The story
HAFTR was founded in 1978, the result of a merger between two schools on the South Shore of Long Island. Its predecessors were the Hebrew Institute of Long Island in Far Rockaway, Queens, and the Hillel School.
The Hebrew Institute of Long Island served the Rockaway and Five Towns community since about 1936. It was originally known as The Yeshiva of the Rockaways, then located in a synagogue in Averne. A few years later, it took over a children's home on Seagirt Boulevard in Far Rockaway. The school later bought the neighboring Roche estate and United States hotel grounds (which had contained the summer homes of, inter alia, New York State governor Alfred E. Smith, and Manhattan Borough President, Justice Julius Miller), extending the facility to a five-building campus. The high school, founded in 1951, moved into the final campus building in 1953. Yeshiva Darchei Torah took over the old Hebrew Institute campus after the merger.
The Hillel School was founded in Lawrence in 1957.
The foundation of HAFTR provided a co-educational school for Jewish families in the area. In 1980, HAFTR purchased the Number 3 school in Cedarhurst, New York, to house the HAFTR High School.
On January 10, 2019 a fire damaged the HAFTR elementary school campus in Lawrence, New York, and students were temporarily taught at other HAFTR campuses. The campus reopened in April 2019 after the building was renovated.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the HAFTR schools temporarily ended in-person classes, and later implemented further sanitation protocols to prevent the potential spread of COVID.
The HAFTR High School hosted the 2021 Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education Robotics Tournament.
From Wikipedia’s article on Hebrew Academy of the Five Towns and Rockaway, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5