Port Washington: Jewish Life is Booming Here

Rebecca Rosenthal – Lubavitch.com

Children at the Chabad of PW preschool.

PORT WASHINGTON, NY — You don’t find many storefront houses of prayer in Port Washington, NY. A modest home carries a $1 million price tag, double that for a place on the water. Residents are not likely to be calling out to a Higher Power to fill the void left by economic insecurity.

Nevertheless, Chabad of Port Washington is experiencing nothing short of a boom. Its two-acre campus houses a 25,000 square foot preschool, school, mikvah and synagogue complex with water views. An expansion project is underway to add another 18,000 square feet that will house a prep school caliber library and gymnasium.

“Until Chabad came I never saw a Jewish presence in Port Washington,” said Dr. Martin Brownstein, whose medical lab served the area for three decades. “I never saw a mezuzah on a door. I never saw anyone wearing a yarmulke. The ethnic newspapers were Korean, nothing Jewish.”

Synagogues in the area had and continue to boast solid affiliation numbers, but being Jewish in Port Washington was a low profile affair. Now, 17 years into Chabad’s presence in the area, its Chabad Academy of Sciences and Humanities educates 200 children. Fifty-eight tots fill the Brownstein Preschool to capacity, and there’s a waiting list. 120 students are enrolled in Hebrew School. Another 150 attend post-bar and bat mitzvah teen clubs.

Crossing through the double doors into Chabad’s mikvah, open since the summer, offers a window into Chabad’s growth. Custom upholstered Ethan Allen chairs flank a fireplace in the anteroom. Opposite the elegant credenza stands a hardwood desk burnished to a gleam. It holds a butter soft leather-bound schedule book. Entry into the exclusive mikvah, which is fed by a custom-built waterfall, is by appointment only. The only clue that this is not a spa waiting room is the Chabad volunteer who appears to answer related mikvah questions.

All the opulence has holy roots. “The best way to appreciate the physical world is by seeing it through the eyes of the Torah and the Creator,” Rabbi Sholom Paltiel, director of Chabad of Port Washington, told Lubavitch.com.

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