Camp registration in a Chabad center that faces Tel Aviv University's bright white buildings is open, but it's not for kids. Or men.

Women – college students, young professionals – are enrolling in Pnimiyut, Chabad of Ramat Aviv's three-week spiritual boot camp. The name means "inner, within" and evokes the program's focus on “building oneself from the inside out,” according to principal Shira Weiner.

During the year, Pnimiyut's regular classes are structured to fit neatly into a woman's career-degree-family merry-go-round. Two to four hour-long classes are offered from Sunday to Thursday. The most popular of which is the class on relationships. Another well attended course on Chasidic topics starts Thursday nights at 10:30 and lasts right up to daybreak. 

More than 150 women per week sit in on lectures and practical workshops covering Shabbat, keeping kosher, prayer, Chasidic philosophy. Some of Pnimyut's best students discovered the center as they jogged by between finals at TAU.

Change is afoot in Israel's city that never sleeps. Founded as a bastion for secular Jews, Tel Aviv has none of Jerusalem’s holy sites. But this city’s tempo, its openness and its metropolitan character are a draw for English speakers who choose to settle in Tel Aviv. After years of losing young people to the burbs, Tel Aviv's parks are now filled with children again as parents discover city living equals less commuting. 

“Family values have come back to Tel Aviv,” said Esther Piekarski, a lecturer and teacher who has been on of Chabad's representative in northern Tel Aviv for 30 years.

Around the Piekarskis' Shabbat table, English speaking medical students sit next to visiting scholars and athletes like Tamir Goodman. While the boy wonder once dubbed “Jewish Jordan” was engaged to be married, he was playing pro-basketball for Maccabi Tel Aviv and went for lessons on building a Jewish home with Mrs. Piekarski.

Finding a teacher like Mrs. Piekarski in the mostly secular city of Tel Aviv was a gift. “I always make sure to update her when my family has some news. I feel like she set the tone for our lives together,” said Mr. Goodman. 

Throughout this non-traditional city, Chabad centers are going the innovative route to bring Jewish meaning to Tel Aviv's renaissance.

Zizi Benu was climbing the rungs in the left-wing political party Meretz when disgust with a boyfriend who wouldn't commit brought to chance meeting with a Pnimiyut teacher. “I was shocked,” she admits, by how wrongly she had stereotyped religious women. They spoke of marriage and men, and “It wasn't what she said. It was how she said it. At that moment, I understood that this is the type woman I wanted to become.”

But Ms. Benu wasn't quite ready to sign up for Pnimiyut, but she was ready for a cup of coffee at another Chabad project, Mimal Mammosh, a stylish lounge on King George Street,Tel Aviv's theater and shopping corridor. 

Shelves of vintage 50s—60s alarm clocks ring the room. A 70s era gas pump  adds an offbeat touch to a bookcase of the latest Jewish titles. The kitschy accessories are remainders from the 'Miki V'Tal' vintage kitsch store Mimal Mammosh once was before owner Tal Ziv revamped into a Torah study center five years ago. 

Acoustic remixes of Chabad songs play on the sound system. Outside, a wood deck decorated with teak couches, coffee tables, a hammock beckon. Mimal Mammosh opens early and closes late, offering opportunities to Tel Aviv's up and comers for Jewish study, Shabbat meals, holiday parties.

“We built a place like home. Only more stylish,” said director Rabbi Chanoch Weiner. 

Mimal Mammosh opened five years ago. In March, the center gutted a property next door to house the overflow crowd that attends classes, a kitchen and event space. 

Two years ago, Omer Michael was scouring King George for new CDs to use in a festival he was to deejay in Berlin when a Mimal Mammosh staffer asked him to put on tefillin.  He accepted, “because the place didn't look like a synagogue, it looked like a fun place to go into.” He stayed on to join a night of Chasidic songs and stories. “Music was my way into religion.”  Mr. Michael still deejays, but he spends his mornings at Chabad's yeshiva in Ramat Aviv.

Mr. Michael thinks Tel Avivim are ready for a spiritual reboot. In Jerusalem, drivers zoom past holy sites and take it for granted. “In a city that never stops, you really need Shabbat. 

He says that in Tel Aviv,  where so much glitters on the surface, and shallow living is a lifestyle, “when you finally see truth, you recognize it.”