The Shul finds a home in former restaurant

Jeff Langer has been a member of Congregation Ahavat Yisrael —commonly known as The Shul — for about 10 years.

He said that during the small Bayside synagogue’s existence it has moved “four or five times,” before it came to the site it now occupies in the Audubon Court shopping mall.

“We just didn’t know where we were going to be,” Langer said in a telephone interview on Jan. 10. Moreover, “we were outgrowing what we had.”

And to top that off, the shopping mall space was so small that its administrative offices were in yet another building, according to the congregation’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Shmaya Shmotkin.

A division of Lubavitch of Wisconsin, The Shul has “85 formal” membership units, but many additional people participate in its programming, Shmotkin said. “We were really bursting at the seams,” he said.

These problems will soon be solved. On Dec. 17, the Bayside village board by a unanimous vote approved plans for The Shul to turn the building of the former Pandl’s in Bayside restaurant into a synagogue building.

Shmotkin said the purchase of the building and the site, located at the junction of Lake Dr. and Brown Deer Rd., was finalized on Dec. 28. The building will be remodeled into “a major social and sanctuary area” that will accommodate some 250 people, said Shmotkin.

Shmotkin said he hoped the project could take “three to six months.” Langer added that the congregation may be able to move into the building by this coming Pesach.

Originally, the congregation considered constructing a building from scratch.

It purchased three houses along Brown Deer Rd. between Pelham Parkway and Rexleigh Dr., and in 2005 obtained the Bayside village government’s permission to construct a new building there.

But “if we were to build a building, the investment of money and time would have been much greater,” said Langer.

Shmotkin said that about half-a-year ago, The Shul began speaking with the owners of the restaurant.

No news reports have said why the Pandl’s owners were willing to sell, though a WITI headline on the TV station’s Web site on Nov. 15 suggested that the restaurant was one casualty of the current economic recession.

Shmotkin said, “The timing was right for them [the restaurant’s owners] and for us.”

Though the congregation’s plans are “much more modest” than they would have been with a new building, purchasing the restaurant had the advantages of costing less and including a parking lot. Also, Pandl’s will need to be rezoned from a commercial site to an institutional site, usually considered a minor change compared to rezoning a residential site.

Shmotkin asked a group of Shul members to walk through the restaurant to check on its suitability. Langer was a member of that group, and said the restaurant impressed him as being “a beautiful property, with a lot of space that we could grow into.”

Shmotkin said the synagogue purchased the building and site for about $1.2 million. He said he didn’t yet know what the remodeling costs will be, as “that isn’t all priced out yet.”

He and Langer added that funds for the project are being predominantly raised by congregants, who Shmotkin said “really went above and beyond, giving very generously despite these economically challenging times.”

Both Shmotkin and Langer said they were pleased with this project.

“I think having a place to call home will naturally provide new opportunities [for carrying out the congregation’s mission to] provide a welcoming, family-like atmosphere where everybody feels at home with each other and with their Judaism,” said Shmotkin.

“It gives us the ability to have some permanence,” said Langer. “I am truly excited about the expansion [and] I can see a lot of good things coming.”

The project constitutes “yet another step in the work of Lubavitch of Wisconsin … to reach out to all Jews in the state and provide a setting where they can experience Judaism at whatever level they are comfortable with.”

Shmotkin said the congregation has not yet decided what it will do with the three houses on whose sites it was originally going to build.

Formerly op-ed editor, Leon Cohen has written for The Chronicle for more than 25 years.