ALANNA E. COOPER
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Future in question for Chicago Loop Synagogue and its monumental stained-glass window
 
Just three stories high and hemmed into a small 5,000 square foot lot, the building at 16 South Clark street in Chicago is a small jewel box, situated amid the city’s dense urban fabric.  Exuding an aura of cool simplicity, the structure’s façade is composed of glass, metal and concrete planes.  Its name is etched in delicate gold lettering: Chicago Loop Synagogue. 
 
Perched above the synagogue’s front door, a two-ton brass and bronze sculpture extends over the sidewalk. Created by Israeli artist Henri Azaz, the work is comprised of bold letters tumbling over each other, spelling the priestly benediction.  A pair of massive hands emerge out of the English and Hebrew words, sloping gently downwards as though placing a blessing on the heads of all those who enter.  Dedicated in 1963, the sculpture has since weathered and turned a tarnished green.  Streaked with corrosive lines, the heavy hands now look weary.  Chicago Loop Synagogue has fallen on hard times, its future precarious.
 
Decline began long before the synagogue shut its doors in response to Covid-19.  Indeed, the pandemic has proved to be a small financial boon, as keeping the building closed has cut expenses necessary for operating its outdated and inefficient systems.  The Covid pause has also given synagogue leadership time to ponder how the congregation might recover, and what is at stake if they were to sell the building and relocate or disband altogether.
 
A synagogue for the world
 
Conceived in 1929, Chicago Loop Synagogue was initiated by a gift from the Midwest Branch of United Synagogue of America.  Since then, it has served as the only consistently operating Jewish house of worship in the “Loop,” the one-and-a-half square mile area touted as the second largest business district in North America.  Centrally located inside the district, the Loop synagogue was founded to serve commuters seeking kosher food and a place to pray during the workday.
 
The institution quickly gained national recognition.  By 1934, the prayer space was renovated to accommodate more worshippers, and was featured in the Chicago Tribune for installing air conditioning.  Membership grew.  Situated just a few blocks from the site of “Century of Progress,” Jewish tourists attending the Chicago World’s Fair must have sought it out as the only synagogue in the district. Visitors also likely came to view the celebrated wall paintings designed by A. Raymond Katz, official muralist for the world’s fair.  Sightseeing translated into financial support, and by 1936 the synagogue had managed to sign on 8,000 members.
 
That number declined over the years to 1,400 member units in 1992, and to 416 today.  Still Chicago Loop Synagogue holds fast to its identity.  “We are not a neighborhood synagogue,” administrator Mary Lynn Pross points out, “we have always been a synagogue for the world.” 
 
Now - as in its early years – synagogue members include commuters who come from Chicago’s nearby suburbs.  Les Blau is among them. Each weekday morning Blau attends services at Central Avenue Synagogue near his home in Highland Park, then hops on the train for a 45-minute ride to his law office in the Loop.  In the afternoons, Blau takes a quick jaunt from his office to the Loop synagogue to attend minha (afternoon service). “It’s the only institution like it in the Loop – the only synagogue in the area that holds afternoon services every weekday all year round.”   
 
Other commuters come from New York, Los Angeles and internationally.  “We’ve got members who regularly fly in on business,” explains Pross, “whenever they are in town, they head here for daily services.  They also count on us as for kosher food – there’s nowhere else in the Loop where they can get it.”
 
The downside of serving as a destination-synagogue is a weak sense of community.  Nearly every single member also belongs to a home synagogue closer to where they live.  “We are really three – or even four – different congregations,” President Lee Zoldan reports.  Strong ties bind members who see each other every day at shaharit (morning services).  So too for those who regularly attend minha, like Les Blau.  But these two groups generally don’t overlap.  Nor do they intersect with the 30 – 40 members who live in the Loop’s immediate outskirts and regularly attend services on Saturdays.
 
“We are in dire straits,” continues Pross, breathless with a sense of urgency.  Dues are a low $180 a year for an individual membership, and given members’ loose sense of connection, the institution’s leadership fears losing people if that fee is raised significantly. With no endowment or large donors, Chicago Loop Synagogue is headed for the red.  “We are currently breaking even on a cash-flow basis,” president Lee Zoldan wrote in a 2021 Small Project Community Grant Application submitted to American Institute of Architects.  Still, “we know that social trends will not favor us long term. Unless we can find additional income streams, we will be forced to close our doors and sell the building.”
 
Letting go of their mid-century modern structure, however, is hardly the ideal answer.  Never mind that it is an architectural gem, or that the congregation’s most significant asset – its property located just blocks west of Millenium Park - is worth millions.  Relinquishing the building would also doom the fate of Chicago Loop Synagogue’s monumental stained-glass window. Designed by renowned artist Abraham Rattner, the work was the subject of a 1976 exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and a 1978 exhibition at the Skirball Museum in Los Angeles.  Insured for $1.5 million, this spellbinding window is simply too large to fit anywhere except where it sits now; inside the prayer space for which it was created.
 
Rattner’s window, “…. and then there was light”
 
Although Rattner was known primarily as a painter, he was enchanted with glass as an artistic medium, and saw its potential to fill the sanctuary space with a magisterial aura.  Focusing on Genesis, he spent two years (1957-1959) studying the Bible’s opening sentences.  Honing in on the hidden meanings of the words, “and there was light,” Rattner worked to channel cosmic creative energies of the Divine.
 
With notes and sketches in hand, Rattner then traveled to France to work in Jean Barillet’s glass studio where he spent much of the year (1960) focused on the window’s design and fabrication.  The scale was expansive.  At forty feet wide and three stories high, it was devised to fill the entire eastern wall of the synagogue.  Jutting into the prayer space from the far-left corner of the window, Rattner incorporated the ark that would house the Torah scrolls.   He surrounded it with flames – integrated into the glass – leaping up and out, drawing attention to the presence of God in the very heart of the sanctuary.
 
“Rattner was a deeply spiritual artist, imbued with a powerful moral connection to his own Jewishness,” art historian Samantha Baskind remarks.  He wrote that he envisioned Chicago Loop Synagogue as a place where the worshipper might experience “renewed faith in a higher elevation of being.”  Clearly, Rattner achieved his goal.
 
The window dominates the synagogue’s vast column-less space, cathedral-like in its openness. Those who enter are “awestruck,” reflects Les Blau.  And Pross, who herself is not Jewish, recalls people dropping into the building before Covid-19. “They came just to sit in the sanctuary. It’s hard to explain to someone who has not been here,” she continues, “You have to be in that room, with the light streaming through that window.  Even if you don’t understand the language [of the prayers]” the experience transcends religious identity.
 
In addition to these occasional visitors, over 2,000 people visit the space each year as part of Chicago Architecture Foundation’s annual Open House tour.  So too, groups from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Historical Society regularly tour the building to study the architecture and behold the window.
 
Looking towards Chicago Loop Synagogue’s future
 
In exploring the possibility of the congregation leaving its building, Zoldan has reached out to a number of museums to see if she might find a new home for the window.  She has learned from conversations with staff as the Art Institute of Chicago and the Leepa-Rattner museum in Tarpan Springs, Florida that the work’s tremendous scale would make moving it prohibitive.  
 
“I don’t want to see it divided up into pieces and sold off as scrap,” Zoldan pauses and takes in a deep breath. “That window has been the centerpiece of our sanctuary since the day it was installed,” her voice wobbles, “we are attached to it.  The window, our location, our historic building, they are all integral to who we are.”
 
Taking the next step in planning for the future, Zoldan has convened a task force.  The group is charged with imagining a new future for the congregation and its building: one that will generate revenue, while simultaneously allowing them to preserve the Rattner window intact and continue meeting in their space.  Possibilities include refashioning the building to serve as an education center, a theater, an event space, or - most tantalizing - a national sanctuary for synagogue stained-glass. 
 
Envisioned in part as a light-and-color experience, and in part as a museum, this “stained glass sanctuary” would provide dissolving synagogues across the county safe haven at Chicago Loop Synagogue for their own colorful windows.  This idea is favored by task force member Michael Landau.  An architect who has worked on over 75 U.S. synagogues, Landau is known for his creative re-use of historic sacred materials.  He takes windows, Torah arks, perpetual lamps and other treasured ritual objects, which hold synagogues’ histories, and incorporates them into new contemporary design schemes.
 
“I see that as integral to my work,” Landau states, “honoring their past by giving them new life.”  That is his hope for Chicago Loop Synagogue.  As other congregations across the country shrink, disband, and struggle to figure out what to do with their own stained glass, the Loop synagogue with its Rattner window beckons.  “I think it can serve as a beacon,” Landau says; a gathering place for displaying the windows and telling the stories of their congregations.  “That solution is the most intriguing and significant from an artistic and religious point of view.”
 
Les Blau is likewise optimistic.  “All it takes is one person – or a few - who don’t want to see this magnificent structure go to the wrecking ball.”  Zoldan, who has taken the burden of the building onto her shoulders, is more pensive.  “There is a lot of work to be done.  This is a monumental endeavor.”   
 
For now, those who attended services regularly before Covid-19 are getting vaccinated and looking forward to returning to their luminous prayer space once the pandemic is under control.  And all options for their future are still on the table.
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
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