A Synagogue Comes to Life on the Bowery

The Bowery still has a few surprises left. Just when you thought you’d seen the last incredible new thing on old Skid Row — luxury condominiums, fancy hotels, trendy restaurants and precious boutiques — comes something the Bowery has never had: a synagogue.

Indeed, the synagogue at Chabad Serving N.Y.U., 353 Bowery, at East Fourth Street, may be only the second religious sanctuary ever to have been situated on the Bowery. (The first was the Bowery Mission Chapel at No. 227, which opened in a former coffin factory just over a century ago.)

“To see the Bowery flourishing and our congregation flourishing, it’s a cool shiddach — a match, as we say,” said Rabbi Dov Yonah Korn, the co-director with his wife, Sarah, of the Chabad House.

“Cool shiddach” is the kind of usage you can expect from a 34-year-old former dreadlocked Deadhead who wears Pumas to work, uses an iMac and told the interior designer Penelope Kim that he wanted his study to feel like a “man cave.”

“We believe in a colorful Jewish experience,” Rabbi Korn said. “We honor the past so much, yet at the same time we want to be in the present — with flavor, with swagger, with the hip vibrations of today. That’s expressed in the building.”

So, too, is the fact that this is, after all, an Orthodox synagogue. Movable screens divide the small second-floor sanctuary, washed in daylight from a wall of windows at the back, into men’s and women’s sections.

Chabad, also known as Chabad-Lubavitch, is part of a worldwide Hasidic movement based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. A portrait of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), hangs in the little lobby of the Chabad House on the Bowery. The Chabad community at New York University was established about 10 years ago by the Korns. Its quarters were in the basement of 27 Washington Square North. Everything was improvised, every event overcrowded. At first, it had a special feeling to it. Mrs. Korn cooked Shabbat dinners in her own apartment on the Bowery, and students schlepped the food over to the Chabad House on Washington Square, about three-fifths of a mile.

“It was slowly getting less special and more frustrating,” Rabbi Korn said.

Because each Chabad center is independent financially, he said, he despaired of being able to acquire new space. But two years ago, with the real-estate market scraping bottom, Rabbi Korn set his sights on a 7,800-square-foot, two-story commercial condominium at the base of a new apartment tower, 52 East Fourth Street. Through contributions by students and alumni, their families and other supporters, he said, money was raised for the $3.6 million purchase price and the $1.5 million construction cost.

Beside the sanctuary, the Chabad center includes an assembly hall on the third floor with an adjoining kitchen, ideal for Shabbat dinners; a small library; offices; meeting rooms; and, of course, the rabbi’s man cave. The architect was Michael Even. The Chabad House opened last semester but will really “sprout forth” in September, Rabbi Korn said.

Ms. Kim, the interior designer, said students asked her to preserve some of the shoulder-to-shoulder quality the old Chabad House had at Shabbat dinners, which can attract as many as 400 students. “We like the energy, the hubbub,” she recounted them as saying. That dictated banquettes in covelike configurations “so the kids could squeeze in.”

This did not prevent Rabbi Korn from marveling last May, at dinner on the holiday of Lag B’Omer, by the sight that met his eyes. “Everyone had a place to sit.”