The Spirit Moves Them, to Tarzana : Bais Menachem Chabad House Is New Valley Hub for Traditional Jewish Sect

More than 2,000 people helped the energetic, Hasidic Jewish movement known as Chabad open a $3.6-million spiritual and educational center Sunday, gaining a traditionalist foothold among the growing number of Jewish families in the western San Fernando Valley and Ventura County.

Bearded rabbis, some wearing Chabad’s signature black hat and black coat despite the hot midday sun, used the ribbon-cutting occasion to pay homage to the late, revered leader, or rebbe , of the worldwide Chabad Lubavitch movement, Menachem M. Schneerson, who died last year in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“There is an incredible presence here--it’s the presence of the rebbe . He is here today,” declared Rabbi Boruch Shlomo Cunin of Westwood, Chabad’s West Coast director. The outspoken Cunin is one of the most visible Chabad rabbis in Los Angeles with his annual telethon. This year’s is coming up Sunday.

Cunin spoke during festivities in front of the two-story, Art Deco building named Bais Menachem Chabad House in honor of the late elder . Chabad’s spread into the Valley dates from 1973, when the rebbe commissioned Rabbi Joshua Gordon and his wife as emissaries to the suburbs. Gordon began in a tiny office behind a pizza parlor on Ventura Boulevard.

“It was only due to the inspiration of the rebbe , during his lifetime and more so after his passing on high, that we are here,” said Gordon, now the senior leader of a network of eight centers, known as Chabad of the Valley, which are estimated to serve up to 5,000 people.

The most publicly active and exuberant of Judaism’s mystical Hasidic sects, Chabad occasionally sparks controversy with its aggressive recruiting of young Jews and its tendency to work apart from the larger Reform, Conservative and secular Jewish institutions. The death of its 92-year-old leader, Schneerson, last year was news-making because many followers had long hoped that he would confirm their belief that he was the Messiah.

Chabad has a center in North Hollywood--an area where most of the Valley’s traditionalist, or Orthodox, Jews have lived in recent decades. But five Chabad houses are located in the West Valley and two of the newest are in Westlake Village and Ventura.

Jewish demographers generally place the Jewish population in the Valley and Ventura County at about 250,000 and growing--with the shift generally westward.

“Chabad always goes where it sees a void,” said Rabbi Menachem Bryski, who is the leader of the Chabad House in Northridge. “For the longest time, the West Valley had very little going on in terms of traditional Judaism.”

The new Tarzana facility will open the second mikvah , or ritual bath, in the Valley--eventually lessening what one rabbi called a “bottleneck” at the other mikvah at Shaarey Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue in North Hollywood.

The ritual bath is used mostly by pious traditional Jewish women, who immerse themselves after their monthly menstrual period.

“Men also make use of the mikvah , but it’s not as strictly dictated by Torah [Jewish law] as it is for women,” said Bryski. “To men, it’s just to enhance their spirituality, especially before the Sabbath, and it’s almost obligatory before Yom Kippur.”

The new building, which has about 24,000 square feet of floor space and houses about 200 children in a preschool and kindergarten, also has space for about 900 worshipers in a room that will double as a synagogue and social hall.

“We’re going to fill that room on the High Holidays--you can take that to the bank,” predicted Rabbi Mordechai Einbinder, the spiritual leader of the Tarzana center and associate director of Chabad of the Valley.

“We used to sit like sardines in our original facility here,” Einbinder said.

Chabad’s Valley expansion has been directed out of Rabbi Gordon’s small synagogue on a residential street in Encino. But the rapid growth of Einbinder’s Tarzana center on Burbank Boulevard and its ability to develop more classes without neighbors’ objections led to the choice of the Tarzana center as the new hub for Chabad activities.

“A lot of Jews that were hiding in the hills south of the [Ventura] Boulevard now come walking down the hill to shul [synagogue] here,” said Bryski.

“We will attract the highest echelons of society and we will deal with people who no one gives a darn about,” said Einbinder.

The building project was launched in 1989 when Paul Reisbord, board chairman of C & R Clothiers, and his wife Haya contributed $360,000 toward what was then described as a $3-million building campaign. Einbinder said that nearly $2.5 million has been raised and a bank loan covers most other costs.

The upcoming Chabad telethon will not benefit the Tarzana center. “We are not connected financially in way, shape or form,” Einbinder said. “In Chabad, each emissary [rabbi] has to raise money for his place.”

The center may have opened Sunday, but the mikvah will not be operational until nature lends a hand.

As explained by Rabbi Aaron Adend, Jewish law requires that the mikvah needs to use water in its natural flow, such as from a spring or the skies. A catch basin on the roof will direct rainwater down a pipe to a basin with a concrete bottom, which sits atop the ground and is interpreted as part of the ground. The water from natural sources is not supposed to be in something regarded as a container, he said.

The cold rainwater will “touch,” in the rabbi’s term, the heated tap water in a basin above it (where the actual immersions take place) through a four-inch-diameter pipe connecting the two pools of water. That contact, and intermingling, of the water from two sources meets the requirement of Jewish law as interpreted by Orthodox rabbis, Adend said.

“If we haven’t had any rain by October or November, we will probably go up to the mountains to get some snow,” said Adend. “We will put it into milk crates, which have holes in them. Since they can’t hold water, they can’t be called containers.”

Rabbi Einbinder, joking in an interview about the dry spell in Southern California, said that the hundreds of helium-filled balloons released during the ribbon-cutting ceremony had messages on them: “Please, rain.”