Landmark $100M Gift for LA Jewish Center
A Los Angeles real estate investor has donated $100 million to Chabad to build one of the world's largest Jewish centers in the city. The project is poised to become a major cultural and religious hub, underscoring the power of private philanthropy to shape LA's urban landscape.
The donor behind the landmark $100 million gift is real estate investor Alon Abady, a managing partner at Waterfall Bridge Capital and a graduate of UCLA. Abady, known for high-profile deals including the Sofitel Beverly Hills hotel and selling a home to Justin and Hailey Bieber, has a long-standing personal history with Chabad, which assisted his family when they immigrated from Syria in the 1970s. The donation is not cash but the 16-story, 300,000-square-foot office tower at 9911 W. Pico Blvd., appraised at over $100 million. Abady had purchased the then-vacant building in 2023 for $35 million with redevelopment plans. This gift of a physical building provides an immediate, substantial foundation for the project, named the "Chabad Campus for Jewish Life" and the "Abady Family Center" in honor of Abady's mother. The new campus will be located in the heart of the Pico-Robertson neighborhood, an area known as a vibrant and diverse hub of Jewish life in Los Angeles. The neighborhood is home to over thirty kosher restaurants, numerous synagogues, and a growing Orthodox community, making it a central and significant location for a major new Jewish center. Upon completion, the 300,000-square-foot facility will be one of the largest Jewish centers in the world. For comparison, it will be larger than most Jewish community centers in North America and comparable in scale to New York's 92nd Street Y, though smaller than Chabad's 538,000-square-foot Menorah Center in Dnipro, Ukraine. The "Chabad Campus for Jewish Life" is slated to house a wide array of services and institutions. Plans include a central synagogue, educational facilities, and venues for life-cycle events. Additionally, it will offer youth and senior programming, mental health and social services, and museums designed to engage the community with Jewish history and heritage. The center will also serve as a regional hub and a global center for the Chabad-Lubavitch movement's emissaries. It aims to address community needs with specialized programming for children with special needs and comprehensive services for California's growing elderly population. This project comes at a time of financial strain for some local Jewish institutions, such as the recent sale of the American Jewish University's Bel Air campus.
