This week marks the beginning of Hanukkah, and as part of the Jewish winter holiday’s observances, the Jewish Center of the Hamptons will light a giant outdoor menorah in front of its building beginning today.
Although East Hampton is dense with churches, with five in and around the village alone, it wasn’t until 1959 that observant Jews of East Hampton had a dedicated space of their own.
The property at 44 Woods Lane was bought in 1958 by Evan M. Frankel (1902-1991), a real estate mogul, and Jacob M. Kaplan (1892-1987), a philanthropist, and donated to the Jewish Center, which until that point had been meeting in the Session House of the East Hampton Presbyterian Church. Congregants flocked to the center, and in 1985 it became necessary to expand the sanctuary to accommodate the growing group. The construction began around July 1985, following plans by Norman Jaffe (1932-1993), a noted modernist architect.
The sanctuary at the Jewish Center was the first and one of only a few nonresidential buildings Jaffe designed in his brief but illustrious career. The temple addition, captured above in a photo from The East Hampton Star’s archive, features cedar shingles meant to evoke local historical houses while also helping the building blend into its wooded surroundings.
The sanctuary itself is centered around a bimah, a special table on which the Torah scrolls are placed during a worship service. Behind the bimah is the ark, a closed space in which the Torah is stored when not in use. In Jaffe’s design, these central elements are framed by a series of Alaskan yellow cedar arches meant to evoke a number of things, including a huppah (a Jewish wedding tent), the shawl traditionally worn by Jews during prayer, and the angular shape of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
Julia Tyson is a librarian and archivist in the East Hampton Library’s Long Island Collection.
