“Rabbi K” is Looking for a Permanent Home

The rabbi is looking. He’s been looking for months. And, as soon as he finds the right property, he’s buying it and moving Chabad of Owings Mills to its own, long-hoped-for home.

“We want to build a thriving community synagogue,” said Rabbi Nochum Katsenelenbogen, affectionately known as Rabbi K, director of the Owings Mills outpost of Chabad, currently located in a storefront in the Crondall Corner shopping center.

Chabad calls itself the largest Jewish organization in the world, with 3,000 centers in over 60 countries around the world. There are 25 Chabad centers in Maryland alone, from Baltimore City to Columbia and from Bel Air to Frederick.

The Owings Mills Chabad, an affiliate of Chabad Lubavitch of Maryland, is a relatively recent addition. Founded in 2003, it didn’t start programming until 2005 with the arrival of Katsenelenbogen, his wife, Chanie, and now-four children.

“We were living in New York and I got a call about Baltimore. We’d never been there. I googled Owings Mills. I didn’t even know how to spell it,” said Katsenelenbogen, a native of England whose accent is faint but unmistakable. “We visited, and I got the sense it had a large Jewish community.”

It does, indeed. The 2001 demographic survey of The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore counted 7,600 Jewish households in the Owings Mills and Reisterstown area.

Owings Mills and Reisterstown experienced the biggest growth spurt – over 170 percent – in metro Baltimore from 1985 to 1999, though that growth has stagnated in the decade since, according to a 2010 survey.

There are several congregations in Owings Mills — notably Beth Israel and Har Sinai — conservative and reform congregations, respectively.

“But our outreach is especially to unaffiliated Jews and to intermarried families,” said Katsenelenbogen, who has made Chabad a visible presence in just a few years.

In 2005, the year he arrived, Katsenelenbogen started a weekly worship service that has grown from 10 people to an average of 40 people. A year later, he opened a Sunday/Hebrew school that started with one class and four children and now has three classes and 20 children.

Also that year, Katsenelenbogen began offering free High Holiday Services at Timbergrove Elementary School. Five years later, in 2010, Chabad’s High Holiday Services moved to rented facilities at the Owings Mills Jewish Community Center.

With over 400 people in attendance, “we ran out of space,” said Katsenelenbogen, who expects an even larger crowd this year. “We get a lot of repeat worshippers, and the word is spreading.”

Besides the weekly worship service and Sunday/Hebrew school, Chabad of Owings Mills offers ongoing classes in Talmud and Kabalah, a Sunday prayer breakfast and study session, a Jewish Women’s Circle, two kosher cooking classes for children and bar and bat mitzvah preparation and celebration.

All events are held in the storefront that Chabad occupies at 11299 Owings Mills Blvd., in the rear of the shopping center. To say that “Rabbi K” is ready to move from its current cramped quarters is an understatement.

“I’ve looked at several locations in Owings Mills. I need at least five acres of land,” he said, for Chabad’s future synagogue and Sunday/Hebrew school. “I’m ready to build.”