The Manhattan Times

Glueck Center is first new construction on campus in 20 years

by Andrew Keshner

What better way to celebrate a new facility than a parade?

On Sept. 13, two torahs were paraded down Amsterdam Avenue from the David H. Zysman Hall near W. 186th Street. A saxophonist and a trumpeter led the crowd as students and well-wishers sang and clapped, surrounding the men carrying the sacred scrolls. The torahs were carried to their new home – an ark in the recently completed Jacob and Dreizel Glueck Center for Jewish Study – the first building constructed on Yeshiva University’s campus in the past 20 years.

With its stone and glass façade, the new building is a reason to celebrate. The center contains classrooms, offices and a spacious study hall.

Apart from the facelift to the Washington Heights campus, school officials said the six-story $32 million, 60,000-square-foot building underscores the school’s continuing vitality.

“It’s the tangible symbol of our absolute optimism for this yeshiva. This is a space where we will grow,” said university president Richard Joel, addressing an audience of at least 300 people with the building behind him.

In Sept. 2006 work started on the center, which is built on what was once primarily a parking lot on W. 185th Street between Amsterdam and Audubon Avenues. Dr. Norman Lamm, Joel’s predecessor as president and current chancellor and Rosh Ha Yeshiva, told the audience that he first started talking with the Glueck family about a project in 1997.

“Here we are 12 years later,” he said smiling.

The new center connects to the Mendel Gottesman Library and has a two-story beit midrash, or study hall, that can seat up to 550 people. The center has 50 offices for faculty and staff, plus 11 classrooms, including two lecture halls that can hold 70 students each. The center will also hold a satellite courtroom for the Beth Din of America, which is a rabbinical court.

The building boasts wireless Internet capability, has Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEEDS)-certified air conditioning and technology that can stream lectures to other campus classrooms.

The center was designed by HOK Architects, which is the same firm behind the creation of Citi Field and Yankee Stadium.

Vivian Glueck Rosenberg, a school trustee and daughter of Jacob and the late Dreizel Glueck, said that her parents had been motivated to build Jewish institutions in the wake of the Holocaust.

Jacob Glueck, a Holocaust survivor, philanthropist and businessman attended the event but did not speak. The almost 90-minute ceremony concluded with prayers inside the hall in order to bless the space.

After the event, Rosenberg said she was thrilled to witness the dedication. Explaining the building’s special look, Rosenberg said its window exterior was specially designed to reveal inside light as students studied into the night, symbolizing “the light of torah that should shine.”

The center is certainly a hit with students. Joel said the study hall was filled just minutes after it first opened two weeks ago. That popularity was on display with some students hitting the books inside the beit midrash immediately after the ceremony ended. Yitzchok Lieberman, a 27-year-old graduate student at the school’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, said the new building energized students.

“It’s definitely added a whole new fresh feeling to campus,” he said. “You come here and it wakes you up a bit. It’s shining and new.”

 The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.