Temple toppled
Activists cry foul after demolition of historic Brooklyn synagogue
At 4024 Twelfth Avenue in New York’s Borough Park, there now sits a vacant lot, steeped in local history and embroiled in an ugly real estate battle in which civil and religious law intertwine.
The lot was home to Congregation Anshei Lubawitz, named for the Russian village that in the late 18th century spawned the ChabadLubavitch movement. Chabad, a hassidic dynasty that, having barely survived the Holocaust, has since become one of the dominating forces of 21st-century Jewish life, is more associated with a different Brooklyn neighborhood, Crown Heights, where the movement’s legendary headquarters sits at 770 Eastern Parkway.
Whether the Anshei Lubawitz of today is in fact a Chabad congregation is a matter of dispute. If you ask Asher Gluck, who represents one side of the ongoing real estate controversy, the congregation’s name is indeed an homage to the spiritual heritage of Lubavitch, but this is a shared lineage, from which the two both descend. Anshei Lubawitz was never an offshoot of the ChabadLubavitch movement, Gluck maintains.
Though a somewhat abstruse distinction, this internecine controversy is now tied up in a yearslong legal battle over who represents the synagogue, and who should determine its future.
Five years ago, a legal entity that presented itself as representing the membership of the congregation sold the property on which the synagogue sat to a real estate developer, in exchange for a promise to build the community a new, bigger, and better synagogue, complete with a ritual bath and a study hall, on the first two stories of a condo building.
The synagogue was dilapidated, Gluck says, a relic of earlier times and unfit for current use. A full restoration would have been costly, he says, and the congregation was not in a financial state to invest that much money in a large-scale renovation project.
But the deal came under fire by a coalition of Chabad community leaders, who viewed the demolished synagogue as part of the movement’s heritage, and a group of disaffected members of the shul, who say they never had a proper vote about whether to sell the property in the first place.
In 2019, the dissenters appealed to the City of New York to grant the synagogue landmark status, precluding its demolition and committing to its maintenance going forward, as a historic place in New York City history. The petition was rejected, but its 30 pages of synagogue history shed some light on why those who opposed the deal viewed the synagogue as more than just another old building.
The synagogue, which was originally built for a congregation called Temple Beth El, was believed to be one of the two oldest purpose-built synagogues still in use in the borough of Brooklyn, and the first built and oldest surviving synagogue in Borough Park.
The building was representative of Jewish architecture of that era. Its appearance was evocative of Moorish architecture, a nod to Judaism’s Eastern origins that was popular in synagogue design at the time. Many of the grand synagogues that now dot Upper Manhattan – Central Synagogue, the cathedral-like structure in Midtown, for example – also allude to the aesthetics of Andalusia.
And though the name of the synagogue suggests an origin in the Reform movement, the synagogue seems to have been occupied from the beginning by a notably traditional congregation – indeed, it was dubbed “the most prominent Orthodox congregation of Borough Park” in an article from 1909.
More than 100 years later, on the morning of Sunday, March 17, the structure was unceremoniously bulldozed. Yaacov Behrman, a Chabad community leader and crucial figure in the movement to oppose the sale of the property, was shocked.
Taking to social media, Behrman – the one and only
@ChabadLubavitch on X – assailed the demolition; he accused the developer of violating the terms of an arbitration agreement, and suggested that ritual objects, such as the synagogue’s Torah ark, may have been destroyed, instead of being treated with the proper reverence.
(Gluck says that all holy objects were removed well before the demolition, and that no structure that was part of the building itself had such a status.)
Publicly and privately, the sale’s opponents fulminated against the building’s destruction, asserting that the developer and his allies had run roughshod over the terms of an arbitration agreement, arrived at by a rabbinic panel after years of courtroom fighting between the parties.
“In more than four decades of practicing law,” wrote Stuart Blander, a lawyer representing the deal’s opponents, “it is difficult for me to recall anything more outrageous occurring in any case in which I have been associated.” In a letter to the rabbinic arbitrators, Blander expressed “shock and horror” at what he called “the unlawful demolition... in plain violation of court orders.”
The rabbinic court’s decision affirmed the original sale’s legitimacy, rejecting a request
by congregation members who opposed the deal that the community hold a second vote on the matter prior to moving forward. The decision demanded, however, a performance bond of $5 million – a bond that Gluck says was furnished – and placed a 30-day injunction on any changes to the building, including demolition.
That decision was signed February 29, but Blander alleges that his clients only received the decision after the demolition had already taken place, two weeks after the order was signed.
“They have to follow Jewish law in how they take down the synagogue,” Behrman told New York’s ABC7 the day of the demolition. “None of this was followed.”
On March 22, the chief judge of the arbitration panel weighed in, affirming that, “as of today, the court has still not received a bond,” and warned the developer “not to do anything to the building, or to the ground of the property, or to what remains connected to the ground” until such a bond is received.
What will come of 4024 Twelfth Avenue remains to be seen. There is no longer a synagogue to sue over, for better or worse, and real estate fights in New York City are foolish to bet on. Congregation Anshei Lubawitz still exists, and its history as a congregation is surely not over, whichever new home it ultimately migrates to. (The congregation has not met in the Temple Beth El building for years now anyway.)
BUT IF the synagogue’s construction in 1906 was meant to herald a new era of Jewish life in Borough Park, the acrimony over what should succeed it only testifies to the community’s success in making that vision a reality.
An estimated 100,000 Jews now live in Borough Park, including several hassidic communities, a non-hassidic ultra-Orthodox community, a Sephardi community, and a smaller Modern Orthodox community to boot. Borough Park hosts the headquarters of the Bobov Hassidic dynasty, and the Satmar Hassidic movement hosts several of its boys’ schools as well as its largest girls’ school in the neighborhood as well.
In 1906, the entire Jewish community – about 400 families – is said to have gathered at the ceremony to lay the cornerstone for Temple Beth El. The event included speeches by the Brooklyn borough president and by a lawyer named Michael Furst, who was eulogized in 1934 as “the grand old man of Brooklyn Jewry.”
Most notably, perhaps, the event was attended by the 14th Regiment band, which played the American national anthem as the cornerstone of the synagogue was laid. The borough president, bragging that “there are more Jews in this great city of ours than in any other city of the earth,” noted that “as time goes on [the Jews] are beginning to play an important part in the workings of this great nation.”
For all of American Jewry’s consternation about rising antisemitism and the future of Jewish life in the country, no one could deny the significance of what Furst observed at the time.
Though we cannot know today what Rabbi Hirschowitz – Beth El’s first leader, who retired to Palestine and is buried on the Mount of Olives – would say about the loss of Borough Park’s first synagogue, he would surely be glad to know that it wasn’t, and will not be, the neighborhood’s last.