Squirrel Hill (Pittsburgh) - Jewish Community

Jewish Community

Squirrel Hill has had a large Jewish population since the 1920s, when Eastern European Jews began to move to the neighborhood in large numbers from Oakland and the Hill District. Many of them took up residence in rows of brick houses on the cross streets of Murray Avenue south of Forbes, such as Darlington Road, Bartlett Street, and Beacon Street. The neighborhood became the center of Jewish culture in the city, with kosher butcher shops, delicatessens, Jewish restaurants, bookstores, and designer boutiques. Several hundred Russian Jewish immigrants moved to the neighborhood in the 1990s.

Most of Squirrel Hill is surrounded by a consecrated wall (an "eruv" using telephone poles and wires as the "wall") which permits orthodox Jews to carry things like books and push strollers on the Sabbath. The eruv's boundaries are quite irregular and contain portions of other neighborhoods as well, with one writer noting that "an Orthodox Jew could carry something within the eruv's boundaries all the way from the north end of the Hot Metal Bridge to the intersection of Wilkins and South Dallas in Point Breeze." Squirrel Hill contains three Jewish day schools, affiliated with the Chabad, Modern Orthodox and Conservative movements respectively. There are over twenty synagogues.

The Jewish community also offers two kosher restaurants (Milky Way and Dunkin Donuts at the corner of Forbes and Shady), a Jewish Community Center, a kosher bakery at Giant Eagle (on Beacon), and an annual festival. A kosher bakery that used to be located in Squirrel Hill, called Sweet Tammy's, has since relocated to East Liberty and become a wholesale operation.