A New Reckoning With Community

Founded soon after 9/11, a Tribeca cultural center is crafting a unique, post-denominational model for Jewish belonging.

photographs • michael datikash

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

It’s Friday morning in Tribeca, and the babies are rocking out.
A group of tiny children sits, enraptured, on the floor in the laps of their mothers and caregivers, listening to musician Jacob Stein play guitar, sing and enthrall them with the art of musical Jewish childrearing.
“Ima lights the candles and Abba gets the wine,” sings Stein during a song about the coming Sabbath, and the kids shake their little egg-shaped maracas and dance, if they are old enough to stand.
“OK, now we switch genders because that’s how we roll,” Stein says, still strumming, children careening around the carpet on chubby hands and knees and legs or whatever will get them closer to the music. “Abba lights the candles and Ima gets the wine.”
It is a typical Bim Bam class at the Jewish Community Project, a project that is coming to redefine what Jewish communal life means in Tribeca. JCP characterizes itself in opposition to the existing models of Judaism already at play in other neighborhoods of the city, at the synagogues and Jewish community centers that dot the uptown landscape. Here in Tribeca, says executive director Darren Levine, a new reckoning with Jewish community is necessary.
“We’re not a synagogue and not a JCC,” says Levine. “We’re an emerging community, but not one of faith, not focused around religion or sacred ritual. We’re a cultural center.”
JCP was founded soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center, nearby, in 2001, by the few Jewish families who either stayed in the area after the tragedy or moved there in its wake.
“After 9/11, a bunch of us were kind of left grappling for how do we remain as a tight community,” said Victoria Feder, president of JCP’s board and a co-founder of the project. “There was a lot of community outpouring but it was clearly not going to last. We thought, ‘How do we create a network, so if something tragic happens, or if we want to celebrate, we can be together?’ We realized that if we didn’t do it ourselves, it wasn’t going to happen.”
Like many children in the neighborhood, JCP is young, now 6 years old, and its founders hope it will grow alongside the children.
Originally conceived as an umbrella group that would unite and market all the emerging Jewish institutions in Tribeca, JCP morphed over time from a gathering in Feder’s living room to celebrate holidays and meet other Jews to a fully functional preschool with 75 students, adult educational classes, Hebrew lessons and activities for teenagers.
“The vision is bringing people together as opposed to saving the Jewish people,” says Levine.
The building, painted white with circular, maritime windows that make it feel as though you are walking through a ship, used to be an MRI/radiology lab and was opened just this fall. Levine hopes the floor to ceiling windows in the front will welcome in people from the street, and that the place will feel comfortable for all Jewish comers.
“We didn’t want a 5,000-square-foot sanctuary used three hours a week,” he says of the kind of spaces often seen in traditional synagogues. “Every inch of space here is programmed.”
He says that JCP, and Jewish life more broadly in Tribeca, points to “the return of Jewish foot traffic,” the shtetl mentality that Jews should be able to fulfill their Jewish needs in their own neighborhoods; 80 to 90 percent of participants in JCP events live within walking distance, says Levine.
Tribeca, or “Triburbia” as Levine jokingly refers to it because of its reputation for attracting large families, is known as an area rife with young children. It is not uncommon to see women walking around the neighborhood with “two kids in the stroller and one in the belly.” There is also a pull here between the older, artier pioneering Tribecans who moved in years ago when the area was still underdeveloped, and the hedge fund managers and other residents living in newly built $5 million lofts.
JCP offers something for all of them. It shuns the traditional ideas of membership, fearing that model creates a core and a periphery when the project’s mission is to be inclusive. It employs a rabbi, Erica Greenbaum, who performs Jewish ritual functions and also directs people to area and uptown synagogues if they feel that is what they are seeking.
“We are unaffiliated because we want families across the spectrum to feel welcome,” says Rabbi Greenbaum of the welcoming vibe at JCP. “Everyone has the same goals of creating a vibrant Jewish community inside, and outside a vibrant neighborhood community.”
Rabbi Greenbaum and Levine feel identity is a huge issue in New York City, something people are desperate to explore, and they want JCP to be a place to help them in that journey. At the same time, they are eager to work with other neighborhood Jewish and secular institutions to help make decisions about the character of Tribeca as it continues to grow.
“Real estate below Houston is good, but no one’s taken the lead on the social fabric,” says Levine. “I think JCP will have a big impact on defining that culture.”
After his class, Stein, who also works at other area Jewish institutions, commented on the meaning of attending a Jewish event like the Bim Bam class at an institution like JCP.
“The Jewish component offers kids and their parents the chance to feel comfortable with Jewish material, it gets them used to the sound of Hebrew and makes them understand that Friday is a good day for a Shabbat celebration,” he says. “No matter what they do later on, they’ll always have a comfort with the Jewish cultural experience.”
Randi Sidikaro, attending Bim Bam with her son, Mayer, agreed.
“It allows us to do Shabbat as a family, it’s very realistic,” she said of the once a week commitment and level of Jewish content.
Levine, who also has his rabbinic ordination from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and is working on a doctorate in pastoral psychology, sometimes muses about the impact of money on the JCP community, and how people working in the financial world deal with their spiritual side. He says despite an acclimation some people have toward organizing every aspect of their lives, there is a deeper side they are eager to address.
“Every human being, every Jew, deals with questions of meaning and purpose,” says Levine. “It doesn’t matter if they have money or [not], they are social animals and want to connect. We’re providing that connection.”
Now that its building is finished and it is engaged in the process of making a name for itself in Tribeca, JCP hopes to continue to grow, and Feder says the next big step is exploring the possibility of a day school, something that doesn’t exist below 60th Street in Manhattan, despite the abundance of Jewish families living downtown.
“It’s putty in our hands,” she says of the project she helped found, “and it’s for us, the community, to form it however we want.”
Back in Stein’s class, it’s not only the adorable infants and wired toddlers who are getting an education in music and Judaism.
“Look with intent,” Stein says to the kids. “As we know from postmodern art, intent is all that’s really necessary,” he adds, clearly for the benefit of their parents and caretakers.
And then, for once, the music room is quiet, as everyone who is old enough to have teeth chews on big pieces of challah in anticipation of the coming Shabbat, before heading back outside to the delights of Tribeca.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization