Center of attention

A cultural institution that will look beyond its Jewish roots is ready to raise its profile

By Geoff Edgers, Globe Staff  |  February 19, 2006

o an outsider, the party at Boston College may have seemed like any other. But the appetizers gave it away. Under a tent outside the Catholic university's McMullen Museum of Art, waiters passed knishes and potato latkes. This was strictly kosher.

''The Jews have taken over BC," a man shouted as he walked by Mark Sokoll, the part-time rabbi who serves as president of the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston.

''Hallelujah," Sokoll said, laughing back.

They were joking, but at least on this evening, they were right.

The McMullen, in opening its doors to the Jewish leaders in September, received the kind of support (read: money) needed to stage the show ''The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons." In return, the sponsors -- major players in business, real estate, and philanthropy -- received a platform to spread word of one of the city's most promising arts projects: the New Center for Arts and Culture.

In his welcoming remarks, Ronald M. Druker didn't hold back. He talked of the project's world-class architect, Daniel Libeskind, and the site, a priceless Greenway parcel in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel.

''A lot of people will say, do you need this institution in Boston?" said Druker, the bearded developer whose high-profile projects dot the Boston landscape.

He then gave his own answer, explaining the special nature of the $80 million project. Despite being sponsored by the Jewish Community Centers of Greater Boston and Combined Jewish Philanthropies, the New Center will not merely be a hangout for the Temple Brotherhood, he said. There could be dance, music, film, lectures, and art exhibitions, and through those events, the center intends to build relationships among a range of groups, both inside and outside the Jewish community. And the target audience won't be Boston's typical museum and theater crowd.

''We're going to be looking to a much broader sector," Druker said.

First, he'll have to get the word out. So far, in a city in the midst of an unprecedented arts building boom, the New Center is the project hardly anyone seems to know about. During the push to reshape Boston, post-Big Dig, it's been overshadowed by other plans, whether the proposals for a $70 million YMCA or the Massachusetts Horticultural Society's ''Garden Under Glass." Now, with those ideas thwarted by rising costs and slow fund-raising, the New Center could be the Rose Kennedy Greenway's best hope.

Quietly, the New Center has raised more than $20 million and recruited a virtual who's who of local business and cultural leaders. The drawings by Libeskind, whose designs include the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Imperial War Museum in Manchester, England, and who's been involved in the planning to redevelop the World Trade Center site, show an illuminated, four-story, 67,000-square-foot building with exhibition galleries, seminar rooms, a cafe, and a 350-seat theater.

In January, the New Center signed up LaPlaca Cohen, the New York-based marketing expert whose clients include the Art Institute of Chicago, the New Yorker magazine, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition, the New Center's tiny staff has started developing the kinds of relationships -- and buzz -- that will be crucial as it creates programs, books performances, and searches for an audience.

''These are real smart folks," says Sol Adler, the executive director of New York City's 92nd Street Y, the famed cultural center that New Center organizers have consulted with. ''Whenever they open, we're ready to partner with them."

It hasn't always been a smooth road, and the project is far from done. Already, organizers have lost two of the central figures driving the project: developer Edwin Sidman, who died last year of cancer, and Shoshana Pakciarz, the founding executive director who resigned a few months later to spend more time with her retired husband. But New Center's leaders say they're not only close to hiring a new director, they've determined that their complex could open as soon as 2010.

When Sidman began to get sick, he asked Druker, who had been active in the project, to lead it with him. And Pakciarz's exit meant that Francine Achbar, a former television producer and Boston Herald reporter, would serve as the New Center's top administrator. Druker and Achbar, director of development and marketing, talk almost every day, by phone or e-mail.

Achbar counts on Druker for real estate issues. He meets with the project's building manager one morning each week. She calls on Robert Beal, the Harvard-educated real estate mogul, to maintain the network of political and business-world supporters the New Center will need. Paula Sidman, Edwin's widow and a veteran of several campaigns for the Combined Jewish Philanthropies, makes the important fund-raising calls.

As for Achbar, she's found herself explaining the New Center's mission, particularly to those who don't understand how a project organized and so far paid for by the region's Jewish leaders can be anything other than a cultural club for the JCC. It isn't, Achbar says.

The New Center's purpose is to develop connections among groups historically separated by race, geography, and religion. That plan has evolved, particularly as the leaders considered the challenges the Jewish community now faces. Earlier generations -- motivated out of fear during the Holocaust era, or the need to create institutions when colleges and hospitals excluded Jews -- built some of the region's leading institutions: Brandeis University, Beth Israel Hospital, the Jewish Community Centers.

''But what does it mean to be Jewish when that generation dies, when you and I intermarry, and when we can go anywhere, do anything, belong to any club, go to any school?" Achbar says. ''What we decided is you don't have to go to temple or be affiliated or care about Zionism to appreciate Jewish culture."

So what started as a plan to construct the center in Newton, on the JCC campus, moved downtown to parcel 18, a spot directly in front of the Boston Harbor Hotel, one of the key developments of New Center supporter Norman Leventhal.

''The more talking that was done, even with big leaders in the Jewish community, they would say, 'Don't make it all Jewish. And don't call it Jewish,' " Achbar says. ''We don't need another Holocaust Museum. Let's make something contemporary. Let's make something that's both looking inward at Jewish culture and appreciating Jewish culture and reaching outward and looking at other cultures."

That feel-good concept has quickly been put to practice.

In 2003, the New Center's ''Words on Fire" project took on an issue central to the Jewish community -- the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Nazi book burnings in Berlin -- and used it as a springboard for a two-month program of readings and discussions that created collaborations with a range of other institutions, including the Boston Public Library, Museum of Afro-American History, and Mary Baker Eddy Library. ''The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons," which closed in December, drew 13,000 to the McMullen and spawned a host of salons around the city.

'' 'Salon,' as an exhibition, is a neat example of what we could do," says Gail Lord, the Toronto-based consultant who developed the New Center's master plan. ''It's an exhibition about Jewish women and salons, but had it been able to be shown in our [new] place, you can imagine theatrical pieces, they might be African-American or Irish-American, you could see Ibsen's ''The Dollhouse" being performed. The model really is to take a big theme and express it in different ways."

When it opens, the New Center will be part of a cultural scene that has grown dramatically over the last decade. A new Institute of Contemporary Art is set to open later this year, and major expansion projects are underway at the Museum of Fine Arts, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Children's Museum, and Museum of Science.

That growth leads some to wonder about the viability of all of these new institutions. Can Boston support so many new venues, particularly with competition for entertainment dollars growing fiercer? Two of the region's leading arts institutions -- the Wang Center for the Performing Arts and Boston Ballet -- have struggled to balance their budgets in recent years. The 91-year-old Wilbur Theatre currently sits empty, as Clear Channel Entertainment decided recently not to renew its lease on the space.

The brand new Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown has struggled to keep its space booked only months after its grand opening, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem has seen its attendance drop from 237,000 in 2004 to 190,000 last year following its dramatic expansion.

The new ICA, which plans to unveil its Fan Pier home in September, will need to draw 200,000 visitors during its first year to break even. That's up from an average of 24,000 annually in its current location on Boylston Street.

''I think we're spreading the peanut butter a little too thinly across the same cracker," says David D'Alessandro, the former John Hancock Financial Services chief executive officer and longtime chairman of the Wang Center's board. ''There's a good chance this particular center could be successful if it has the right people behind it. But as they say in Las Vegas, there's less and less whales around. There's a capacity issue in this town. If it succeeds, it's going to draw from other places."

In the arts community, which has responded with enthusiasm to the building boom, D'Alessandro is in the minority.

Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre Company, points to the success of the Calderwood Pavilion at Boston Center for the Arts, a project he worked on with Druker. Over its first year, it has run ahead of budget projections with two shows, ''Sonia Flew" and ''Culture Clash in AmeriCCa," selling out a string of performances.

''When I look at the question of whether somebody should build a space, the only thing I'm interested in is, 'Do they have a purpose?' " Maso says. ''There isn't any generic audience, people who just show up at a theater. To me, it still comes down to the programming."

Though the New Center won't open for years, Achbar says it has been looking at how other institutions book their spaces. The 121-year-old 92nd Street Y has, over the years, brought in a range of thinkers for programs and lectures, from dance legend Martha Graham to architect Frank Gehry and former president Bill Clinton. Achbar has also been clipping out reviews of potential acts for the space. She brings up Matisyahu, the Hasidic Jewish rapper who recently sold out the Paradise and Avalon.

Druker points out that the Center's programming will be determined, in large part, by the new director.

''Our timing is perfect," he says. ''It's not as though we have a building that's etched in stone so this person can't have influence on it. We are not only going to have dance performances, we're going to have theatrical performances. We're going to use our space for lectures and for chamber music. We don't see ourselves competing with anybody."

At the opening at Boston College, Druker stood at the podium during the show's introductions and raved about Libeskind's design. He compared its potential impact on the Boston landscape with that of Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain.

''People will know where we are," he said, smiling. ''And trust me, when people see that building, they'll know that building."

Geoff Edgers can be reached at gedgers@globe.com.