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Many smaller NYC congregations rent their space. As real estate prices soar, how do they find a home?
(JTA) — When Rabbi Adam Mintz’s Modern Orthodox congregation was first looking for a space on the Upper West Side, finding one that worked was no simple task.
Kehilat Rayim Ahuvim, the fledgling congregation, didn’t have the resources — i.e. tens of millions of dollars — to buy a property and develop their own building, so the plan was to rent.
But renting space for a congregation comes with very specific needs.
They needed a room that could fit the entire congregation, which would typically draw 50 to 80 people for services. There had to be a second space for kiddush lunch after Saturday mornings. The building needed to be on the Upper West Side, where its congregants, who’d broken off from Lincoln Square Synagogue following a lay leadership dispute, lived and could walk to synagogue. Perhaps most importantly, the space needed to be available for them on Friday nights and Saturdays, plus the major Jewish holidays.
And all this in the Manhattan real estate market.
Finally, after a months-long search, Mintz, on the advice of a congregant, found a spot that checked all those boxes, housed inside the National Council of Jewish Women’s building on West 72nd Street.
“God was smiling at us one day,” Mintz said in an interview.
“You can’t go on StreetEasy and find a synagogue space exactly as you want it,” Mintz said. “And that space on 72nd Street, I guess we walked past it every day. But it took somebody — one of our members had this amazing idea.”
Mintz said the arrangement was a win-win. For Mintz, his congregation had a place to meet while paying below market rate. Meanwhile, the NCJW was now benefiting from a new stream of income while housing a Jewish group, a partnership which Mintz said “strengthened the Jewish community.”
That search was just one example of the effort — and creativity — required to secure a space to congregate in New York City and solve the “edifice complex,” as Mintz refers to it.
“As real estate prices have gone sky high, New York City — and especially Manhattan — congregations have had to get creative,” said David Kaufman, author of “Shul with a Pool.”
Kaufman has written extensively on the history of American synagogues, including the entry for synagogues in Kenneth Jackson’s “Encyclopedia of New York City.” In that entry, Kaufman segmented the history of the city’s synagogues into four phases — the latest of which, starting around 2000, details the challenge of finding space as rents have skyrocketed.
“In my early years, the ‘70s and ‘80s, New York was not like that,” Kaufman said. “Rent was not astronomical and you could find premises for various purposes. Nowadays it’s nearly impossible.”
Congregations have indeed gotten creative, leasing from a variety of properties that moonlight as synagogues. A “shul community” called Kehillat Harlem rents out a storefront property on Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard. Modern Orthodox synagogue Prospect Heights Shul is housed in Luria Academy, a Jewish school in Brooklyn.
But even after a congregation secures a space, it is not necessarily out of the woods.
Independent minyan Darkhei Noam had been renting from Manhattan Country School on the Upper West Side since 2017. Its lease at MCS was set to expire in 2034 — but when the school went bankrupt this summer, the congregation was left scrambling for a new home.
Similarly, the Fort Tryon Jewish Center has been renting from the Fort Washington Collegiate Church in Upper Manhattan, but the church’s closure is forcing them out at the end of December, according to an email sent to their mailing list.
Paul Wachtel, the former co-chair of Darkhei Noam’s board who was involved in their building search, said it was “very difficult to find a place.” The cost of renting property can be prohibitive for a congregation that only uses the space a few times per week, he said.
“We need a space for all the Jewish occasions and events, but it would be impossible to buy and difficult to rent unless we have a partner who would make use of it at other times during the week, like an educational institution,” Wachtel said in an interview during the search. That search recently concluded — for now — when Darkhei Noam came to a one-year lease agreement with the Trevor Day School.
Mintz said he believes the optimal model is to rent space from a large Jewish organization’s building. He stuck to that model earlier in September when his congregation moved, after 21 years at NCJW, into the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan, rebranding as the Shtiebel @ JCC.
Mintz said he was excited by the move, for starters, because the congregation would be moving into “probably the busiest Jewish building in Manhattan.” (Mintz had long wanted to move into the JCC; things were finally set in motion after KRA held a service there last year, which served as something of a trial run, while its own air conditioning was broken.)
About a month into the relocation, Mintz said the Shtiebel @ JCC has been successful, with new people “from the community and people connected through JCC” joining services every week. His congregation is also planning to use the JCC’s rooftop sukkah.
But Mintz said this model — renting space from a Jewish organization — goes beyond just the JCC, and that he’d like to see it “replicated everywhere.” He added that big synagogues often rent out their spaces to non-Jewish organizations between services, and could do so with smaller Jewish nonprofits in mind.
“Whether it’s synagogues looking to find space in Jewish buildings, or big synagogues looking to rent [out] space to Jewish things — and nothing wrong with the non-Jewish things — but I think within the community, it only strengthens the community,” he said.
Kaufman said he hadn’t seen much precedent for the concept of a congregation leasing space from a Jewish community hub.
There are examples, Kaufman said, of congregations that were formed within organizations, such as at the Educational Alliance (originally called the Hebrew Institute) and the former Young Women’s Hebrew Association building on 110th Street.
“But in none of these cases is it another congregation that moves into and takes over space in one of those buildings,” Kaufman said. “So that is new to me.”
UJA-Federation of New York, the city’s largest Jewish organization, “regularly gives space to community organizations — including synagogues — for a wide variety of events and activities in our building,” public relations director Emily Kutner said by email. But she said that until now, “We have not been approached by a congregation to hold services in our building.”
Other Jewish organizations have been approached, and have rented out their space.
Temple Emanu-El’s downtown campus moved last year into the Center for Jewish History’s building. Executive director Dina Mann said the search involved looking at “dozens” of commercial spaces and reaching out to other “mission-aligned” nonprofits and museums that “could have had spaces.”
“I think having a similar sensibility about how to approach different aspects of Jewish community and life in New York is helpful. Specifically around security,” she said.
Another perk of being in the building, Mann added, is that “our religious school kids get exposed to different aspects of Jewish history.”
Rabbi Jonathan Leener, who leads Prospect Heights Shul, said the synagogue’s partnership with Luria Academy has opened up new opportunities in jointly applying for grants.
“It made sense to be like, ‘Wow, we could split this,’ and working really together to take advantage of what’s out there,” Leener said. “We’re hoping that some of the larger foundations and philanthropists are attracted by this model of Jewish community, of working together.”
As congregations like the Fort Tryon Jewish Center continue searching for a home, Mintz said he’d love to see a fund that incentivizes Jewish partnerships by kicking money to both the hosting and renting organizations. Some congregations face more obstacles with this model than others; FTJC, for example, serves the community of Washington Heights, which lacks Jewish organizations that could house tenants.
Still, for congregations that are walking distance from those organizations, Mintz said he believes these partnerships could be fruitful for all.
“It’s such an important real estate model, and we don’t utilize our real estate properly,” Mintz said.
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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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Everyone was a fan of Clive Davis — even if they didn’t know it
Last September I spent about 30 seconds with Clive Davis in a crowded elevator.
I was in the Sony Building, having just seen a press screening of Richard Linklatter’s Blue Moon. The elevator was full of mostly young people — probably Sony employees — and some press. The doors pinged open and in stepped a man with two handlers and an adorable spaniel. I turned to a fellow journalist and whispered “That’s Clive Davis.”
Someone who knew Clive — enough to call him “Clive” — told him we’d just seen a movie about the creative breakup between lyricist Lorenz Hart and musical composer Richard Rodgers.
“Didn’t you play Janis Joplin for Richard Rodgers,” he asked Davis.
Davis replied with perfect comic timing: “Yes. He hated it.”
That anecdote tells us just how much Davis, the legendary music executive and producer who died Monday June 22 at the age of 94, changed the musical landscape.
Davis had been in the music business long enough to serve as a bridge figure between the Great American Songbook and the popular music of the latter half of the 20th Century. The artists he signed at CBS, and later Arista (he was ousted from the CBS/Columbia for allegedly using company money to finance his son’s bar mitzvah), are enduring icons even, in the case of Ms. Joplin, decades after their deaths.
But what hit me in the elevator was the feeling that not everyone there knew who he was. They did, of course, know the music: Pink Floyd, P!nk, Whitney Houston, Sly and the Family Stone, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Aerosmith, the very authors of “Love in an Elevator.”
It’s not overstating it to say that Davis’ influence across genres and his golden ear provided the soundtrack to American life. His own life was productive until the end.
He was in the Sony building because he was Chief Creative Officer at the company. A week before his death, the streets were thumping with a New York anthem from one of his late career discoveries: Alicia Keys.
Davis’ rise could be taught in Jewish Studies courses. Born in working-class Crown Heights, he — like Barba Streisand — was a graduate of Erasmus Hall High. He made good at NYU and got his law degree at Harvard.
He rose from the legal department at Columbia to become the company’s top tastemaker. Somewhere along the way he discovered Joplin — of a polar opposite disposition and background — and went from strength to strength.
Davis’ true triumph might have been just how adept he was at navigating everything the U.S. had to offer. The musicians he promoted had little in common save for his imprimatur.
In that elevator, which delivered us without much fuss to the lobby, there may have been people whose musical tastes gravitated to rock, R&B, jam bands, easy listening, guitar instrumentals and jazz.
Whether they knew it or not, Davis shepherded something they liked into existence. His genius was in recognizing genius.
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