With funding from international philanthropists and foundations, and the support of the Harvard Medical Community and Hospital Leadership, Harvard Chabad has acquired three institutional buildings adjacent to the Harvard Longwood Campus over a period of several years.
These buildings serve as a student center for hundreds of students, faculty, physicians, and researchers, and as a hospitality center (currently with 25 beds) for hundreds of patients and their families in one of the medical capitals of the world.
For 24 years, Rabbi Hirschy and Elkie Zarchi, the Rebbe’s Shluchim to Harvard University, along with a growing team of Shluchim and volunteers, have nurtured thousands of medical students, physicians, patients and families studying, teaching/working, or receiving medical care in the Harvard Longwood Medical Area (LMA) at Harvard Medical School, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, and the Harvard teaching hospitals, including: Beth Israel Deaconess, Brigham and Women’s, Children’s Hospital, and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
Its educational programs, including weekly Shabbat dinners, holiday programs, seminars presenting the Torah view on a wide range of questions and subjects related to medical ethics, and weekly lunch ‘n learns, have been attended by thousands of students and physicians. Through its hospitality and medical program, Harvard Chabad has been able to connect, host, and assist countless patients from around the world in receiving life-saving surgeries and treatments.
Over the past year, Harvard Chabad has been working with a leading Boston architectural firm to design a campus that will combine its buildings and have all of its programs in the LMA under one roof.
The convergence of Harvard medical students and Harvard’s world class hospitals and physicians, with the inclusion of patients and their families, will make this expanded new center a most unique Jewish educational and hospitality center in the world. Among many other features and programs of the new building will be an additional 12 hospitality suites, bringing the total bed count to over 50! The center will also have a central industrial kitchen that will provide Kosher meals to all Jewish patients in the Harvard teaching hospitals.
The expanded center in the Harvard Longwood Medical Area (LMA), is all in addition to 5 thriving student centers, reaching thousands of students a year, that Rabbi Hirschy and Elkie Zarchi have established in Greater Boston. One of their recent projects, Cambridge Preschool of the Arts, quickly grew to a capacity of close to 200 students in four locations!
