FAIR LAWN, N.J. — Sixty years ago, a small group of Orthodox Jewish families moved from Paterson to Fair Lawn and started a shul.

Six decades later, that shul is preparing for its 60th Rosh Hashanah in Fair Lawn, with about 300 members and a history that is closely tied to the growth of the town’s Orthodox Jewish community.

“Sixty years in gematria is samech, whose root means to lean on, to support,” Rabbi Andrew Markowitz said in his High Holidays appeal. “For 60 years, we’ve leaned on our shul. Sixty years of Shomrei Torah.”

That idea runs through the history of Congregation Shomrei Torah.

The congregation dates its founding to 1966, when 13 Orthodox families from Paterson moved to Fair Lawn. They purchased a house and began holding services there, with early minyanim taking place in the basement.

When Rabbi Benjamin Yudin and his wife, Shevi, arrived in 1969, the Orthodox community was still tiny. There were about 17 families.

Rabbi Yudin later recalled driving around Fair Lawn on Friday afternoons looking for people to make a minyan.

The shul was small, but the vision was not.

Rabbi Yudin and Shevi built their lives around the congregation and its members. Their home became a place where people could walk in, ask questions, learn and feel welcome.

The original house synagogue eventually became the Yudins’ residence and Shomrei Torah moved into its current building on Morlot Avenue in 1981.

The congregation also understood early that a growing Orthodox community needed more than a shul.

Space and plumbing were built into the original synagogue for a future mikvah. The Fair Lawn Mikvah opened in 1990.

Today, Fair Lawn has several Orthodox synagogues, a mikvah, an eruv, Jewish schools and other communal institutions, including Bergen Hatzalah. The community has developed a Jewish infrastructure that would have been difficult to imagine when those first families arrived from Paterson.

But the growth was not always guaranteed.

By the late 1990s, Shomrei Torah had a problem. The congregation had established itself, but young Orthodox couples were not moving into Fair Lawn.

Rather than simply wait for that to change, the shul tried something different.

Around 2005, Shomrei Torah partnered with Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future on a Community Growth Initiative. The program subsidized housing for young Orthodox couples who would move to Fair Lawn, become part of the community and help introduce their friends to it.

The results were significant.

Within two years, 16 new couples had visited and moved into Fair Lawn. Over the following years, dozens more families followed.

By 2013, Shomrei Torah was approaching 300 members. Fair Lawn had grown to seven Orthodox synagogues.

And Shomrei Torah’s growth helped create more growth.

Congregation Darchei Noam was established in 2006 by families from Shomrei Torah. Other congregations also emerged and expanded as more Orthodox families settled in town.

The shul’s influence also extended into Torah education and community life. The Fair Lawn Shomrei Torah Beit Midrash was established in 2011, offering shiurim, chavrusas and other learning opportunities to members of Shomrei Torah and other Orthodox synagogues.

Shomrei Torah members were also among the Fair Lawn families whose efforts helped establish Sinai, the Jewish special-needs school.

Through it all, Rabbi Yudin remained the central figure in the shul’s story.

He served as spiritual leader beginning in 1969 for more than five decades, building a reputation for warmth, outreach and personal relationships.

His philosophy was straightforward.

“A rabbi shouldn’t be overly concerned with what is ‘l’fi kvodo’ and what is beneath him,” he once said. “He should do what he needs to do to reach the people.”

That approach became part of Shomrei Torah’s identity.

Today, Rabbi Yudin is Rabbi Emeritus and Rabbi Andrew Markowitz leads the congregation. The shul has multiple Shabbat minyanim, daily minyanim, adult Torah classes, youth programs, NCSY, children’s groups and a nursery school.

The Fair Lawn of 2026 bears little resemblance to the Fair Lawn of 1966.

There are hundreds of Orthodox families, multiple shuls and a network of Jewish institutions serving a community that has grown far beyond the handful of families who once gathered in a basement.

But the shul that started it all is still there.

And as Shomrei Torah prepares to enter its 60th year of Rosh Hashanah in Fair Lawn, Rabbi Markowitz’s gematria lesson offers a fitting description of what those six decades have meant.

Sixty years of leaning on the shul.

And, in many ways, 60 years of a community growing around it.