Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi of New York’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST), jokes that the space her organization had occupied for most of its 43-year history was like a 1970s lesbian bar: in order to find the synagogue’s windowless quarters, buried deep within the venerable Westbeth artists’ housing complex in Greenwich Village, you had to follow very specific directions. Once inside, “you couldn’t see the outside world, and the outside world couldn’t see you,” she says.

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