Community Magazine May 2012

An Ocean Parkway Location In the late 1930’s, many Syrian families moved from the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn where they had lived as a community since the 1920’s to the Flatbush, Midwood and Gravesend areas where larger houses were common. At first, the men who moved to these neighborhoods would walk some 25-40 minutes each Shabbat to the Magen David Congregation on 67th Street, the community’s main kinees at the time. But by 1941, as the population in Flatbush grew, the Syrian-Sephardic Congregation Shaare Zion was established when community leaders acquired a brick house at 1756 Ocean Parkway near Kings Highway. Prominent sponsors involved in establishing the new kinees, included the Beyda, Chabot, Esses, Haddad, Hedaya, Hidary, Labaton, Laniado, Levy, Mansour, Mizrahi, Shalom, Shamah, Sutton and Tawil families. The house served the congregation’s 75 regular members. Attendance was about ten times that amount on the High Holy Days, when some 750 worshippers would attend Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services in theAperion Manor a few blocks away at 815 Kings Highway (currently Kings Terrace). Mr. D.E. Cohen says that the heavy attendance on the holidays indicated to community leaders that a large central synagogue was needed for the growing community. On March 24, 1951, six leaders from the Shaare Zion committee met to discuss the acquisition of land for such a synagogue. They decided on a plot of land on Ocean Parkway and between Avenues T and U – the current site of Shaare Zion. That same year they bought the land and two years later, in 1953, plans were drawn for the present synagogue. The project was of grand scale, as the new building was intended to accommodate not only prayers, but also social events. To oversee design of the edifice, the committee selected renowned architect, Morris Lapidus, whose credits included the Fontainebleau of Miami Beach. To finance the cost of construction, the community had, since 1941, already amassed a fund of $250,000 (about $2 million in 2012 dollars). But soon after construction got underway, the building fund was entirely depleted and the whole project was very nearly aborted. CAROLYN RUSHEFSKY Shaare Zion: e Synagogue at Nearly Was 't Built As the agship synagogue of Brooklyn’s Syrian-Sephardic community, Shaare Zion has hosted well over ten thousand happy occasions including berit milahs, bar missvas, engagements and, of course, weddings. is June will mark 50 years since the rst wedding at Shaare Zion. And while our dependence on this community icon has continued to grow over the years, recollections of the early setbacks which nearly doomed the entire the project, are starting to fade. In an extensive interview, Mr. David Eliahu Cohen, who was co-chairman of the synagogue’s building committee in 1957, shared his memories of the massive project, and the formidable obstacles that had to be overcome for Shaare Zion to become a reality. Interior of the famed Shaare Zion Dome. Photo: Morris Antebi BY CAROLYN RUSHEFSKY 22 Community magazine