Chicago Chabad Center in Foreclosure

Seven years ago, Lubavitch Chabad of the Loop, Gold Coast and Lincoln Park took out a $4.9 million loan to build what was supposed to be a state-of-the-art synagogue and community center at Chestnut and Clark streets.

As collateral, the group offered the Chabad House of the Loop, where Jewish travelers and members of the Hasidic Orthodox community go for worship, religious classes and meals. It was also the home of the group’s leader, Rabbi Meir Chai Benhiyoun.

But when the economic downturn caused construction plans to fall apart, Benhiyoun not only lost his dream for an Orthodox community center. He now stands to lose the roof over his head.

On Wednesday, the brownstone on North Dearborn Avenue that has housed Chabad for 12 years, and where Benhiyoun and his wife, Rivka, are still raising six children, was to go on the auction block. Benhiyoun is praying for an 11th-hour miracle to save his home and keep his community together.

“I hope and trust this story will end with a positive ending,” Benhiyoun said. “A bank should not have a record of foreclosing on a synagogue where a rabbi lives with his six children.”

Born in Morocco and raised in Israel, Benhiyoun and his new bride were sent to Chicago in 1987 by the leader of the Lubavitch Chabad movement, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson.

While most of the area’s Hasidic Jews were concentrated in Skokie and Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, Chabad, a Hasidic movement focused on education and outreach, set out to establish a community at the city’s center. Hasidic Judaism combines ultra-Orthodox observance and mystical Jewish teachings similar to the Kabbalah.

Gradually, Benhiyoun developed a following. The first Chabad House operated out of office space in the financial district. The second location became a two-flat in Lincoln Park. In 2000, the Benhiyouns and their eight children moved into a town house at 1236 N. Dearborn Ave.

The house served as a residence, classroom and synagogue. Members of the Chabad community moved to the neighborhood too — an investment that enabled them to walk to worship on the Sabbath. The Chabad House also caters to Jewish travelers seeking to worship or eat a kosher meal. For any given Friday or holiday, Rivka Benhiyoun bakes homemade challah bread and prepares meals for up to 100 guests.

In 2005, the group broke ground on a multimillion dollar Center for Jewish Life at Chestnut and Clark. The contemporary glass building would house a sanctuary, school, crisis intervention services and kosher catering. Even more important than breaking ground, concrete was poured for the mikvahs, or ritual baths, considered the cornerstone of observant Jewish life.

Benhiyoun said The Private Bank, which granted the loan, accommodated Chabad’s “piecemeal” strategy. Chabad had no endowment or coffers from a capital campaign to offer as collateral for the project. To finance the loan, the group offered Chabad’s current headquarters.

“This was all Chabad had to pay with,” Benhiyoun said.

The rabbi never imagined the economy would turn sour and the bank would come to collect.

Benhiyoun said in 2007 donations took a nose dive and the bank changed its rules. Unable to meet the bank’s new demands, the community tried to sell the property on Chestnut. But it wasn’t able to do that either. The bank was asking for more, but people were giving less, he said. A spokeswoman for The Private Bank declined to comment.

“The whole environment changed,” Benhiyoun said. “The community changed because they got scared. You can’t squeeze a lemon out of a turnip.”

On Tuesday, as a judge denied the motion to delay Wednesday’s auction, Benhiyoun was driving back to Chicago from New York City where his youngest son donned tefillin for the first time, a rite of passage that precedes a young man’s bar mitzvah.

Meanwhile, a dozen women gathered in front of an ark in the den of the Chabad House to study Torah with Benhiyoun’s oldest daughter, Chaya Moscowitz.

Chavah Golden, 62, said she and her husband have supported the center financially for 15 years. They also moved to a building across the street in order to walk to services on the Sabbath.

“It’s a very genuine community,” said Golden, who unlike her husband wasn’t raised Jewish.

Yechezkel Elkins, a real estate lawyer, also has supported the community since he stumbled upon one of Benhiyoun’s classes 15 years ago.

“I knew immediately it was going to change my life,” said Elkins, who was raised in a nonobservant Conservative Jewish family. “I know people might not be used to the way we look with the beards and yarmulkes and such. It’s not a typical sight. But it promotes good values of respecting people’s differences, making families and creating stable homes.”

Benhiyoun helped Elkins meet his wife. When the rabbi’s family moved to the Gold Coast, Elkins and his wife did too.

“God forbid, if he had to move it’s not just his family on his shoulders,” Elkins said. “It’s also a community with families. It’s not so easy to move these days.”