Lenora Fay Garfinkel, 90, Architect for Orthodox Jewish Communities, Dies

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/obituaries/lenora-garfinkel-dead-coronavirus.html

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When Leonard Josephy took the admissions exam for Cooper Union in 1949, the circumstances were unusual in two ways. The first was that it was a Sunday, because as an observant Jew, Leonard could not take the test on a Saturday, with the other applicants.

The second and more significant difference was that Leonard was actually Lenora, using a man’s name on her application because the school’s architecture program at the time was almost entirely male.

Better odds, she figured.

Whether by hook or by crook, her plan worked, and the future architect, having overcome two artificial barriers — her faith and her gender — had a story to tell her future children.

So began a distinguished career designing buildings for Orthodox Jewish congregations in the New York area, as one of the few women in the field.

She worked until she was 85 from her home in Monsey, N.Y., in Rockland County — raising five children, caring for a disabled brother and teaching Hebrew school along the way. She died on April 29 at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey, after spending her 90th birthday on a ventilator.

The cause was the novel coronavirus, which also claimed one of her sons and a grandson over the next two weeks, all at different hospitals, her daughter Letitia Dahan Forspan said.

“It’s been overwhelming,” Ms. Forspan said.

Lenora Fay Josephy was born in the Bronx on April 12, 1930, the oldest of three children of Hyman and Bertha Josephy. Her father taught at New York University, on the old Bronx campus; her mother worked as a secretary.

Lenora attended the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan, commuting from the Bronx, and then spent a year at Hunter College before she was allowed to take the Cooper Union exam on a Sunday. A family friend, a judge, had advised her that the test’s Saturday-only format amounted to religious discrimination, and told her to push the issue. She did, with good results.

“I never got the picture that she was breaking the glass ceiling because she wanted to break the glass ceiling,” her grandson Ariel Dahan, who lived with her in her later years, said. “She just wanted to be an architect, so this is what she did.”

She met a pharmacy student named Samuel Garfinkel, from Winnipeg, Manitoba, and the two married, twice — once in the Bronx, once in Winnipeg.

After graduating from Cooper Union in 1952, Ms. Garfinkel worked for another architect, then branched out on her own. The family moved to Spring Valley, in Rockland County, in 1958, and later to Monsey, to a house she had designed on spec for a builder.

Both areas had large Orthodox populations with specific needs: for synagogues or wedding halls or ritual baths — mikvahs — all regulated in their design by Jewish law. Ms. Garfinkel navigated these arcana with rabbis, and explained them to community zoning boards.

A simple handrail in a school hallway had to meet local building codes, fire codes and the Americans With Disabilities Act as well as Jewish law.

“It’s a lot of laws,” said Rabbi Yaakov Bender of Far Rockaway, Queens, whose home she redesigned.

She often worked until the wee hours of the morning, Mr. Dahan said. “Three o’clock was ice cream o’clock,” he said.

Her noteworthy buildings, all aesthetically simple, include a cavernous synagogue for the Viznitz Hasidic sect in Kaser, N.Y., the Atrium catering hall in Monsey and the Masores Bais Yaakov school in Brooklyn.

But her signal edifice was her family, her daughter and grandson said. She is survived by four children, 19 grandchildren and 49 great-grandchildren. Two of her sons, Eliezer and Chaim, became architects.