Rabbi Zalman Bukiet’s usually enthusiastic voice was even more filled with pride and excitement as he described his hopes for his South Florida congregation’s ambitious expansion plans. Having recently purchased $900,000 worth of land, Chabad-Lubavitch of West Boca Raton is setting out to build a permanent home in Palm Beach County.

“Currently, we have more than 250 people attending on the Sabbath, and on holidays close to 800,” said Bukiet, illustrating the need to move out of the synagogue and community center’s 6,000 square-foot rental property. “We’ve been bursting at the seams for the last couple of years.”

With a target completion date of March 2013, the new Chabad House of West Boca will have a 12,000 square-foot building on an acre and a half campus. Facing a main road, the building’s façade will resemble Jerusalem’s Western Wall, while its interior will house a large sanctuary, library, an adult-education room that will double as a smaller sanctuary, social hall, kosher kitchen, ritual bath, five classrooms for the Jeff Weltman Hebrew School and other administrative spaces.

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Bukiet noted that the congregation’s current space requires it to break down its sanctuary at the end of services to convert the space into a social hall for a communal Kiddush.

“We’ve gotten rather good at this over the years to where it now takes us under 15 minutes,” said co-director Chani Bukiet, adding how the new arrangement will make weekly services and holiday events more convenient and fluid.

The project has already generated a buzz among locals, she said, serving to kindle a spark of excitement in a community of nearly 70,000 Jewish residents.

“It’s reminding me a little bit of when we bought our own home,” she explained. “It’s just a very different feeling when you have a place to call your own: You have a sense of permanence, so it’s very exciting to start in a building built specifically for our needs. I think when you move into a new place it gives you that new energy and vigor.”

Although for years, Boca had been comically stereotyped as the definition of an upper middle class, progressive Jewish community, it’s beginning to diversity demographically as younger families move in.

“It’s going to place Chabad in the vicinity of some very, very young communities with families, and I know that there is already a buzz from people who have bought homes there and are excited that there will be a synagogue that they can actually walk to,” said Rabbi Moishe Denburg, director of Chabad of Central Boca.

Denburg and Bukiet moved to the area about a quarter of a century ago, establishing a Chabad-Lubavitch center that has since expanded to five individual branches across Boca Raton.

A Developing Dream

“The new center is a dream that we’ve been awaiting for a long time,” said Denburg. “It is the next stage of some 16 years of slowly starting a prayer group, eventually growing out of our first storefront, then the second and finally acquiring a larger rental, and now being at the stage when we’re bursting from that.”

Congregation member Dr. Robert Bader, agreed.

“It’s incredible to me that during such a tumultuous time in our economy – the worst economic time in my life – we’re building, and when most institutions are really struggling financially just to stay afloat,” said Bader, a dermatologist with offices in nearby Deerfield Beach and Coral Springs. “So it’s really an amazing project.”

Bader, 44, who has lived in Boca Raton for 13 years and attended the West Chabad House for three, sympathizes with the work ahead for the congregation. The new location, though only one mile west of its rented building, is situated in the heart of newly developed, young and largely secular neighborhoods.

“In my neighborhood of more than 200 homes, mine has the only sukkah in the whole community,” he illustrated. “But the kindness and acceptance of anybody that comes through the door” will win people over.

“It’s truly inspirational to see how giving of himself and his time [Rabbi Bukiet] is to the entire community, not just to the congregation,” added Bader. “He will do anything for any Jew no matter who they are. He doesn’t even know some of these families but he runs at moment’s notice to do the right thing; he’s truly an inspirational leader.”

According to Bukiet, the community’s response has been very generous. A major contribution from Holocaust survivor Herman Wachtenheim in memory of his late wife Olga provided the initial $900,000 to purchase the land. That leaves $2 million for the capital campaign.

A congregant introduced the Bukiets to world-renowned interior designer Perla Lichi – famous for designing palaces and commercial buildings in such oil-rich cities as Dubai – who signed on to design the synagogue.

“She was very excited about doing this job because she’s never designed a synagogue before,” said Chani Bukiet. “Right away she said that she wanted to do this job, and of course, is being very generous about it.”

When asked about his hope for the future, Zalman Bukiet is unabashedly optimistic.

“My hope is that we’ll have 500 people on a Sabbath!” he boomed. “Our hope is to touch every Jew, whether he or she comes to services or not. We’re not only building a synagogue, we’re building a community center.”