Sixteen million dollars buys a lot of classroom space in Crown Heights. For Oholei Torah, it also buys something the school has been chasing for years: room to breathe.
The longtime Chabad-Lubavitch institution is making a major play for its future, snapping up a 58,000-square-foot school building that will become a dedicated rabbinical campus. The deal is meant to relieve the space squeeze at its packed Eastern Parkway headquarters and give its advanced programs a home of their own.
The purchase price works out to about $275 per square foot, and the property is zoned to expand to roughly 80,000 square feet, according to the New York Real Estate Journal. Law firm Nixon Peabody represented the seller, with Long Island partner Ed Puerta leading the deal team. The school has described the purchase as its largest acquisition in decades, a sign of just how big a swing this is for the institution.
A New Crown Heights Base for Rabbinical Students
The new campus site sits near Eastern Parkway and Bedford Avenue, just a few blocks from Oholei Torah’s existing facilities and a short walk from Chabad headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway. In its announcement, published by COLlive, the school describes a purpose-built center with multiple study halls, classrooms, offices, a Torah library, a mikvah, dining space and other yeshiva amenities tailored to rabbinical students.
The building is expected to be delivered vacant, according to the New York Business Journal, which reported the sale in June. That clean slate should let Oholei Torah start reshaping the property for its own needs instead of working around an existing school tenant and an active day-to-day operation.
The expansion is aimed squarely at the yeshiva’s fast-growing rabbinical college program. The New York Real Estate Journal reported that the program currently has about 485 students, has been growing at roughly 10 percent annually and sees about 40 percent more viable applications than its present space can handle. Oholei Torah expects the new campus will be able to support approximately 1,300 students once it is fully built out.
The new facility is slated to house a post-graduate program with a rabbinical ordination track, as well as advanced study for students who have already been ordained. When those programs move off the main campus, Oholei Torah plans to backfill the freed-up space with expanded early-childhood programming and additional capacity for its pre-K through high school divisions.
That shuffle aligns with the institution’s broader footprint. Oholei Torah says it was founded in 1956 with just three students and now educates more than 2,000 students across its all-ages Jewish education network, according to the school’s official website. In Crown Heights, this latest purchase turns a single property deal into a long-term campus strategy, creating more room for the neighborhood’s youngest students and its future rabbis under the same institutional umbrella.
