Thursday, March 06, 2025
A Chabad House for a Growing Family
In 2019, Rabbi Yanky Bell was on one of his annual pilgrimages to the Ohel, the resting place of Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson in Queens, New York, when he realized it was going to take him a while to write his petition.
Usually, Rabbi Bell's formal requests include blessings, spiritual guidance and inspiration from people back in El Cerrito, Calif., the small city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay where he and his wife, Shternie, run a Chabad House. (Rabbi Schneerson, who died in 1994, was a leader of the Chabad movement, a sect of Hasidic Judaism.)
But this time, Rabbi Bell came with a strong ask of his own: His family needed a new place to live and serve.
"We'd been looking for six or seven months," said Mrs. Bell, 31. "I'd already looked at about 20 to 30 houses."
It wasn't just that their family was expanding — their second son had just been born. Their community was growing, too. "When we had services," Mrs. Bell said, "we had people inside, outside, people everywhere."
They needed enough indoor space to accommodate an office for the rabbi and child care for at least 10 children — theirs and their supporters' kids — and to hold classes, meetings and other events. Outside, they needed space to build a sukkah, the temporary hut central to Sukkot, which celebrates harvests and gratitude.
For Rabbi Bell, 33, it was a complicated petition. "It took me about two hours to write," he said. "We really needed a blessing."
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