Boston Approves Harvard Chabad Plans for Longwood Jewish Center

Boston recently approved Harvard Chabad’s building plans for the Longwood Center for Jewish Life, a satellite center in Longwood.

The new satellite center will feature educational and social programming for Jewish Harvard students. It will provide kosher food, lodging, and chaplaincy resources for Jewish patients and families, including Longwood Medical services through the Patient & Family Hospitality Center.

Longwood, a Boston medical campus, houses Harvard’s Medical School, Dental School, and School of Public Health, as well as several prominent Boston hospitals.

“This is wonderful news that we’ve been waiting now for a long time,” said Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi, Harvard Chabad’s founder and president.

The approval process for the satellite centers faced obstacles from city boards, Zarchi added.

“There’s been, unfortunately, a lot of opposition to this project, a lot of NIMBYs, including some who had some power by placing themselves on some of these boards, some of who expressed publicly or in their opposition that this is a project that brings no value to the neighborhood,” Zarchi said.

Chabad also faced pushback against its proposal to expand its Cambridge headquarters, which was rejected by the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeal in June following opposition from the group’s neighbors. Some Harvard students have also expressed discontent with the organization’s efforts to expand, citing criticisms of pro-Palestine protests last spring.

“There’s a significant number of Jewish students at the College and across Harvard who feel very unwelcome by Chabad,” said Violet T.M. Barron ’26, a leading organizer with Jews for Palestine and a Crimson Editorial editor.

In Longwood, however, the Boston Office of Historic Preservation wrote in an emailed statement that they were “excited” for the project.

“The updated design of the Chabad Center will benefit the cultural and architectural diversity of the neighborhood while maintaining the District’s unique historic character,” the office wrote.

The center “was in the works for a couple of years” and was “preceded first by a process of purchasing a number of properties in the area,” Zarchi said. He pointed to the donations of Harvard Chabad alumni and benefactors as funding sources for the properties.

The satellite center will be the first Harvard-affiliated Jewish institution in Longwood, though non-Harvard-affiliated centers like the synagogue Temple Israel of Boston have been in the area since 1928.

Zarchi said the new center will provide an important hub for Jewish affiliates who are not on Harvard’s main campus.

Jewish students on the Longwood campus have “endured an incredibly difficult year, like we’ve seen at other parts of Harvard and throughout the academic community, but we’ve heard specifically from many students and faculty in the LMA about too many incidents over the past year where they’ve felt deep isolation,” Zarchi said, referring to the Longwood Medical Area.

Zarchi cited the rise in antisemitism as a factor that further intensified the feeling of isolation among Longwood’s Jewish students.

“They’ve been the subject of very bigoted and hateful rhetoric from members of the community,” he said. “So the need for a space, a home where they can find community, find comfort and just be Jewish, feeling safely and with dignity, couldn’t have come at a more important time.”

Previously, Harvard affiliates on the Longwood campus who wanted to attend Harvard Chabad programming needed to make the commute from Boston to Cambridge.

“Oftentimes, it’s been very difficult in terms of transportation,” said Camila “Cami” Tussie, a fourth year student at the Harvard School of Dental Medicine. Tussie said that due to religious reasons, the only way those who observe Shabbat can travel is by foot, and the Longwood campus has limited large gathering spaces.

Betty Ben Dor, a fourth year at HSDM, said “having a physical space for us is just going to be a really nice way to bring it together.”

“I do think that we have an amazing community here in Longwood, but we’ve always felt a little bit without a home base,” Ben Dor said.

—Staff writer Rachael A. Dziaba can be reached at rachael.dziaba@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @rachaeldziaba.

— Staff writer Aisatu J. Nakoulima can be reached at aisatu.nakoulima@thecrimson.com.