By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat, sat and wept, as we remembered Zion.

There on the willows, we hung up our lyres,

For our captors asked of us songs for their amusement:

“Sing for us the song of Zion.”

How can we sing songs of the Lord on foreign soil?

If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither and forget her cunning...

Tehillim (Psalms) 137:1-5

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What role do sacred spaces play in an increasingly secular world? With the steady decline of traditional religious participation, the fate of such cultural beacons remains uncertain. As a Jewish architect largely shaped by my ancestral heritage, I’ve felt particularly drawn to the question. What possible futures lie ahead for this immense stock of significant human structures? Will they become empty ruins surrounded by chain-link and scribbled with graffiti? Are they doomed to hide in local investors’ portfolios of difficult-to-develop properties? Or are they fated to become regional Holocaust Memorial Centers to receive the funding they need to survive? Over the past year, I’ve studied the challenges and opportunities involved in maintaining these sanctuaries, scattered throughout our cities, waiting to provide wanderers with familiar places to commune. What I’ve found is as much a reflection of my own experience as it is of our shared narratives.

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I was born in Uzbekistan, shortly after the dissolution of the USSR. Our diasporic outpost in Central Asia was home to almost 50,000 Bukharian Jews before the collapse. 50,000 Jews that were difficult to distinguish from their ethnically Russian, Persian, Tajik, and Uzbek neighbors. Local cultural forces shaped their language, diet, fashion, and architecture. While the similarities were innumerable, the differences were precarious enough to prompt a change in scenery. 

Like many Soviet Jews after the Cold War, my family chose to emigrate to the West for opportunities that weren’t available behind the Iron Curtain. After several centuries of assimilation (Soviet administrators even referred to them as “indigenous Jews”), about half the population resettled in Israel in the early 1990s. The other half, thousands of Bukharian Jewish families, relocated en masse to the 10-block radius in Central Queens where I grew up. Communities of butchers, cobblers, doctors, artisans, musicians, retirees, engineers, hustlers, and holy men all picked up their lives and migrated to an entirely unfamiliar part of the world. 

This practice of collective relocation isn’t a novel concept in Judaism. Our nomadic origin story references long periods of wandering, coerced and voluntary migrations, fabric tents and stone temples, and feelings of estrangement from an ancestral homeland. A territory that feels both real and mythical, to be recalled and reconstructed; a fundamental aspiration of the diasporic experience.

 And so, New York’s already vibrant Jewish community received an influx of spices, sounds, and colors from the Silk Road during the 1990s. Outside of Israel, it was the ideal place for Bukharian Jews to resettle. Starving for a place to openly practice their faith, the unfamiliar freedoms afforded by New York City allowed kosher storefronts and restaurants to thrive. It facilitated the construction and patronage of synagogues and community centers, five of which sat across the street from my childhood apartment building. The annual rituals became so thoroughly embedded in the city’s identity that even public institutions observed the high holidays as though they were federal banking holidays. 

Years later, much to my grandmother's chagrin, I began moving from city to city in search of something different. First to Philadelphia as a wide-eyed undergraduate studying design, then to Seattle as a naive architect’s apprentice and graduate student, and then most recently to Phoenix, as a licensed architect with a Vitamin-D deficiency. Over a decade of moving from place to place, I found myself searching for the very things I took for granted as a distracted kid in New York. Homesickness kicked in anytime I heard people speaking Russian during my morning commutes, drove past old synagogues along unassuming suburban streets, saw Hasidic families walking to their local temples on the Sabbath, or even smelled chargrilled meat on a stick coming from late-night street vendors.  

These diasporic recollections stir potent emotions when encountering the familiar in foreign lands. Recognizing certain foods, sounds, scents, or places provokes memories that tap into something beyond our daily reach. For people longing for some sense of home, those feelings are amplified further when encountering active communities. The common cultural language becomes a balm for isolation and offers refuge among fellow wanderers. 

Shortly after settling down in Arizona, I experienced a pair of such moments in quick succession. The first was during a morning walk when I came across Temple Beth Israel. A modest 1920s Spanish Mission building now operating as the Cutler-Plotkin Jewish Heritage Center which originally housed the first Jewish congregation in Phoenix. The second came during a day trip to nearby Tucson where I happened upon The Stone Avenue Temple in the historic Barrio Viejo. The oldest synagogue in the Arizona territory, the humble turn-of-the-century Greek Revival building now acts as the centerpiece of the Jewish Heritage Center of the Southwest.

These chance encounters took me down a rabbit hole that resulted in a research grant from the Arizona Architecture Foundation. This funding, which I was incredibly fortunate to receive from the AAZ, has allowed me to study the state’s oldest Jewish community buildings to better understand the evolving role of religious architecture in an increasingly secular world. 

Through my initial research, I learned what prompted the desert communities to commission these buildings, how their congregants occupied them before moving to the suburbs, and how they were sold to other communities when the congregations could no longer support their operation. I learned about a larger network of synagogues and community centers serving the Valley’s Jewish population. I came across a variety of spaces, some active, some abandoned, and some barely surviving as their flocks dwindle. But by far the most fascinating thing about these historic sites is how their communities returned almost a century after their founding to reinvest so that they might better serve their descendants long into the future. 

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What can be learned from these synagogues’ successful transformation that might inform the preservation or adaptive reuse of other community spaces, regardless of faith or background? I will continue exploring these often-loaded questions and documenting the process in a series of quarterly articles with ARCADE.