By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Noting that it was just 72 hours before the New Year, Rabbi Mordechai Farkash drew parallels to Rosh Hashanah as he presided over the groundbreaking ceremony of the Eastside Torah Center’s new 16,000-square-foot synagogue and center in north Bellevue.
“This is a further development in the work of the Lubavitcher Rebbe,” Farkash told the crowd of about 200 during a sun break on the afternoon of Sept. 25.
The primary goal of the center will be education, Farkash said.
“It’s all about learning,” he said. “Education to the youth, education to adults, education to the golden age.”
Aside from synagogue services, several programs that include youth and young adult programming will be held in the new center, as will an expanded Jewish library. The Eastside Torah Center currently resides in 3,000 square feet about a half mile west of the new facility.
The $4.5 million project was launched three years ago when longtime Torah Center member Karen Mannering pledged a $1.8 million matching grant. Though center officials had expected the project to be completed by last year’s High Holidays, the economy and other issues got in the way. Still, the center’s development director and lead fundraiser, Dan Cahn, who returned to Bellevue for the ceremony from Israel after recently making aliyah, noted that 77 percent of the fundraising had been completed, “with not one penny of debt.”
Rabbi Yechezkel Kornfeld, a longtime Seattle-area educator and rabbi of Congregation Shevet Achim on Mercer Island, told the crowd that the new center will be a source of light in the community.
“It will illuminate the hearts and souls of Jews old and young that will enlighten all segments of Jews in Bellevue,” he said.
Following a shofar blowing and speeches from several area Chabad rabbis, the ceremonial digging took place on the spot where the ark that holds the center’s Torahs will be located. Rabbis Farkash and Kornfeld, as well as Mannering, her father, and Rabbi Sholom Ber Levitin, director of Chabad of the Pacific Northwest, carved out a hole just large enough to drop in a large rock. The first piece of the structure should be made from a material that wasn’t man-made, such as concrete, Farkash said, but something that came from the earth.
“Let the beginnings of a building be a heavenly made stone,” Farkash said.