Community Corner
[VIDEO] Congregation Sons of Israel Dedicates Educational Center
The new building houses four classrooms
For its 120th birthday, the temple in Nyack received quite a gift: a new education center.
After five years of planning, raising money and construction, the congregation held the dedication of its new Educational Center Saturday night, where Rabbi Jeffrey Abraham affixed a mezuzah on the door to the new center, which houses four classrooms.
“The number one thing the new building allows us to do is to program it for early childhood,” he said. “The old building was never up to proper code and they built this one specifically to be up to code so we’ve been able already to do multiple different early childhood programs from yoga for kids to music classes for little kids to Hebrew immersion class. We have Shabbat class.”
The Hebrew school has about 25 students right now, and the congregation is hoping to bolster numbers with the new facilities. Additionally, in September 2012, the Congregation Sons of Israel will open the Hebrew Preschool of Nyacks on its campus along with Upper Nyack’s Temple Beth Torah.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do that without the new building,” Abraham said, adding they’re hoping for about 12-15 kids ages two and three to start the preschool.
Even though the process took about five years, it was first brought up closer to 10 years ago, according to Nina Iser, the immediate past-president of the Congregation Sons of Israel.
“It was something the past three or four presidents all talked about, and finally we got together with about 15 key families to really get going,” she said.
She said they brought in a professional consultant and started raising money to pay for the building. Iser said they paid for the building using only the $1.2 million they raised.
“We made three directives to people when they donated,” she said. “We told them we wouldn’t mortgage the property, we’d only spend what we could raise and we wouldn’t tear the community apart. And we lived up to all of those.”
The trickiest one might’ve been the third one, she said, adding that there was so much input from so many different places that there were a lot of arguments. But, in the end, everyone just wanted what was best for the community and they all learned to listen to one another and respect each others’ opinions, she said.
“At the end of the day, the building got built and we’re all still talking,” Iser said.
The educational center is now attached to the other building, which it wasn’t before. Larry Kintisch, congregation member and husband of temple President Alice Kintisch, said the congregation moved to its current location in the 1960s. There was a mansion on the property they knocked down to build the temple and a carriage house, which was used as the synagogue for a few years while the new building was being built. The carriage house eventually became the school.
With the temple celebrating its 120th year, the congregation is hopeful the new building will attract some new members and keep it going strong well into the future.
“For a congregation that’s been around for 120 years, there becomes a concern about what will the future look like,” Abraham said. “This new building really represents that that synagogue does have a future, that it’s not going to taper off and have to merge or other things like that, which other synagogues in Rockland County have had to do or are in discussions of doing. This really shows that we’re here and we’re here to stay.”
