Finding Beauty in Sacred Space

At the center of Chabad-Lubavitch Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn is a large basement sanctuary located beneath two repurposed apartment buildings. Sacred to the Chabad movement as the place where the Rebbe prayed and spoke, the room is nevertheless unfamiliar to most people who attend Chabad’s institutions around the world. And when people come in for a closeup, they are usually surprised.

Rebbetzin Esty Marcus occasionally fields questions from members of her Northern California community who have toured the Brooklyn synagogue, familiarly known simply by its address, 770. “They’d ask me why it looks so timeworn. I share with them the boiler room metaphor,” she says, referring to a famous analogy in Chabad lore that compares the sanctuary—last renovated in the 1980s—to an unglamorous but powerful source of energy. 

But the question also speaks to a deeper disconnect Rebbetzin Marcus’s congregants experienced: Two years ago, their community in San Mateo, California, inaugurated a custom-designed $20 million building, which includes a sanctuary with hand-made copper doors imported from Israel. 

The large synagogue in 770 served as an incubator for generations of Chabad representatives who would go on to create their own sanctuaries all over the world. But outside the hothouse environment of Crown Heights, it quickly became clear to many of them that energy alone wasn’t enough to attract new congregants. And over time, some Chabad couples came to realize that it was more than a matter of window-dressing: Their communities had a value for beauty that played an important role in their religious and spiritual lives. 

Chasidism, too, values aesthetic beauty as a means of connecting with the Divine, but twentieth-century Chasidim typically didn’t have the resources to invest in beautiful sanctuaries, notes Rabbi Dovie Shapiro, whose stone-and-glass Chabad House in Flagstaff, Arizona, draws Jewish tourists from around the country. In the twenty-first century, however, things have changed: “We don’t have to live with a mentality of scarcity,” he says. 

A New Genre

The Chabad House is a new architectural genre. Some sixty years after the first American shluchim were dispatched, relatively few operate out of custom-built facilities. That is beginning to change, however, as communities born in living rooms and raised in rented storefronts reach maturity and look to express themselves.

The buildings are self-consciously different, rarely drawing on trends in synagogue architecture. “They’re unique, because they’re not synagogues, but they’re not Jewish community centers either,” says Jim Shelton, the architect behind the Flagstaff Chabad House who has since become a go-to resource for many Chabad centers. Nevertheless, when a Chabad couple approaches him, he has a few building blocks to work with: a sanctuary, a commercial kitchen, space for youth education, whether it’s a Hebrew school or a full day school, a library that can be repurposed as a social hall.

What might have become a cookie-cutter template is saved by another Chabad value: reverence for the unique qualities of its location and community. In Flagstaff, Rabbi Shapiro was looking for a building that would draw inspiration from the rock outcroppings and groves of ponderosa pine surrounding it. “Jerusalem stone in Flagstaff is nice, but it doesn’t fit,” he says. He recalled how Shelton would get up early to walk the site at dawn, taking note of how the light fell: “He designed it so that, at 10 A.M. on a summer Shabbat when we start services, we don’t need shades. Normally that would be a disaster.”      

In San Mateo, the inspiration came from a rather different quarter. “We’re in the midst of Silicon Valley; our community is very high tech,” says Daphne Kaufer, who designed the interior of the building. “Very early on, one of our donors said he wanted the synagogue to look like the Apple Store,” she recalls. “We were laughing.” The Marcuses ended up fusing traditional accents—brass fixtures and wooden paneling—with an airy, spacious minimalism. The sanctuary, however, includes a lowered ceiling to create a feeling of intimacy: “Large shuls do lift your spirit, but it makes you feel small,” says Kaufer, who grew up in Israel and considers herself part of the San Mateo Chabad community. “Chabad Houses are meant to make you feel the holiness within you.”

Chabad House design also responds to some of the darker elements in its modern environment: The Flagstaff Chabad House was vandalized and covered with antisemitic graffiti during construction. “Chabad has the conflict of wanting to be open and receptive and showing the light, but sometimes they’re under attack,” Shelton says. He draws on his experience designing US embassies all over the world to find “a balance between security and openness.” The Chabad House he’s currently working on in Rancho Santa Fe, California, he notes, includes large windows, but is elevated way above street level on a bluff.

Invisible Sanctuary

The setting of the Rebbe’s famous farbrengen gatherings where he delivered talks and prayed, the large synagogue at 770 has been recorded and photographed from almost every angle. And yet, it has remained largely invisible. For the Chasidim who crammed the room to pray in the Rebbe’s presence, aesthetics was a nonissue: “It was so insignificant. Nobody noticed, nobody cared, because the Rebbe was there,” recalls Rabbi Manis Friedman, who provided simultaneous English translation for the Rebbe’s televised talks during the 1980s. Visitors from outside the community often found it hard to see the walls and floor beyond the black-hatted mass of the crowd.

And for many visitors, that impression persists today. Rabbi Mayer Friedman (nephew of Manis) runs a popular “Hasidic Brooklyn Tour,” which ranks among Airbnb’s Top Experiences in New York City. Almost without fail, he says, participants rate their visit to the 770 sanctuary as a highlight. “The most common reaction I get is that this is a fascinating place of worship. It looks like a beehive, or the stock exchange,” he says. Though he occasionally hears comments about the physical state of the shul, for most people, the overall impression is “human energy. It’s palpable. It eclipses the aesthetics.”

Though the interior has received little attention, one part of Chabad Headquarters is highly visible: the red brick, gothic-revival facade of the original building at 770 Eastern Parkway, designed in the early 1930s by the architect Edwin S. Klein, has become a recognizable brand for the movement, appearing everywhere from keychains to a congressional medal. The home and synagogue of the sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, and later of the Rebbe, the building holds multifaceted theological significance for Chabad, a tangible expression of the movement’s resilience and flourishing on American soil. 

Shelton says he has gained a new appreciation for the iconic 770 building: “All the rabbis I’ve met are actually interested in design and have a pretty good eye,” he says. “I think it stems back to 770. They have an appreciation of how a building can play an important role in their community. I think that’s powerful,” he says. “It’s in the psyche.”