Young Jews keep moving to Dallas. Hundreds of them filled the Intown Chabad for Yom Tov.

Attendance at The Intown Chabad in Uptown Dallas kept climbing through Sukkos and Simchas Torah, as young Jewish professionals who have moved to the city filled the shul over the holiday week, Chabad.org reported.

The center is led by Rabbi Mendy and Mushka Plotkin. Rabbi Plotkin told Chabad.org that companies moving to Dallas keep bringing young Jews with them, and that he gets four to five calls a week from people on the East Coast planning a move. The busiest regular night is First Friday, davening and a dinner on the first Shabbos of every month that draws 250 to 300 people, most of them single.

The Intown Chabad started as a weekly class. In the early 2000s, Rabbi Mendel Dubrawsky, regional director of Chabad-Lubavitch of Dallas, began teaching a group of singles in Uptown. His daughter and son-in-law, Rabbi Zvi and Aidy Drizin, came to Dallas as shluchim in 2004 and built out programs for young professionals. When they moved to Uptown in 2007, The Intown Chabad was born.

A Tikvah Fund profile names Rabbi Drizin as the founder of the center, which serves Jewish millennials. It credits his work with showing that an organization built for that age group can succeed, and with leading other local groups and Chabad Houses around the country to try the same model. The Drizins brought the Plotkins on in 2022. They later opened a Chabad on Campus at Southern Methodist University, about three miles away, and they still work with Intown on development.

The Plotkins hand much of the work to the young people themselves. Zach Pokroy met Rabbi Plotkin at a hockey game after moving to Dallas, and now he organizes basketball, pickleball and golf tournaments. He told Chabad.org he is not sure he would be so set on staying in Dallas without a place like Intown. Chaia Geltser grew up in Denver feeling far from Yiddishkeit, reconnected through Chabad at Colorado State University, and came to Dallas for medical school. Today she leads a running club.

"We want to empower young adults to lead our community today," Rabbi Plotkin said.

Along with Shabbos dinners, classes and Yom Tov programs, Intown takes part in Our Giving Kitchen, a meal program that began as a project of Chabad in Pittsburgh under Rabbi Chezky and Bassie Rosenfeld and provides hundreds of meals to people in need. The center also holds an annual Shabbos project called Shabbat 500, which drew hundreds of young professionals in 2025, Lubavitch.com reported.

The newcomers are joining a community that goes back more than 150 years. Jewish settlement in Dallas began around 1870 with about 15 families, most of them merchants, according to the Jewish Virtual Library. A Hebrew Benevolent Association and a Jewish cemetery followed in 1872, and the city's first congregation, Temple Emanu-El, was founded in 1874. Shearith Israel came in 1884 and Tiferet Israel in 1890. The same source put the Jewish population of Dallas at about 50,000 in 1997. Chabad.org noted that the Jewish community is still small next to the city as a whole, which is part of why a center built around newcomers matters to them.

How we reported this: This story is based on a Chabad.org report by Faygie Levy Holt published Oct. 5, 2026, with background from a Tikvah Fund profile of Rabbi Zvi Drizin, a May 2025 Lubavitch.com photo report on Shabbat 500, and the Jewish Virtual Library's history of Dallas Jewry. The population figure is a 1997 estimate; we could not reach the Jewish Federation of Greater Dallas website and did not find a newer count we could read. Chabad.org did not publish a total holiday attendance figure or name the companies relocating to Dallas. Growing communities can reach us at [email protected].