreach, within a few miles of one another.
The Landmarks
Temple Israel, 14 Coleytown Road. Founded in 1948 and dedicated in 1959, this Reform congregation is the mother synagogue of Jewish Westport. Its sanctuary, expanded over the decades, still anchors the community that Leo Nevas and his neighbours imagined, and the memory of King’s 1964 sermon lingers in its history.
The Conservative Synagogue, 30 Hillspoint Road. Born in 1987 above a Bay Street ice-cream parlour, TCS moved to its Hillspoint Road home in the mid-1990s. It is the town’s Conservative congregation, and its founding story, with the borrowed Torah scroll, is a small parable of how Westport’s Jews grew by sharing rather than splitting bitterly.
Beit Chaverim Synagogue, 85 Post Road West. Westport and Norwalk’s Modern Orthodox congregation, Beit Chaverim brings traditional observance and daily minyan to a community otherwise dominated by liberal Judaism, serving families who want Shabbat within walking distance and a rigorous learning culture.
Chabad Lubavitch of Westport, 79 Newtown Turnpike. The local outpost of the Hasidic outreach movement, Chabad runs holiday programmes, Hebrew school, and a public menorah lighting that has become a downtown fixture each December, extending Jewish life beyond the synagogue membership rolls.
Gold’s Delicatessen, 421 Post Road East. A Westport fixture for more than two decades, Gold’s is the town’s Jewish deli, the place for pastrami, matzo ball soup, and smoked whitefish. For a New York transplant missing the city, a sandwich at Gold’s is a small homecoming.
Westport Country Playhouse. Opened in 1931 and long a launch pad for Broadway, the Playhouse is the heart of the town’s creative life and a magnet for the writers, actors, and producers, many of them Jewish, who have made Westport home since the mid-century.
Staples High School. The town’s celebrated public high school, with its renowned Staples Players theatre programme, is the institution that drew many families to Westport in the first place and the proving ground for talents like the composer Justin Paul, class of 2003.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Westport came overwhelmingly from New York City and its inner suburbs, the children and grandchildren of the Eastern European immigrants who had crowded the Lower East Side and the tenement blocks of Brooklyn. Their forebears had passed through places like the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the early Orthodox streets of Borough Park in Brooklyn.
The generation that bought houses in Westport was the one that had made it: lawyers and doctors, advertising executives and television writers, who could afford a Gold Coast address and wanted the schools and the shoreline that came with it. Many had grown up in the Bronx or Brooklyn and made their careers in Manhattan, and the move to Westport was the final step in a single-generation climb from tenement to commuter suburb. Their arc north was the same one that filled Scarsdale in Westchester a generation earlier.
Within Fairfield County, Westport’s community has always been bound up with its neighbours, drawing rabbis, members, and kosher shoppers from the older and larger Jewish community in nearby Stamford just down the line.
Westport Today
Estimates put the Jewish population of the Westport and Norwalk area somewhere between eleven and fifteen thousand, which would make it well over a quarter of Westport proper. Four congregations serve them, and the town’s calendar carries Jewish holidays alongside the school plays and the beach passes.
It is a comfortable Judaism, more cultural and communal than strictly observant for most families, weighted toward Reform and Conservative practice but with the Orthodox and Chabad presence giving it range. The deli, the temples, the menorah lit downtown each December, the High Holiday traffic on Coleytown Road: these are the markers of a community fully woven into the fabric of an affluent New England town. Chronicled affectionately over the years by local writers and the long-running 06880 town blog, Westport’s Jewish life is no longer a story of arrival but one of belonging.
What began as a postwar experiment, Jewish families betting that a creative, open-minded suburb would have room for them, has become simply part of what Westport is. The descendants of the men who commuted to Madison Avenue now run their own firms, and their children fill Staples and the Playhouse stage, carrying a story that started in a Manhattan walk-up and continues by the Saugatuck.
Frequently Asked Questions
How large is the Jewish community in Westport, Connecticut?
Estimates suggest that between eleven and fifteen thousand Jewish people live in the Westport and Norwalk area, meaning Jews make up well over a quarter of Westport’s population of roughly 28,600. The town supports four distinct Jewish congregations.
When did Jews first settle in Westport?
Jewish families began moving to Westport in significant numbers after the Second World War, when the suburbs of Fairfield County opened to them. By 1948 there were enough families to found Temple Israel, the town’s first synagogue.
What synagogues serve the Jews in Westport, Connecticut?
Westport has four Jewish congregations: Temple Israel (Reform, 1948), The Conservative Synagogue (1987), Beit Chaverim (Modern Orthodox), and Chabad Lubavitch of Westport (Hasidic outreach). Temple Israel on Coleytown Road is the oldest and largest.
Why did so many Jewish families move to Westport?
Westport offered a beach, excellent schools, and an established artists’ and writers’ colony that welcomed creative professionals. Many early Jewish residents worked in Manhattan advertising, media, and the arts, and Westport let them keep a New York career and a shoreline home.
What is the most historic Jewish landmark in Westport?
Temple Israel at 14 Coleytown Road, dedicated in 1959, is the most historic. Under Rabbi Byron Rubenstein it hosted Martin Luther King Jr. in 1964, and Rubenstein was arrested in St. Augustine that year in the largest mass arrest of rabbis in American history.
Is there a Jewish deli in Westport?
Yes. Gold’s Delicatessen at 421 Post Road East has been a Westport fixture for more than two decades, serving pastrami, matzo ball soup, and smoked whitefish to a community that prizes a proper New York-style deli.
If your family’s story passed through Westport, or any of the places Jews have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a Manhattan walk-up to a house near the Saugatuck, to wherever you are now.