Lou Dease and his daughter Katie hammer sub-flooring at the Abraham House construction site in Newark.
Photos by Robert Wiener
July 3, 2008
Ten months after Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Essex County joined forces to raise money and recruit volunteers, construction is under way on an affordable home for a Newark family in a program sponsored by Habitat for Humanity.
Under the direction of Barry Wolfensohn of Florham Park, a picture frame salesman who volunteers much of his time to Habitat, the interfaith effort succeeded in raising the $110,000 it needed to finance the three-story frame residence on South Sixth Street just off South Orange Avenue.
It will be called Abraham House.
“Because of world tensions and the inability of religions to have peace with each other, we chose to call it Abraham House because Jews, Christians, and Muslims have an affinity with Abraham in their religions,” Wolfensohn explained.
“We thought it would give us a touchstone to those groups and they would come together to raise the funds and build the house,” he said as he toured the construction site on June 25. “The thing that makes this exciting is that everyone has a concept of how Abraham is connected to their religion,” he said.
As Wolfensohn spoke, a team of professional and volunteer workers installed wood sub-flooring above the home’s concrete foundation and prepared to erect its walls.
The land for Abraham House was donated anonymously by a member of Ahavas Sholom, the century-old Conservative congregation in Newark.
Then, said Wolfensohn, “we got 12 congregations — synagogues, churches, and mosques — to raise the money, and now the volunteers from those organizations are coming to work together. We hope to have the house ready for the Christmas-Hanukka season.”
‘Start on a new life’
The first funds came from Prospect Presbyterian Church in Maplewood, which tithed its members to provide $33,000 in seed money. Members of Ahavas Sholom and three South Orange synagogues — Congregation Beth El, Oheb Shalom Congregation, and Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel — were also major contributors.
Wolfensohn said the project was so successful that Habitat is now planning to build a second Abraham House in West Orange. “We have Jewish folks such as myself involved, and we will be seeking to call on the synagogues in Livingston and West Orange to solicit their support,” he said.
“We hope that anybody who belongs to a synagogue or a church or a mosque will go to their social action committee and tell their folks, ‘As a congregation we should support this effort.’ We can come down and make a presentation to that congregation and hopefully, they will help us in building Abraham House II.”
The family who will live in the first Abraham House has already been selected and, in accordance with the group’s requirements, its members are working on other Habitat homes currently under construction.
The homeowner, who will receive an interest-free mortgage from Habitat, must be employed, have a good credit record, a minimum income of $25,000 a year, and the ability to pay $2,500 for the home’s closing costs. Family members must also spend 150 hours working on building other people’s homes, explained David Zurheide, executive director of the Newark chapter.
After some basic training in homebuilding and job-site safety, they will work side-by-side with volunteers like Lou Dease of Staten Island, who was hard at work, on the structure. He was drawn to the construction site by his teenage daughter Katie.
Barry Wolfensohn checks out the work at Abraham House I as he makes plans to raise funds for Abraham House II.
As an employee of Con Edison, Dease said, he is adept at “plumbing, electricity, and pneumatics” — three skills that are essentials in homebuilding.
Katie, who said she knows how to hammer nails and saw wood, said, “I thought it was a great thing to do, to help people build houses and get them started on a new life. There are people in Newark, right in my backyard, whom I can help.”
Although his organization has its roots as a nondenominational Christian movement, Zurheide said, Habitat “is not about Christianity. It is about helping your neighbors. We call it ‘the theology of the hammer.’ Everybody is devoted it this common mission, which is to help your neighbor.”
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