Chabad Headquarters or Henry VIII Residence?

The building came into the Lubavitchers’ hands in 1940. “The doctor who first owned the building had interesting taste,” a Hasidic architect named Eli Meltzer said on a snowy afternoon last week, looking up at the shul. Meltzer had joined some rabbis for a history lesson about Lubavitcher H.Q. In the nineteen-thirties, the doctor, a Jew, commissioned the three-story, triple-gabled, neo-Gothic Tudor revival (other historians have argued that it’s more neo-Jacobean) mansion from an architect named Edwin Kline. The style telegraphed Old World wealth, like a proto-McMansion. Kline also built a Tudor revival for Oscar Hammerstein, on Long Island. As the Jewish news outlet the Forward has chronicled, the doctor, who performed illegal abortions in the house, lost his medical license, bribed a judge, and went to prison for tax evasion. The mansion was repossessed by the bank, which sold it to the Rebbe’s father-in-law, a rabbi who had just fled the Nazis in Poland and was looking for a headquarters for the Lubavitchers. He didn’t buy the house for its old-timey details (stained-glass sailboats, inset quatrefoils, an oriel window, ornamented spandrels, rumors of a crucifix). The deciding factor? The Rebbe’s father-in-law, who had been tortured by the Soviets, required an elevator, and the mansion had one.