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American synagogues are closing at a record rate. This retired judge is rescuing their stained glass windows.
CHICAGO — Jerry Orbach moves through the sanctuary of Northbrook Community Synagogue with the practiced eye of a man who’s spent years rescuing pieces of a fading world. The suburban Chicago congregation glows with stained glass saved from shuttered synagogues, their colors reframed along these walls. What began as one man’s mission has turned the space into a living museum — a collage of light and loss.
A large gold Star of David hangs from a chain around Orbach’s neck, catching the light from the windows he’s saved from seven shuls. At 79, the retired judge has made a second career of rescuing what others have left behind: stained glass from synagogues that have closed, merged, or fallen into disrepair.
He isn’t just saving glass; he’s salvaging light — the one thing that never stops traveling.
Each panel is marked by a small plaque: the name of the congregation, the town it once illuminated, the year it died. When the sun hits them just right, color ripples across the walls like ghosts, a chorus of light still singing long after the voices are gone. “A continuation instead of a destruction,” he says, as if arguing a case.
For more than a century, the number of synagogues in America steadily climbed, a reflection of immigration, assimilation, and Jewish ambition. But by the 1990s, that momentum stalled. In the decades that followed, it reversed. There are roughly 20% fewer synagogues today than there were in 1990, according to data gathered by Alanna E. Cooper, a Jewish Studies professor at Case Western Reserve University. For the first time in American history, more synagogues are closing each year than opening.
The walls of Northbrook Community Synagogue now hold what those closures leave behind: fragments of glass salvaged from sanctuaries across the post-industrial Midwest, where factories shuttered and congregations dwindled. Orbach has become a one-man preservation society.
A history in glass
Stained glass has long been a marker of Jewish arrival in America. When immigrant congregations began erecting monumental synagogues in the early 1900s, they built them with arches, domes, and large window apertures. Glass became the medium of belonging.
In cathedrals, stained glass told the stories of saints. In synagogues, it told the story of survival. Early designs depicted the 12 tribes, the days of creation, the Exodus from Egypt. Later came darker panels, fractured blues and reds evoking the Holocaust, followed by bursts of gold and white celebrating the creation of the State of Israel. Across a century of Jewish life, the art evolved into a visual Torah of endurance.
The factories closed. The congregations scattered. But the windows remain: fragile, luminous, still looking for a home.
Orbach leads me into a small elevator, one hand steadying his cane as the doors close. “You’re gonna like this,” he says, as the bell dings and the elevator jolts to a stop.
The basement sprawls beneath the entire building, a hidden warren of storage rooms and concrete corridors. One room is a large gym. Another section is soon to become indoor pickleball courts. But in a far corner, the scene could be straight out of an Indiana Jones movie. This is where Orbach has built something else: a warehouse of memory.
Wooden crates line the walls, some open, others nailed shut. Inside are stained-glass windows that have yet to find a new home — towering panels from Beth Achim synagogue in Southfield, Michigan, each thirteen feet tall and three feet wide. For now, they rest here, waiting for wherever their journey next takes them, like the vessels of a traveling tabernacle.
Orbach lifts his phone, flicking on the flashlight. Dust drifts through the beam. The air smells faintly metallic, like old pews and time. He runs the light along the edge of a crate, tracing the outline of a hidden window.
“I just got these in two weeks ago,” he says, like a shopkeeper showing off new stock. “Seven for the holidays, seven for the days of creation. They’re gorgeous.”
He steps closer to a crate, resting his hand on the wood as if on a headstone. This, he said, is how memory becomes a kind of faith.
The case for light
A son of Chicago, Orbach was born in Humboldt Park to parents who fled pogroms in Eastern Europe — his mother from Ukraine, his father from Poland. When he was eight, the family moved north to Albany Park, then a humming center of Jewish life. He’s stayed close to the city ever since: studying law at Loyola, serving as a prosecutor and alderman, and later, in 1988, taking the bench in Cook County. In time he rose to head the court’s law division in District Two, a job that taught him to listen before ruling. He retired two decades ago, though he now mediates and arbitrates cases — a judge, it seems, never entirely off duty.
A few of Orbach’s earliest rescues were the panels from his childhood synagogue in Albany Park. They once illuminated the sanctuary where he became bar mitzvah, where he was married, where his parents once prayed. Reinstalled now in Northbrook, they’ve since framed his grandchildren’s baby namings. “They sold the building to a church,” he said. “I couldn’t stand the idea of those windows ending up in a dumpster.”
Something shifted. He started calling contractors, preservationists — anyone with a ladder and a conscience. Soon he was showing up at demolition sites, paying crews out of pocket to let him climb the scaffolding and pry the glass from the walls. Once, at Mikro Kadosh Anshei Ticktin, an old Chicago congregation, he and his crew worked through the night, prying the stained glass from the front while a bulldozer tore into the back of the building. “By the end, there was one wall left,” he said. “It was shaking while we got the last window out.”
He talks about the windows the way some people talk about those who once prayed beneath them, as if they still have a pulse. “If you keep the memory of the shuls alive,” he said, “the people in them are alive too.”
From ruin to renewal
Among Orbach’s most prized rescues are a set of stained-glass windows from Saginaw, Michigan — luminous panels manufactured in France and salvaged just before their synagogue was torn down. He brought them to Northbrook several years ago, giving their light a second life.
A few months after Orbach installed the Saginaw windows, Cooper — the scholar who tracks synagogue closures and the fate of their sacred objects — flew in from Cleveland to see them. She’d been studying what happens to the sacred items left behind when synagogues close: Torah scrolls, yahrzeit plaques, arks, pews, memorial lights. But the stained glass, she said, posed the hardest questions.
Stained-glass windows don’t have a sacred status like a Torah scroll or even the building itself. They carry a different kind of holiness. “I’ve heard many congregations describe their windows as the soul of their congregation,” Cooper said.
She found in Orbach what her fieldwork had only theorized. “He’s creating an afterlife for these windows,” she said at a dedication ceremony at Northbrook, where they both spoke.
Standing before the crowd that day, Cooper described the scene she’d witnessed when windows were removed from Ahavath Israel in Kingston, New York, which Orbach also rescued and relocated to Northbrook. Cooper recalled workmen carrying the panels to their crates as the last members of the congregation looked on. “As they lowered the windows into the boxes,” she said, “it felt like a burial.”
Now she gestured toward the sanctuary, the glass alive with color once more. “And this,” she said, “is the afterlife.”
In his own sanctuary
Orbach has one more thing to show me, in his two-story home on a quiet suburban street. Rusty, his six-year-old rescue mutt, bounds to the door. His wife, Noreen, waves from the hallway.
The foyer is lined with photos of his two daughters and their families. Hanging above the entryway are two stained-glass windows he salvaged years ago from a shuttered synagogue in Lakeview, Illinois, where he used to go for minyan. The site is now condos.
“In my own way, this is how I keep those shuls alive,” he says, glancing up at the glass.
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How the Forward got a cameo in ‘Marty Supreme’
“The challenging thing about any film, for me, is you’re trying to build these worlds, so you’ve got to find the elements,” said Jack Fisk, production designer for Marty Supreme, and regular collaborator with big names including Terrence Malick, Paul Thomas Anderson, David Lynch and Brian De Palma.
“We’re trying to piece together bits of reality to tell our story, and that look right for the period,” Fisk said in a Zoom conversation, the day Marty Supreme got a Best Picture, Musical or Comedy, nomination from the Golden Globes. “So the challenge is to find them, that you can get to them reasonably and within the day, and that will fit in your budget.”
Often the on-the-ground reality of the filming location inspires the scene, but sometimes it gets in the way and forces the art department to get creative. Both were the case in a blink-and-you’ll miss it moment in Josh Safdie’s epic of a schvitzer table tennis champ.
While shooting a scene on location at Seward Park on the Lower East Side, the original Forward Building, with its historic preserved façade, loomed in the background. It fit the film’s early 1950s setting, and the biography of Marty Reisman, the real ping-pong pro whose 1974 book The Money Player inspired the film, and who grew up on East Broadway and learned the game at the Education Alliance in the neighborhood.
“Josh told me that, you know, ‘That’s this Jewish newspaper, it’s been here forever’” said Fisk.
It was more than a bit of trivia from a lifelong New Yorker. It was a fix to a problem: modern street signs opposite the park, which were decidedly out of place but which the city wouldn’t bother removing for a one-day shoot.
So Fisk and his team, drawing inspiration from the locale, built a Forward delivery truck to block out the signs. He even recalls printing up some papers. The graphic artists relied on reference photos to reproduce the font — painting the cargo bed immediately after a period-appropriate truck arrived. Fisk thinks it may have still been wet on shooting day.
Every time Fisk entered a neighborhood for this New York shoot — his first since 1974’s Phantom of the Paradise, directed by De Palma — he looked for traces of the past to take advantage of. (In the case of Phantom, Fisk opted to use the Brooklyn building of the Pressman Toy Corporation— a Jewish-owned outfit known for manufacturing Chinese Checkers and the family firm of Hollywood producer Edward R. Pressman — as a prison instead of filming in a real jail; Fisk said all the ones he scouted looked “too nice.”)
Recreating the lost world of Marty Mauser, played by Timothée Chalamet, posed its own challenges.
Central to the film, if only briefly seen in the final cut, is Lawrence’s Broadway Table Tennis Club on 55th St. The building was demolished, but Fisk, together with producer Sara Rossein (who is also Safdie’s wife), was able to get hold of blueprints and black-and-white photos through tax records, government archives and a magazine feature. Rossein’s discovery of a 16mm piece of film clued Fisk in on the color palette.
Fisk got his start in film working for B-movie maven Roger Corman (“Every other page there was a bare breast or something,” he recalled of the scripts) so he is no stranger to improvising on a shoestring. In fact, he relishes it. On Marty Supreme, as maximalist a picture as Safdie has ever made, the budget — despite being reportedly the most-expensive A24 production yet at around $60-70 million — often creaked, calling for some creative problem solving.
There’s a scene where Marty volleys an apple into a bowl in a building across from his hotel room. There wasn’t money to retrofit the room in the window, so the period stove viewers see is an image printed from a plotter — a massive printer — pasted to the wall. Norkin’s Shoe Shop, where Marty works, was an actual location on Orchard Street, but the crew built modular units of the storefront so they could move the shots away from a modern-looking hotel recently built nearby.
While Marty Supreme is largely rooted in New York, with some detours to New Jersey, London and Tokyo, there’s a memorable sequence set at Auschwitz, as former world champion tennis pro Bela Kletzki (Géza Röhrig) recounts his life in the camp.
“It’s kind of horrible and challenging at the same time,” Fisk said of recreating a part of the death camp. “Everybody’s knowledge of Auschwitz and concentration camps really helped make the set.”
The dimly lit barracks were built inside a house that doubled as the set for a farm in New Jersey where Marty tries to retrieve a lost German shepherd.
Fisk said Röhrig, who starred in the Auschwitz-set film Son of Saul and converted to Orthodox Judaism after a visit to the camp, was excited for the scene. (Fisk noted that Röhrig is part of his longtime collaborator Terrence Malick’s upcoming film, The Way of the Wind, where the actor will play Jesus, possibly the first Orthodox Jew to embody that role on the big screen.)
Fisk’s work on Marty Supreme has been noted in nearly every review — even the rare pan in Time singled out his production as “the best thing about the movie” — but it’s technically not his only film this year.
Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere shows the Boss watching Malick’s Badlands on his home television; the crime drama was the inspiration for the singer’s album Nebraska, the making of which is the crux of the biopic. Fisk is grateful Badlands is still resonating, as it marked the beginning not only of his most prolific collaboration, but was the set where he met his wife, Sissy Spacek.
While Fisk is a sought-after talent for the ambitious auteurs looking to wind back the clock — his most recent credit is Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, for which he was nominated for his third Oscar — his most personal connection was with David Lynch, his friend since high school.
Lynch died in January, during the production of Marty Supreme. Fisk was in Japan working on one of the last scenes soon after his passing, and was gratified to see people hosting film festivals in diners in Lynch’s honor.
Marty Supreme is the first film Fisk has done with Safdie, and while it is a relatively early work (Safdie is just 41, though this film is his seventh feature, and his second without his brother, Benny), the veteran production designer was impressed by his enthusiasm and his attention to detail.
“I always tried to prepare myself so I have a little bit more detail than he asked, which is very hard to do,” Fisk said.
It’s that eye for minutiae — and the need to block out the blight of modernity — that paved the way for the Forward’s brief cameo. Fisk, for his part, likes the look of the Yiddish.
“It’s so graphic and beautiful and you can move it around,” Fisk said of the truck. “The camera’s gonna miss it, you can just back it up five feet to see it.”
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A Hanukkah menorah in the window for eight days? Try an Israeli flag for two years
There’s a robust online debate over whether Jews this year should publicly display their menorahs given the rise in antisemitism. Here’s my suggestion: Ask Elon Rubin.
Rubin owns Sundays Cycles, a custom bicycle shop in Santa Monica, California, that since Oct. 7, 2023, features a large Israeli flag in its window. Every time I drive down Main Street, passing boutiques, restaurants, nail salons and Pilates studios, I see that flag, draped inside several square feet of the glass storefront. It is meant to be seen.
“I’m an Israeli citizen,” Rubin told me when I met him at his store last month. “After everything that happened on Oct. 7, it was the least I could do.”
What drew me into the store was the simple, quiet defiance of Rubin’s decision, which stands in stark blue-and-white contrast to the constant, hand-wringing debate American Jews are engaged in over such symbols.
Those concerns bubble up to the surface like sufganiyot in hot oil around Hanukkah, when Jews are commanded to place their menorahs in windows so that they are visible to all.
The Talmud says the menorahs must be displayed to “publicize the miracle” of Hanukkah.
But more and more American Jews are worried — as their European Jews have been for many years now — about announcing their Jewishness to the outside world.
Some 42% of Jewish Americans report feeling unsafe wearing or displaying Jewish symbols in public since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, and 40% have avoided doing so, up from 26% in 2023.
Those fears aren’t new, but they have risen as have antisemitic attacks, anti-Israel protests and online threats.
When I walked into Rubin’s spacious, hospital-clean bike shop, I asked if he shared those fears.
“There’s nothing to be scared of,” he said.
One look at Rubin and here’s the obvious rebuttal: That’s easy for you to say. The 46-year-old, born in Herzliya to an American mother and a father from Libya, came to the United States in 1998 and made a profession of his cycling obsession. He is shaved, muscled, tattooed and speaks in rapid, commanding sentences.
Over the years, numerous people have shouted at him from outside the store to take down the flag.
“I say, ‘Come in here, let’s have a conversation,’” he said. “Not a single person has come in.”
Other reactions have not been as passive. Graffiti reading “Free Palestine” has appeared on the store window, and vandals have thrown numerous eggs at the place. He’s had death threats on his phone messages, including, ”I hope you die Jew” and “Your days are numbered.”
His Yelp and Google review rankings have been tanked by malicious one-star reviews.
Last March, a Jewish anti-Israel activist, Medea Benjamin, entered his store and called the Israeli flag shameful.
“What about the genocide?” she asked Rubin.
“There is no genocide,” he said.
Her Instagram post of the incident, which racked up 127,719 likes, prompted a deluge of negative reports to Instagram about the bike shop’s account. Instagram suspended his account, Rubin said, and has yet to reactivate it.
“Ten years of organic growth, gone,” he said.
But Rubin said the flag has also generated support. “For every negative,” he said, “we’d probably get two or three positives.”
Israeli tourists detoured inside to meet Rubin and thank him. American Jews, and some non-Jews, told him they appreciated the show of support.
The oddest reaction, he said, are from Jews who have urged him to take the flag down because, they said, it incites hate.
“Like it’s the new swastika,” he said.
But Rubin evinces neither fear nor loathing.
He doesn’t have “blind support” for the current Israeli government, he said, but he loves his country. Just because someone flies the American flag doesn’t mean they support President Trump, he pointed out.
It’s true that the Israeli flag, the symbol of a country embodied in conflict, is not exactly comparable to a menorah, seen largely as a religious symbol. Congregations have been divided over whether to display it on the bimah, as some congregants found it loathsome.
But someone prone to attack Jews might not make the fine distinctions between a menorah, a flag with a Star of David, and a Star of David hanging around a child’s neck, or on a Torah ark. The lines between these symbols are often blurry, but so is the logic of people who attack others just for displaying them.
I asked Rubin if he ever, in the past two years, considered taking down the flag, lighting the menorah in the backyard, so to speak.
“So then what are you?” he said. “You’re a Jew in silence, you’re a Jew in secret.”
Symbols aren’t arguments. They demonstrate but rarely convince, and nuance is not their strong suit. But to Rubin, their power lies not in the message they send to others, but in what they say to ourselves.
“Together,” he said, “we have more strength than we realize.”
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He used to think Jewish athletes were a punchline; now, he wants to help them get a proper paycheck
My favorite joke in the 1980 comedy Airplane! is, by the standards of a movie featuring a glue-inhaling Lloyd Bridges and an inflatable toy autopilot, one of its subtler gags. A passenger asks a flight attendant for some light reading; in return, she receives a pocket-sized leaflet of “famous Jewish sports legends”.
The vicious canard (just kidding, we’ve been called worse) that the so-called people of the book are ill-at-ease on the court or the gridiron contains a kernel of truth, of course. There’s a reason nearly all Jews know the names Koufax and Spitz — there are few other Jewish sports stars to choose from.
But the rapid growth of the country’s first Jewish NIL initiative, Tribe NIL, would suggest that, in the collegiate ranks at least, such stereotypes are baseless; in barely a year, it has accumulated a roster of nearly 200 athletes.
NIL, which stands for name, image and likeness, allows student-athletes to profit off of their fame and success, most often via endorsement deals requiring commercials, public appearances, paid social media posts and the like. (Here’s Arch Manning, star University of Texas quarterback, flinging a football downfield while wearing *checks notes* Warby Parker glasses.)
Until 2022, however, college athletes were barred from receiving any form of compensation for their services. So NIL initiatives — organizations that help connect students with funding opportunities — are a relatively new phenomenon. Most of the organizations bring together student-athletes with a particular unifying characteristic, usually a connection to a school or region; for instance, the University of Alabama, a college football behemoth, has two NIL initiatives, Yea Alabama and The Tuscaloosa Connection.
But Tribe is unusual in that it is not organized around geography, but around culture.
So co-founders Moses and Eitan Levine lean on a different kind of network: The Jewish professional one. “There are inherent advantages that the Jewish community has,” Moses told me over a Zoom call.
“I always joke that Jewish nepotism is a good thing,” he added.
Virtually none of Tribe’s athletes are able to command lucrative sponsorship deals, which, under the NIL system, are reserved for the very best Division I athletes in the so-called “revenue sports” — football and basketball. A good number of Tribe’s roster, by contrast, are Division III athletes, and few are in football or basketball. They’re still better at their chosen sport than nearly all other human beings, yet not good enough to be recompensed financially.
“That’s a problem,” said Moses. “A D-III field hockey player who doesn’t have inherent NIL value is still working a full-time job. It’s crazy they don’t get any compensation.”
With Tribe, then, Moses imagined other kinds of compensation. “The question we’re asking,” he said, “is how can our athletes use their name, image and likeness to get where they want to be in five or 10 years from now?”
Tribe’s answer is to cultivate closer ties with a myriad of institutions, and with their Jewish stakeholders in particular, in hopes of securing sponsorships, internships and jobs for its growing list of charges.
“Say I’m a big Jewish law firm,” Moses told me, “and I want to show that I support Jewish athletes. What if I hired a bunch of Jewish athletes for my summer internships, and then give them each an extra $1000 to allow us to advertise them on our Instagram?”
Moses and Levine pocket a fee for each deal, on top of whatever the athlete receives. Take the law firm example: In such a scenario, both men would be paid, by the firm, for giving that office access to the athletes — for “making the introductions,” Moses said.
The simple fact these athletes are Jewish is not the sole reason firms would hire them, Moses emphasized. “Like, they have a degree, and a full-time job as a basketball player on top of that, right? They’ve shown a level of commitment.” But Jewishness, Moses believes, can provide the proverbial foot-in-the-door. And he wants Tribe to be the intermediary.
“I wouldn’t ever tell a kid like they should only rely on the Jewish community to network,” he said. “But it’s a silver platter right there for you, and I promise you, it’ll work out for you if you lean in.”
For the tribe, by the tribe
Tribe is the brainchild of comedy writers Jeremy Moses and Eitan Levine. The pair met while working on Amazon’s short-lived sports TV show, “Game Breakers,” where they created a segment called “This Week in Jews.”
The duo, Moses said, quickly bonded over their shared cultural and sporting interests. Moses had a Conservative rabbi for a father and used to work for the site My Jewish Learning. Levine has a sizable social media presence as a comedian, which he often used to highlight Jewish sporting achievements in ways both heartwarming and acerbic.
In 2024, almost by accident, Levine helped broker the most significant Jewish NIL deal yet: A partnership between Manischewitz, of Matzoh fame, and Jake Retzlaff, Jewish quarterback at Brigham Young University. (Retzlaff was dubbed, entirely appropriately, B-Y-Jew.) Levine had worked with Manischewitz on his webseries, When Can We Eat, while Retzlaff had been the subject of one of Levine’s Instagram videos; he played matchmaker and made the shidduch to introduce the brand to the athlete.
Naturally, the photographs of a smiling Retzlaff holding up Manischewitz’s Potato Latke mix did not escape the attention of other Jewish student-athletes. Levine was soon inundated with requests for further kosher NIL deals, Moses told me.
This took both men by surprise; after all, they too had always subscribed to the notion that Jewish athletes were hard to come by.
“Our first thought was, ‘How many Jewish college athletes are there?’” said Moses. He decided to carry out a survey of sorts. “I went on the UCLA Athletics website — because I needed a school with a large population, a large Jewish population, and tons of sports programs — and looked at last names. If I was 75% sure they were Jewish, I counted it.”
His survey was unscientific, to be sure — Moses was a Jewish studies major, not a statistician — but it was effective: He counted 25 names.
“I was like, ‘Wait, that’s just at one school!” he said.
Moses realized that Jewish student athletes, far from being under-represented, were punching above their weight relative to the overall population. Thus was born Tribe NIL.
Schmoozing to success
Tribe’s yichus-heavy approach is premised on what Moses sees as one of American Judaism’s most enduring traditions: Rooting for Jews in sports just because they’re members of the tribe, whether they’re on your favorite team or not.
Moses offered up a choice example about Max Fried, the Yankees’ excellent pitcher. “Maybe you’re not rooting for the Yankees to win, but you’re still proud that the starting pitcher for the other team is a Jew.”
He acknowledged, however, that such an approach could limit Tribe’s appeal. It would be harder to pull off a paid appearance at a local synagogue, say, or a Q&A with Jewish partners at a business — with a view to potential employment down the road — if the athlete in question doesn’t feel especially Jewish.
So the collective is aimed squarely, and solely, at “proud” Jews, Moses said. “If they’re not comfortable talking about being Jewish out loud, then this is not the organization for them.”
Both Moses and Levine are holding out hope that Tribe will be spared the debates over Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and over competing definitions of antisemitism and Zionism, that have roiled so many Jewish-American institutions. “We really strive to be an apolitical organization,” Moses said. “Because the one time Republicans and Democrats sit together is at a college football game.”
Still, the fairly well-established pathway from U.S. college sports to the Israeli professional ranks is one Moses hopes to exploit, and he’s not afraid of upsetting anyone. “We want to help American Jews play in Israel,” he said. “If this is a political statement, then it’s a political statement. But I don’t think it should be.”
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