“With new synagogue, Forest Hill Village goes old shul.”

Along with my article about a missing Banksy, the other article I wrote for the Globe and Mail a few months back (while I was freelancing, before landing at The Grid) was about a synagogue coming to Forest Hill Village that’s based on one that the Nazis burned down in Poland. (It’s on the stretch of Spadina Road pictured above.) Since it’s no longer available for free online, here it is in its entirety. I still really can’t believe I got away with the title.

With new synagogue, Forest Hill Village goes old shul
BY: DAVID TOPPING
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Published Friday, Oct. 07, 2011 6:22PM EDT

You might not realize, if you walked along Spadina Road through the heart of Forest Hill, that you were walking through one of Toronto’s most densely Jewish neighbourhoods – 30 per cent Jewish, according to the 2006 census. On a weekday morning, there are far more women in Lululemon here than there are men in yarmulkes. Judaism manifests itself quietly, instead: A blue-and-white Jewish Tribune newspaper box stands a few feet from the Star’s, a few posters stuck to street poles advertise Hebrew classes, and the Temmy Latner Forest Hill Jewish Centre hides one floor above the Starbucks at 446 Spadina Rd. But that’s all about to change.

“I always say I may not be the best rabbi, but I’m always awake,” jokes Rabbi Elie Karfunkel. The rabbi is busy, so caffeine helps. Saturday is Yom Kippur, and Sunday is the groundbreaking of what will one day be the centre’s new home a few blocks south on Spadina: a $12-million synagogue, backed by several of Canada’s wealthiest families, that’s a replica of one that the Nazis burned down 72 years ago in Jaslo, Poland.

Mr. Karfunkel arrived at the centre in 1999, in his mid-twenties, “Doogie Howser, the rabbi,” he says. The vision was for “an orthodox congregation that was chilled-out.” It didn’t go well at first. “Quite frankly, no one cared,” he says. “At my first service I ever ran, it was a Friday night like four months after I moved, and two people came to the service. And that night, one of them told me he was moving.” Mr. Karfunkel, who turned down a job in Baltimore to come here from Oshawa, began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Slowly, though, the membership grew, and in 2005 the centre moved from one suite above the Starbucks to three. (When, on a tour, I ask Luci Solish, the office administrator, what one thing she would pin that success on, she gestures over my shoulder. “Rabbi Elie,” she says.)

Now, with more than 1,000 members, and with Karfunkel’s beard sprouting some white hairs – at 38, he’s older than the average congregant – the synagogue’s outgrown its existing location again. “At a certain point,” he says, “it was like, hey, let’s not just be above a Starbucks. Let’s do something special.”

It was Rifky, Elie’s wife, who came up with the idea of modelling a new synagogue after one destroyed by the Nazis, and they found their inspiration in Jaslo. Its synagogue, built around 1905, served a Jewish community that numbered 1,512 by 1931. According to one published account by Jakub Herzig, who lived in Poland at the time, the invading Nazis first tried to set the synagogue ablaze on Sept. 15, 1939, only to be foiled by Polish firefighters. “The Polish authorities were not yet familiar with Nazi methods,” Dr. Herzig wrote; the firefighters fought the fire. One week later, the Nazis ordered the firefighters to go back – this time, to burn the synagogue to the ground. Before the end of the war, the entire town was razed.

With the new project, says Joel Wardinger, the centre’s executive director, “we’re not going for ginormous.” That’s a marked contrast to the much larger synagogues that dot Bathurst Street, something everyone involved in the new centre will remind you of. “They’ve gotten very large and a little impersonal,” says John Kaplan. Mr. Kaplan, one of the construction chairmen, was the one who convinced Mr. Karfunkel not to take the Baltimore job – and his family’s charitable foundation, the Joseph and Faye Tanenbaum Foundation, is one of the main backers of the project, along with the Albert and Temmy Latner Foundation and the Max and Gianna Glassman Foundation. (The building will be called the Glassman Jaslo Complex.)

Still, the new synagogue – all 27,000 square feet of it – will be unmissable, especially on a stretch of Spadina that’s otherwise residential. In Forest Hill, back when the centre first started, “the sense was that there were a lot of Jews but there wasn’t a lot of Jewish content,” Mr. Kaplan says. The plan is for the new centre to be like the old one: orthodox, but inclusive. Only now, says Mr. Karfunkel, “we’ve just gone from day-time TV to prime-time TV.”

The future home of the centre is a little quieter than its current one, for now, even if you can almost see one from the other. Construction equipment is slowly arriving to flatten the soil where three houses stood before they were purchased by the centre in 2006 and demolished. A fourth, still standing at 360 Spadina Ave., has been purchased and set aside for the rabbi. [Actually, it’s on Spadina Road, an error that was inserted into print.] The hoarding will come up next. Then, before too long, a synagogue will grow, a new home on razed earth.