770: A Constellation of Sacred Sites

The Buildings that Remain: Finding Purpose in Place through Collective Preservation

The Leon Levy Foundation Lectures in Jewish Material Culture by Gabrielle A. Berlinger (University of North Carolina)

Thursday, October 16, 2025

Thursdays, October 16 (Lecture 1), November 13 (Lecture 2), December 11 (Lecture 3), 2025 at 6pm

38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

gallery@bgc.bard.edu

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

October 16: 770: A Constellation of Sacred Sites

November 13: Elsewhere: Archive, Museum, and Catalyst of Change

December 11: Buttenhausen: The Material Afterlife of a German Jewish Community 

This series explores how three ordinary buildings have been transformed into extraordinary spaces for religious, social, and historic Jewish purpose: a medical clinic in Brooklyn, New York, a second-hand store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and a schoolhouse in southern Germany. Although geographically, temporally, and culturally distinct from one another, all three sites engage with Jewish memory, values, and practice through creative approaches to the preservation of these buildings and their material contents. Using strategies of reconstruction, restoration, and even deconstruction of these buildings and the objects within, the people who steward these sites nurture deep and dynamic relationships between people, objects, and a sense of belonging in each environment. 

770: A Constellation of Sacred Sites

770 Eastern Parkway is the worldwide headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic community based in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Since Rebbe Menachem Schneerson, the seventh and last leader of the Lubavitch community, passed away in 1994, reconstructions of the gothic-style brick building where he was based have proliferated around the world. In addition, rooms within the original building, and their material contents, have been preserved in distinctive ways for use by members of the community’s growing global movement. In this first lecture, Gabrielle Berlinger examines this network of sacred spaces that enable Lubavitcher Jews around the world to remain connected to the Rebbe and his teachings in his absence. 

Gabrielle A. Berlinger is associate professor of American studies and folklore and Babette S. and Bernard J. Tanenbaum Scholar in Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). As a folklorist and ethnologist, she studies the nature and significance of vernacular architecture and ritual practice, particularly in contemporary Jewish communities. Her article, “From Ritual to Protest: Sukkot in the Garden of Hope” in Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the 2019 Catherine Bishir Prize from the Vernacular Architecture Forum and is drawn from fieldwork for her book, FramingSukkot: Tradition and Transformation in Jewish Vernacular Architecture (Indiana University Press, 2017). She is also coeditor of The Lives of Jewish Things: Collecting and Curating Material Culture (Wayne State University Press, 2024). Before joining the faculty at UNC, Gabrielle was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the “Cultures of Conservation” initiative at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. There, her research and teaching centered on an ethnographic project at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in which she documented the preservation process of the museum’s nineteenth-century tenement apartment building—a study that related issues of historic preservation, immigrant social history, heritage management, and museum practice in the reconciliation of physical and cultural conservation needs.

Image: 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, New York, the worldwide headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch community. Photo: Andrea Robbins and Max Becher.