Anew year, a new semester, a new building.
This week was a week of many beginnings at Yeshiva University.
Coinciding with the start of the academic year and on the eve of the High Holy Days, Yeshiva University opened the Glueck Center for Jewish Study, the first new edifice dedicated at the Washington Heights institution’s Wilf Campus in two decades.
The $32 million, 60,000-square-foot, glass-and-stone multiuse facility, connected to the Gottesman Library, is the home to a two-story beit midrash study hall seating more than 500 people, above; two stadium-style-seating lecture halls, 11 classrooms, 50 faculty offices, faculty and student lounges, storage space for library archives, a satellite courtroom for the Beth Din of America, and a bagel store food kiosk. Yad Norman Lamm, a permanent exhibit space, will honor the career of the school’s former president.
Outside the building, concrete barriers have been replaced with cement planters filled with trees and flowers along the stretch of Amsterdam Avenue that will serve as a “restricted use” pedestrian zone.
Inside, the building, designed by HOK Architects, features such energy-efficient measures as large windows on the north and south facades, an insulated glass curtain along the exterior of the beit midrash, and a LEED-certified air-conditioning system.
“The inauguration of this facility will refocus the world on the light that emanates from Yeshiva University, the learning that generates that light, our commitment to an integrated life based on a Torah that elevates all our studies, and how we ultimately apply that study to the improvement of civilization,” said President Richard Joel.
The building is named for the family of Jacob Glueck, a Holocaust survivor.
