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After half a century, Congregation Rodef Sholom will welcome the Jewish New Year in a most unusual place: its own sanctuary.

Make that its brand-new sanctuary.

For decades, the San Rafael synagogue has shifted its High Holiday services to the Marin Civic Center to accommodate more worshippers. But this year it will make an exception on Oct. 2, Erev Rosh Hashanah, so that congregants can begin 5785 in their new home.

After years of planning, fundraising and then razing its original building, Rodef Sholom dedicated its new synagogue in May. The results are impressive. The 22,000-square-foot, two-story building is 50% larger than the original and includes a 600-seat sanctuary, a balcony, offices, a kitchen and expandable multipurpose rooms, some of which double as classrooms. A courtyard graces an exterior dominated by windows, while the second-floor sanctuary is framed by a massive wall of windows that faces east and looks onto the rugged, forested hills of Marin County.

“Our new synagogue is more than a building,” said Senior Rabbi Stacy Friedman. “It is a sacred expression of our community and reflects our deepest and most enduring values. For many years, our synagogue members dreamed together and created a vision of a sacred space that is a catalyst for goodness, compassion, generosity and joy.”

It had been clear for years that the 1,150-household Reform synagogue had outgrown its original building, which was dedicated in 1962. Yet lead architect Steve Rajninger said the renovation process began innocently enough nearly 20 years ago.

“It all spurred from a longtime congregant wandering into the social hall and saying, ‘We really ought to replace the floor,’” Rajninger recalled. “Then it was thought maybe we needed something more comprehensive, like a renovation. People pretty quickly realized that the kind of renovation necessary would be so comprehensive it would cost the same to rebuild from the ground up.”

Designing the ideal new synagogue required input from many people, according to Rajninger, who is himself a member of Rodef Sholom. He and the committees responsible for the project hosted town halls and smaller sessions to hear what congregants, clergy and staff most desired in a sacred space.

“Those initial conversations really set the ideas for the design ideas to follow,” he said, “and they still happily allowed for a great deal of design creativity. But it grows out of those design conversations. You want it to feel like home from day one, and the way to do that is to make the building embody the spiritual values of the place.” 

Rajninger’s “aha” moment came after posing the question of when and where in life that congregants and others felt “closest to holiness.” Many responded by saying they felt most spiritual when in nature.

That gave the architect an idea.

“In the first committee meetings,” he recalled, “I invited everyone to climb a ladder to the roof of the original single-story building, which was a virtually windowless blank box. There was a single stained-glass window, but no sense there was this beautiful hillside to the east. I invited the committee to the roof, and there we saw this beautiful watershed hillside of virgin forest to the east. It was that moment they realized we needed the sanctuary to be on the second floor.”

And the majestic glass lookout to the hills was born.

Because Rodef Sholom is adjacent to both the Osher Marin JCC and the day school Brandeis Marin, the congregation was able to shift its day-to-day operations to those buildings during the two years of construction. Temple offices relocated to the JCC, which is also where Shabbat services were held. Religious school classes already took place at Brandeis Marin and continued that way.

The proximity allowed congregants, staff and clergy front-row seats to the progress of the $30 million project.

“We watched the building go up every day,” said Tracey Klapow, Rodef Sholom’s executive director. “I was on the site most days. What was really exciting was our community watching it go up. So everyone got to watch it. Now many say they feel like the people in the [architectural] renderings because they have looked at those drawings for so many years.”

Klapow added that the new building has “brought our community together. … We see people feeling like it’s their home.”

Not surprisingly, planners wanted to make sure the new building was as environmentally efficient as possible. LEED certification, the most widely recognized “green” building rating system, was too costly, but the synagogue still pursued the “highest tier of green building code-compliance in Marin County,” according to the Rodef Sholom website. That included the use of natural daylight, solar shades, solar panels, low-flow plumbing fixtures, drought-tolerant plants and high-performance lighting, heating and cooling systems. The new building also features an upgraded air filtration system to handle smoke from wildfires, which have become an unfortunate reality in California.

Rajninger, who plans to welcome the New Year in the new sanctuary, is pleased with the outcome after years of work. Still, as the lead architect, he can’t help but notice the little things he might have done differently.

“Yeah, there are things I see that nobody else sees,” he said. “But it’s pure bliss being able to be a member and pray in the space and celebrate.”