The doorbell kept buzzing at Heather and Teddy Karatz’s art-filled loft on Bond Street in Lower Manhattan on a recent Wednesday night, admitting a stream of stylishly dressed young Jewish professionals: financiers and investors, designers and artists.
The crowd nibbled at sliders and salad, chatting about the relative merits of trading commodities or distressed real estate, and comparing their day’s exercise as displayed on their Nike FuelBands.
Then an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, dressed unexpectedly in a tight black shirt and ripped jeans, called the group, part of the Soho Synagogue, to attention. “Turn off your ringers, and turn on your hearts,” said the rabbi, Mendel Jacobson.
He began reciting, in the original Aramaic, a passage from the Babylonian Talmud about idol worship, translating each sentence into English. Some guests looked bored, others engrossed.
Soho Synagogue first made headlines more than five years ago when it began hosting buzz-filled downtown parties without obvious religious content.
Adding to the mystique of the events was the seeming paradox that these gatherings of attractive, secular young Jews were organized by a young Orthodox couple who had formally broken with the Lubavitch Hasidic movement, but who continued to identify personally with its teachings.
Now older than many of their members, the synagogue’s leaders, Rabbi Dovi Scheiner, 36, and his wife Esty, 32, are trying to export what the couple calls the Soho Synagogue “brand” — its fusion of traditional Jewish practice with a modern urban aesthetic — to young distracted Jews in other cities.
And, in New York, they are seeking to ramp up religious content, through biweekly Talmud gatherings at members’ lofts and more regular worship services.
Saturday night marked the debut event of Soho Synagogue Los Angeles: a house party in the Hollywood Hills with a view over the city.
There was a D.J. and two open bars, and a crowd flush with actors, filmmakers and others from the entertainment industry, many of whom described themselves as “cultural” or “High Holiday” Jews. The event, news of which spread through word of mouth and private invitation, was free.
The Scheiners have already hosted several parties in Miami, and want to start similar gatherings in Chicago, the Hamptons, London, Paris, San Francisco, Tel Aviv and Toronto over the next three years. Over time, they plan to layer in Jewish programming, encouraging young Jews in those cities to take the lead in organizing, and if the need arises, helping them to hire their own rabbis.
“The greater dream which is really exciting,” Rabbi Scheiner said, “is not 10 communities, but a unified global community, so that this sort of diaspora becomes unified through an experience.”
If the idea of setting up a global network to help Jews reconnect to their tradition sounds familiar, it should. The Lubavitch Chabad Hasidic movement, based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, runs a kind of religious foreign service that sends ambitious young couples around the world to start up satellite congregations and kick-start Jewish life.
In their own way, that is what the Scheiners are still doing. Raised in the Lubavitch tradition and married in Brooklyn on Sept. 11, 2001, in sight of the smoke from the collapsed World Trade Center, they longed to work in Lower Manhattan to spread Jewish life there. But the Lubavitch rabbi assigned to the area let it be known there were no openings, they said.
After much angst, the couple decided to break out on their own, with the support of their families and a few advisers. “I stole a shlichus,” Rabbi Scheiner recalled telling one of his favorite yeshiva teachers, using the Lubavitch term for a Jewish outreach post. “And he said, ‘You stole it? They stole it!’ ”
They started small, with Mrs. Scheiner baking challah and offering it to people in their building on Chambers Street. Within a few months, they had their first guest for Shabbat dinner.
They listened as nonreligious Jews told stories about stifling Hebrew schools and uninspiring worship services that led to their alienation from the faith. The couple asked them how they could create something appealing and different.
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