On a Friday afternoon on Central Avenue, the queue at Gourmet Glatt thins to nothing by mid-afternoon, the bakeries sell their last challah, and Woodmere settles into a quiet that is not emptiness but anticipation. This is one of the Five Towns on Long Island’s South Shore, and the Jews in Woodmere have made it the largest and most populous corner of an Orthodox heartland that sits twenty miles and a world away from Manhattan.
The Place
Woodmere is a hamlet in the Town of Hempstead, Nassau County, on the South Shore of Long Island. It covers about 2.8 square miles between Hewlett to the east and Cedarhurst to the west, with the salt marshes of the bay at its southern edge and the Long Island Rail Road threading through its centre.
The 2020 census counted 18,669 residents, making Woodmere the largest of the communities that locals simply call the Five Towns: Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Inwood, the Hewletts, and Woodmere itself. It is leafy, expensive, and built mostly of single-family homes on tidy lots, much like the Orthodox enclaves that grew up to the north and east in towns such as Great Neck and Merrick.
What sets it apart is not the architecture but the rhythm. Woodmere runs on a Jewish clock, and on Saturday the streets fill with families walking, not driving.
How It Became Jewish
Woodmere was not built for the community that now defines it. For most of its history it was a gentile resort suburb, and the Orthodox character that marks it today arrived late, fast, and largely from the boroughs of New York City.
A vacation enclave by the bay
The land that became Woodmere was farmland and salt marsh well into the 19th century, scattered with a handful of homes near a spot once known as Brower’s Point. The Long Island Rail Road reached the area in 1869, and the railroad changed everything, putting the city within commuting distance and the marshes within reach of developers.
In the 1870s a developer named Samuel Wood began buying property to build an exclusive seaside enclave, naming it Woodsburgh after himself. The name was later shortened and altered to Woodmere to avoid confusion with other Long Island places. By the early 20th century it was a comfortable commuter suburb, and twice, in 1910 and again in 1978, residents tried and failed to incorporate it as a village. It remains an unincorporated hamlet governed by the Town of Hempstead.
The Far Rockaway seed
The Jewish story of the Five Towns begins not in Woodmere but just across the Queens line in Far Rockaway, where Orthodox families had been settling since the late 1800s, drawn to a religious community by the sea. That older settlement supplied the rabbis, the schools, and the confidence that an observant life could be built in the suburbs.
The decisive moment for Woodmere came in 1955. Myron Bienenfeld, a Woodmere father, made a phone call to Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky, then a young first-grade teacher in East New York, asking him to come see the community where his family lived. Rabbi Kamenetzky came in 1956 and became the founding rabbi of the Young Israel of Woodmere, a congregation that would grow into one of the largest Orthodox synagogues in the United States.
The great migration from Brooklyn and Queens
Through the 1960s and 1970s the Orthodox presence grew steadily, anchored by the new shul. Then, in the late 1980s, the trickle became a flood. Modern Orthodox families left Brooklyn and Queens in large numbers for the lawns, schools, and synagogues of the Five Towns, and Woodmere, the largest of the towns, absorbed a great share of them.
This was internal migration, not immigration. The families moving to Woodmere were already American, often a generation or two removed from the Lower East Side or Borough Park, trading apartment buildings for driveways without trading away observance. By 1980 the UJA-Federation estimated that 35,000 Jews lived across the Five Towns out of a population of roughly 47,000, and the Orthodox share was rising fast.
Building the infrastructure
An Orthodox community cannot simply move somewhere; it has to build the framework that makes observant life possible. Woodmere and its neighbours did exactly that, knitting together synagogues, schools, kosher shops, a ritual bath, and an eruv, the symbolic boundary that permits carrying outdoors on the Sabbath.
The Five Towns Eruv, headquartered in Woodmere, maintains that boundary across the towns, posting its status on a hotline each week so families know whether they may carry on Shabbat. By 2010 the Five Towns counted 53 Orthodox synagogues, a dense network of day schools, and a commercial strip of kosher restaurants and groceries that drew shoppers from across the region. What had been a gentile resort had become one of the most concentrated Modern Orthodox suburbs in America.
The Landmarks
Young Israel of Woodmere, 859 Peninsula Boulevard. Founded in 1956 under Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky, this is the institution around which Jewish Woodmere organised itself. It is the largest Orthodox congregation in the Five Towns and the largest Young Israel congregation in the world, and its growth from a living-room minyan to a community anchor mirrors the growth of the hamlet itself.
Gourmet Glatt, 1030 Railroad Avenue. The Woodmere branch of the kosher supermarket sits between Franklin and Irving Places in a renovated 15,500-square-foot space, with a full-service butcher, a wide dairy department, and a produce section busy enough to function as a town square on a Thursday night before Shabbat.
Central Avenue, Cedarhurst and Woodmere. The commercial spine of the Five Towns runs through the heart of the community, lined with kosher restaurants, bakeries, Judaica shops, and clothing stores. Places like Ondas by Fuego at 488 Central Avenue, a kosher steakhouse, draw diners who can eat out without leaving the bounds of supervision overseen by the Vaad Hakashrus of the Five Towns and Far Rockaway.
Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway (HAFTR). Founded in 1978 from the merger of two South Shore schools, HAFTR runs from preschool through twelfth grade and is one of the central Modern Orthodox day schools serving Woodmere families. Its presence, alongside several other yeshivas, is one of the main reasons young families keep choosing the area.
Davis Renov Stahler Yeshiva High School (DRS), Woodmere. A boys’ high school that relocated to Woodmere alongside the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach in 2017, DRS is part of the dense cluster of schools that lets a Woodmere child move from early childhood through high school without leaving the Five Towns.
The Five Towns Eruv, headquartered in Woodmere. Not a building but a boundary, the eruv is maintained, inspected, and repaired week after week so that families can carry keys, push strollers, and bring food to one another’s homes on the Sabbath. North Woodmere Park sits inside it, and on Shabbat afternoons it fills with families who have walked there.
The Woodmere LIRR station, on the Far Rockaway Branch. The same railroad that turned marshland into a resort in 1869 still carries Woodmere’s professionals into Manhattan each morning. The commute is part of the bargain: a Manhattan income, a suburban lawn, and an Orthodox community waiting at the end of the day.
Where They Came From
The Jews of Woodmere did not cross an ocean to get there. They came, overwhelmingly, from Brooklyn and Queens, the second and third American generations of families whose grandparents had landed on the Lower East Side or in the immigrant neighbourhoods of the outer boroughs.
Far Rockaway, just across the Queens border, was the immediate staging ground, the older Orthodox enclave whose institutions seeded the Five Towns. From there and from Flatbush, Borough Park, Kew Gardens Hills, and the rest of frum Brooklyn and Queens, families moved east through the 1970s and 1980s in search of space, schools, and quiet without compromise, the same impulse that built Orthodox Roslyn further up the Island.
What they were leaving was crowding and cost; what they were seeking was room to raise large families in walking distance of a shul. Woodmere, the biggest of the Five Towns, offered the most of both.
Woodmere Today
Today Woodmere is an affluent, family-heavy hamlet whose median age skews young, a reflection of the large Orthodox households that fill its schools. Most households are married couples, and a striking share have children at home, numbers that read very differently from the ageing suburbs around them. The professional families here, many of them doctors, lawyers, and finance workers, commute to the city and come home to a community organised around observance.
That concentration brings its own pressures. Housing in the Five Towns has grown expensive, pricing out some younger couples and pushing newer arrivals toward the edges of the corridor and into neighbouring towns. The same density that makes the community work, schools full, shuls within walking distance, kosher shops on every block, also makes it costly to enter.
Not all of Woodmere is Orthodox, and the broader Five Towns still include more modest and more diverse pockets, particularly in Inwood. But the centre of gravity is unmistakable. On a Saturday morning the cars stay parked, the sidewalks fill, and a former gentile resort by the bay reveals itself as one of the most settled Orthodox suburbs in the country.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do so many Jews live in Woodmere, New York?
The Jews in Woodmere are concentrated there because it is the largest of the Five Towns, an Orthodox corridor on Long Island’s South Shore with synagogues, day schools, kosher shops, and an eruv all within walking distance. Modern Orthodox families moved there in large numbers from Brooklyn and Queens beginning in the late 1980s.
What are the Five Towns?
The Five Towns are a cluster of communities in the Town of Hempstead, Nassau County: Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Inwood, the Hewletts, and Woodmere. Woodmere is the largest and most populous of them, and the area is known nationally as a Modern Orthodox Jewish suburb.
Is Woodmere a Modern Orthodox community?
Yes. Woodmere is one of the best-known Modern Orthodox communities in the United States, anchored by the Young Israel of Woodmere, the largest Young Israel congregation in the world, and served by a dense network of day schools and kosher establishments.
What is the largest synagogue in Woodmere?
The Young Israel of Woodmere at 859 Peninsula Boulevard is the largest Orthodox congregation in the Five Towns and the largest Young Israel congregation in the world. It was founded in 1956 under Rabbi Binyamin Kamenetzky.
Where do Jews in Woodmere shop and eat kosher?
Central Avenue, running through Cedarhurst and Woodmere, is the commercial spine of the community, lined with kosher restaurants, bakeries, and Judaica shops. Gourmet Glatt at 1030 Railroad Avenue in Woodmere is a major kosher supermarket, with supervision provided by the Vaad Hakashrus of the Five Towns and Far Rockaway.
How did Woodmere become Jewish?
Woodmere began as a gentile resort suburb after the Long Island Rail Road arrived in 1869. Its Orthodox character formed later, beginning with the founding of the Young Israel of Woodmere in 1956 and accelerating with a large migration of Modern Orthodox families from Brooklyn and Queens in the late 1980s.
If your family’s story passed through Woodmere, 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 shuls of Far Rockaway, to a lawn and a synagogue within walking distance in the Five Towns, to wherever you are now.