The new building for the Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue gives local members a permanent home in Malibu.
By Hans Laetz/Special to The Malibu Times
Workers are putting the final wooden and steel trusses into place for a structure that, when completed, will almost look from Pacific Coast Highway like it isn’t there.
But to the worshippers inside, the tent-like structure will flood with sunshine and harken back to days of the Old Testament and the nomadic Jewish tribes that had to worship on the move.
“It’s very stealthy from the outside,” said Anita Green, the building committee president for the 250-family Malibu Jewish Center and Synagogue. “But from the inside, it’s not a conventional closed building-it will be just the opposite.”
The synagogue is rising on a small hillock on Pacific Coast Highway near John Tyler Drive. Designed by architects Mike Barsocchini and Ed Niles, the curving, new building is on track for its estimated opening in October.
“It will take advantage of Malibu’s climate, winds, solar effects and the coastal winds,” Green said.
The curved building’s structural steel and wood will be sheathed in 1,500 square feet of glass, allowing light to filter through the latticework of supports as if worshippers are in a forest, said Simon Schrier, one of the construction managers.
The building’s overall feel has begun to affect the synagogue’s construction shepherds with a palpable excitement. “It feels like a tent,” Green said.
And that’s important to the congregants, said Rabbi Judith HaLevy.
“In the Book of Exodus,” HaLevy explained, “God said to the Jews, ‘Make me a space and I will dwell with you,’ and then proceeds to be the celestial architect.” The Old Testament’s instructions for building the worship tent even include how to make the metal fittings to hold the tent together, she said.
“Here, we trust the architects and the committee [with the building]-but the intent is the same-to create a place where we celebrate all of life,” she said.
The construction process began with an 18-month search for just the right architect, begun in 1995. “Our first presentation to the congregation was a series of nature photos: stepping stones and trees; no buildings,” architect Barsocchini said.
Barsocchini teamed with his old University of Southern California School of Architecture classmate, Niles, on the design. Niles, who resides in his iconic glass and steel structure near Leo Carrillo State Beach, is a USC School of Architecture adjunct professor.
That progressed to computer animations of what the building’s interior would look like. Green said she’s thrilled to see that the interior space being defined by the new construction matches the promises made by the computer years ago. “It’s amazing how accurate they were,” she said.
Construction is on schedule despite delays in getting permits from the city, county and state, near-biblical rains and the unique construction plan. Special steel tubing from a fabricator near Chicago has been a particularly vexing construction issue.
“The 90-foot arches had to be bent, and the steel is 12 inches wide and 20 inches tall,” Schrier said.
For passing motorists on PCH, those curves will soon be blended into the hillside with the addition of a berm in front of the building. Large native tress will be planted to muffle traffic noise, and the glassed-covered curved roof will look from the side to be the crest of the hill.
Inside, the 40,000 square feet of temple will hold a normal capacity of 900, which can be expanded to more than 1,000 for High Holy Day services.
That gives the 250-family congregation room to grow to perhaps 400 families, and new members are being actively sought to help with the incomplete fundraising to pay for the structure, HaLevy said.
And local synagogue members are hopeful that the completion will finally give their wandering congregation a permanent home that will speak not only to thousands of years of Jewish tradition and teachings, but to the Malibu coastline as well, Green said.
“You know that plant they call the Wandering Jew?” she asked. “Well, our congregation started out over an office building. My kids went to Hebrew school at Our Lady of Malibu. For us to have a permanent space is a huge step for our temple but is also a wonderful statement to the community that ‘we are here,'” Green said.
“Its standing presence will reflect the permanence of the Jewish community in Malibu,” HaLevy said.