At a time when Conservative Judaism was seen as the future, an Orthodox Jewish day school in the Rockaways was the daring vision of a local rav named Rabbi Mordechai Shuchatowitz
During the dark days of September 1939, a ray of light shone through the clouds. The Rockaway Peninsula, a summer destination for New York City Jews, inaugurated the home of its first Orthodox day school, the Hebrew Institute of Long Island (HILI).
The 1930s saw the wealthy, assimilated German Jewish community — who summered in the gilded mansions of the seaside community sandwiched between the Atlantic Ocean and Jamaica Bay (today’s Bayswater) — give way to traditional Eastern European Jews, settling down in communities from Edgemere and Arverne down to Far Rockaway and Lawrence.
At a time when Conservative Judaism was seen as the future, an Orthodox Jewish day school in the Rockaways was the daring vision of a local rav named Rabbi Mordechai Shuchatowitz, brother-in-law of Rav Ruderman and Rabbi Naftali Neuberger. He became the founding principal of the Yeshiva of the Rockaways, which opened in the ezras nashim of the Anshe Sefard Shul in Arverne in 1935.
With the help of a devoted congregant named Joseph Yurkowitz, the yeshivah eventually purchased the Beach 19th building and Americanized its name to “Hebrew Institute of Long Island.” This would herald an era when Orthodoxy rose to prominence on the Rockaway peninsula.
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