'A hidden gem': Northbrook synagogue houses rare stained glass collection

A Northbrook synagogue has a rare collection of stained glass people might not realize exists.

Northbrook Community Synagogue, at 2548 Jasper Court immediately northeast of the intersection of Willow and Landwehr roads, houses the collection. The stained glass was rescued from synagogues across the country after the buildings went “out of Jewish hands,” a news release said.

Believed to be the only repository of its kind, the collection — “The Jewish Experience: A Perspective in Stained Glass Over the Last 100 Years” — includes four sets of glass from Chicago synagogues, one from Saginaw, Michigan, and another from Kingston, New York.

The set from Kingston's Ahavath Israel Congregation, created by the late stained glass artist Robert Pinart, is installed in the Northbrook synagogue's foyer. The rest of the permanent exhibit, backlit and contained within wooden cabinetry, resides in the sanctuary, which can seat up to 1,200 people.

Each of the displays includes plaques describing the windows, the synagogues or congregations they graced, and their respective journeys to the Northbrook Community Synagogue.

The stained glass is available for public viewing during weekday business hours, other than on Wednesdays.

But few people know about the collection.

“It's sort of like a hidden gem. No one knows the collection is there,” said Jerry Orbach, a former judge and alderman of Chicago's 46th Ward now living in Glenview across the street from the synagogue.

Orbach, executive vice president of the synagogue's board, also is the investigator, financier, occasionally death-defying glass remover and curator of the stained glass exhibited in “The Jewish Experience.”

“The windows are exquisite. You really have to see them,” he said.

He's been at this for some time — not counting his first window, a smaller piece from Chicago's original Anshe Emet Synagogue, which he rescued from a salvage business and is hanging in his home.

The story of how 36 windows from the former Kehielat Jerushan Synagogue in Albany Park arrived at the Northbrook synagogue illustrates Orbach's commitment and emotional attachment to the project.

His family had attended Kehielat Jerushan when he was a boy. Orbach conducted his Jewish rites of passage at “KJS,” as he told the Chicago Tribune in a 1998 story.

“I loved the windows at the synagogue I grew up in,” he told the Herald.

As an adult he often drove past the synagogue. Over time he documented its transformation into a Korean church, then into a dilapidated, grafitti-scrawled building within a “rough” neighborhood.

Then, one day, he noticed its exterior had been sandblasted, cleaned up for a renewed life as a Pentecostal church.

Orbach stopped in, met the pastor and asked about the stained glass windows. The pastor — the Rev. J.L. Rivera, the Tribune article said — had no affinity for them.

Orbach orchestrated a trade by which he would have the prestigious Botti Studio of Architectural Arts (which lists among its top projects the stained glass at Techny Towers Conference and Retreat Center) create windows more fitting for a church in exchange for the former Kehielat Jerushan Synagogue windows.

Those, Orbach said, went to Northbrook Congregation Ezra-Habonim — which, in 2011, merged with two other congregations to form Northbrook Community Synagogue.

As another tie-in with Ezra-Habonim, the collection in Northbrook also includes a wall of windows from the Ner Tamid Congregation in Rogers Park, which merged with Ezra-Habonim.

“The Jewish Experience” includes transom windows from Beth Itzhok Congregation in Chicago; a set of 16, 8-foot-tall windows from Congregation B'nai Israel of Saginaw, Michigan; and 13 entrance windows from Mikro Kodesh Anshe Tiktin Synagogue of Budlong Woods in Chicago.

Orbach sometimes employs a hands-on approach to saving these works. A construction crew was tearing into the rear wall of the Budlong Woods synagogue while Orbach and a crew were on the front side extracting windows as the walls shook.

“That was the most terrifying experience I've ever had,” Orbach said.

Alanna Cooper, Abba Hillel Silver Chair in Jewish Studies at Case Western Reserve University, interviewed Orbach for a book she's writing, “Disposing of the Sacred: America's 21st Century Jewish Congregations.”

There may be cause for an epilogue. Orbach is not slowing his pursuit of stained glass significant to the Jewish experience — “much to the rabbi's chagrin,” he said jokingly of Aaron Braun.

“I'm very proud of the collection at this point,” Orbach said, “and if God gives me years, there will be more.”