Being Secure and Feeling Safe: Building for the Jewish Community Today
Michael’s article on the relationship between design and safety at synagogues and shuls
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Pittsburgh. Poway. Colleyville. Monsey. Riverdale. All names associated in our minds with recent sites of violence aimed at Jews, or antisemitic attacks on Jewish community buildings that have become known nationwide. And after October 7, the number of places sharing this distinction has grown beyond our ability to keep track.
The increased vulnerability of American Jews has been made manifest in bricks and mortar, concrete and steel, and in the design of our community’s institutions—primarily our synagogues and schools. More and more, security concerns are significant when communities come to us to upgrade their facilities.
Creating a secure environment is something we do every day using time-tested, consultant-approved methods: We limit and secure points of entry, we can reduce visibility into a building by limiting and “hardening” glass, and we put barriers that keep potential aggressors far enough away from the building as is practical. These same techniques have been used for decades now in embassies and airports (since before 9/11) and government buildings (since Oklahoma City). More recently we have, to our deep regret, seen these same strategies applied in schools and concert halls to defeat mass shooters. Shuls and yeshivas have been included in this group for over a decade.
While this concern has been prominent for a while, only now do we feel a different challenge arising: the feeling that antisemitic acts are no longer the purview of a few fringe, crazy, radical people, but a nationwide groundswell unseen in over a generation. So our challenge now as architects is to consider not only the practical measures known to provide actual security, but to talk with our clients about what we all, as shul-goers, parents, teachers, administrators and students want to feel as we use these places. The aesthetics of shuls and schools matter: Do we want spaces that convey a feeling of safety, to feel embraced yet barricaded in a hardened place of shelter? Or do we want to enjoy the feeling that our places of worship and learning are places where the openness we wish to show the stranger, the troubled, the seeker and the unaffiliated is expressed in the openness and transparency of our communal institutions? So, beyond providing actual physical elements and practical measures to improve a facility’s ability to maintain security, what message should our building send through its appearance and design? Do we want a formidable fortress or an open tent?
Back in 2011, a JTA article by Sue Fishkoff, discussing a bomb set off next to a Chabad in Santa Monica, California, quoted Howard Lerner, executive director of Los Angeles’s Sinai Temple: “You want people to feel safe, but still welcome.” Yet this synagogue employs measures some might find extreme: People coming to services are “screened, wanded and eyeballed by a bevy of security personnel. Members of the congregation get a special decal allowing them to park in the building’s secure parking lot. The temple employs a full time security director and brings in nearly three dozen guards for high holiday services…” Twelve years later, in December of last year, The Business Insider recognized how the Gaza War has made this situation much worse:
In New York, [large Conservative synagogue] Kehilath Jeshurun spends ‘multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars’ annually on security assessments and upgrades. The synagogue has turned to congregants to foot the bill, charging a security fee of $250 per family as part of membership dues, an increase from past years. Even with 1,150 families paying the fee, the amount doesn’t fully offset the cost of keeping congregants safe. [Board Members] refer to this strain on communal resources as an ‘antisemitism tax,’ quantifying the financial and emotional burden of the vigilance required for a Jewish organization to function in America.
People might not only want to be safe but to feel safe, to have their synagogues and schools send a visual message to friend and foe: This is a secure place, safe and solid, more visually deterrent and less visually open.
Many buildings value an expression of solidity and invulnerability: banks, prisons, and military installations all send the viewer a message: Don’t bother trying to get in here (or to get out). It might be that this is a moment when the Jewish community might feel the need for an architecture that nurtures and protects, that is more about psychic healing and self-protection.
Since October 7, many in our community have felt a seismic shift in our place in the broader American landscape. Many Jews feel real danger and threat and the fragility of living in a society where old norms are shattered and old hatreds rekindled.
While as an architect I feel I have the tools to adjust to that reality, as a Jewish American I mourn the need for them. As a child of an earlier generation, where I felt welcomed and at ease in my community, where antisemitic incidents happened to other people in other places, and were a rare and remote concern — the idea that a shul or school should be visually welcoming to all remains a paradigm. But the current situation may prove a turning point.
Events, bad or good, tend to pass, while architecture tends to last. So maybe we can, as a community, aspire to better times and embody those aspirations in the institutions we build.
https://jewishlink.news/being-secure-and-feeling-safe-building-for-the-jewish-community-today/
