On a recent Friday afternoon Tzvi Schapiro, the new owner of Judaica Treasures and JT Cafe on West 72nd Street, serves Shaul Robinson, a Modern Orthodox rabbi from London, a bowl of lentil soup. Then Schapiro, a Lubavitcher chasid, helps a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary select a challah board and waits on a non-observant telecom expert who is buying “the glass” for his sister’s wedding to a Baptist. (A Reform rabbi will officiate with a priest.)

“I’m learning the nuances of the community,” says Rabbi Robinson, as he pores over a certain pre-eminent Jewish newspaper.

Tonight he will lead his first service as the probable new rabbi at Lincoln Square Synagogue. Rabbi Robinson has been concerned about rising anti-Semitism in England.

“I’m moving here because I think it will mean a better life for my family,” he says.

The rabbi has come to the right place: the Jewish friendly Upper West Side, where traditional Judaism crosses paths with conventional or eccentric variations. You can send your child to an Orthodox, Conservative, Reform or nondenominational day school; catch a daytime lecture on “Judaism, Physics and God” or an evening performance by the Hip Hop Hoodios (Jewish-Latino musicians) at the Makor/Steinhardt Center of the 92nd Street Y on 67th Street; and do laps in the pool at the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan on 76th Street, or immerse ritually (if you’re the right gender) in the mikveh at the West Side Women’s Club on 78th Street.

“There’s been a flowering of Jewish life here,” says Rabbi Carol Levithan, senior director of learning, outreach and adult programs at the JCC as she strolls home on Shabbat from Ansche Chesed at West End Avenue and 100th Street, greeting friends from Ohab Zedek (Orthodox), B’nai Jeshurun (not affiliated, Conservative prayerbook) and the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (Conservative/ Reconstructionist).

Rabbi Levithan belongs to Ansche Chesed’s Minyan M’at. With 140 families, it’s not so little anymore. Page numbers aren’t announced — they’re not necessary for the well-versed men and women davening in multi-hued tallitot and kipot, many of whom are rabbis and leaders in Jewish educational and communal organizations.

Ansche Chesed was at the vanguard of the lay-led prayer group movement that sparked an explosion of independent minyans in West Side synagogues, churches and private apartments from Kehilat Orach Eliezer (serious davening and sensitivity to women’s issues) to Kehilat Hadar (egalitarian, Conservative vibe) to Darkhei Noam (mechitza, but women read Torah) to Kol Zimrah (singing, musical instruments), and more.

“The library minyans and the living room minyans are all heavily indebted” to the people who revived the moribund Ansche Chesed in the late 1970s by creating different groups ”under a community umbrella,” says Rabbi Jeremy Kalmanofsky, spiritual leader of Ansche Chesed.

Rabbi Kalmanofsky leads the Sanctuary Minyan, but pops into the others (the West Side Minyan and Minyan Rimonim meet on alternate Saturdays).“The Ansche Chesed tradition is that there is no ‘main’ minyan,” he says.

At Ansche Chesed’s children’s service, Eva Fogelman, a member of Minyan M’at, kvells as her son, Adam Fogelman Chanes, 9, leyns from Leviticus.

“I only practiced two or three times this morning,” Adam says.

Adam, whose favorite subject is mishna, learned to read Torah at the Beit Rabban Day School on 70th Street off Central Park West, where he is in fourth grade. Occupying cozy, cheerful quarters at the community house of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, the school, which is not affiliated with a particular denomination, has mixed-grade classes and daily Hebrew immersion classes. Founded in 1991, it opened a kindergarten two years ago, and plans to start a middle school.

Beit Rabban families “are ones who come from a whole spectrum of religious affiliations, but for whom Jewish life and learning are absolutely central,” says Jo Sassienie, the school’s British-born principal, while a group of girls and boys snacks on grapes b’ivrit.

“We picked the school because we’re interested in Jewish literacy,” says Fogelman, an author and psychologist, “but not to learn by rote — to be questioning and creative.”

A few blocks away, at the Drisha Institute’s airy new quarters on 67th Street, executive director Daniela Weiss ushers a visitor into a sun-splashed room with bookshelves and long, blond wood tables.

“It’s a wonderful sight to see a women’s beit midrash,” Weiss marvels.

When it was founded 26 years ago, “this was the only place for women to study on an advanced level,” Weiss says. Now that others have followed its lead, Drisha is taking on new challenges.

There are men at Drisha tonight. Ben Sandler and his wife, Shuli, are co-teaching a new course for engaged couples on Judaism’s view of sex and the laws relating to a woman’s menstrual cycle.

“We challenged the notion of how couples had always been taught,” says Shuli Sandler, a graduate of the Scholars’ Circle at Drisha. Traditionally a rabbi instructed the groom, and the rebbetzin the bride.

“We thought, why not teach them together?” Shuli Sandler says.

Rabbi Mark Wildes, founder and director of the Manhattan Jewish Experience, says “there’s such an established, vibrant Jewish community here, you sometimes think there’s no more work to be done.”

The Manhattan Jewish Experience is a 7-year-old outreach program of Friday night dinners and beginners’ services for young professionals with little or no Judaic background supported by The Jewish Center, where it is based, and by a UJA-Federation of New York continuity grant.

(UJA-Federation’s 2002 New York City population study showed that only 30 percent of the Upper West Side’s 59,400 Jews belonged to a synagogue, and the intermarriage rate of 35 percent was higher than the rest of the metropolitan area.)

“It’s easy to fill the room with Jews — good food and good beer, and you’re good to go,” Rabbi Wildes says.

But to keep them coming, he says, you need “authentic Jewish content,” which MJE provides at its new Monday Night Lounge. (At a recent meeting, socializing was followed by a discussion of disengagement in Gaza.)

MJE participants are among the 1,000 people who pour into The Jewish Center on 86th Street every Shabbat. The Modern Orthodox synagogue was founded 90 years ago with the idea that it be more than a house of worship.

“The whole concept of a JCC emerged from The Jewish Center,” says its rabbi, Ari Berman. “We were the first ‘shul with a pool.’ ” (The health club no longer exists.)

The Jewish Center helped shape American Judaism. Its first rabbi was Mordecai Kaplan, who went on to found the Reconstructionist movement at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism one block west. Next came the legendary Leo Jung, then Norman Lamm, now chancellor of Yeshiva University.

Proximity to an abundance of Jewish life (and to Central and Riverside parks) doesn’t come cheap. One-bedroom condos in the new Time-Warner Center at Columbus Circle go for $950,000; two-bedroom co-ops on West End Avenue sell for more than $1 million.

“The West Side has a residential feeling, convenient shopping and better transportation than the East Side,” says Adrienne Pesin, a sales associate at Halstead, making the inevitable comparison.

“Lincoln Center changed everything,” says Leslie Niederman, 79, proprietor of Fisher Bros. Kosher Meat and Poultry on 72nd Street between Broadway and West End Avenue.

Niederman, a Hungarian-born survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau, has been trimming T-bones and taking phone orders for more than 50 years. He started out working for brothers Louis and Morris Fischer in a “walkdown” across the street.

He remembers when European immigrants crowded the now-defunct Éclair and Famous Dairy restaurants, and when “glatt” became de rigueur (Fischer Bros. has OU certification). Niederman’s son, Steve, a former art student, and son-in-law, Paul Whitman, are in the business, “bringing it to higher levels,” he says.

With the popularity of chicken, the store features hormone-free, antibiotic-free poultry that is “a different product altogether” from the packaged kosher birds found in supermarkets. And there’s plenty of vegetarian takeout. A pudding made with quinoa, the seed of a leafy plant, was one of the hottest items this Passover.

“We got a 27 rating from Zagat,” Niederman says, referring to the popular food and restaurant guides. “I asked them, ‘why not a 30?’ They said, ‘no one gets a 30.’ ”