As Manhattan’s Chabad Young Professionals seeks to fundraise for its new Chelsea townhouse, hundreds of its supporters — dressed in their black-tie best — gathered at The Angel Orensanz Center on Tuesday night for the group’s “Bringing It Home” gala. 

The sold-out event raised more than $950,000 towards a larger space for the new Chabad center, which is slated to open on West 24th Street at the end of this year. The new location “will serve as a positive, forward-looking Jewish space where young leaders thrive, learn and grow,” Rabbi Levi Shmotkin, who runs CYP, along with his wife Perel, told eJewishPhilanthropy.  

But much of the evening’s focus was on what has already been accomplished at the current hub, which was opened in 2008. Located in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, it is one of the few Chabads that specifically caters to recent graduates and rising leaders in finance and technology. Throughout the event, guests could be overheard schmoozing about their favorite memories at the center — the fun Purim party, the Shabbat dinner where they met their future spouse or the comfort and consistency that CYP provided in the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and the soaring rates of antisemitism that followed in New York City. 

The gala honored Joe Lonsdale, founder and managing partner of venture capital firm 8VC; Sequoia Capital’s Shaun Maguire and OakTree Capital’s Adam Shapiro. It also featured remarks from New York City Mayor Eric Adams and a musical performance by IDF reservist Noam Buskila. 

Lonsdale credited Chabad with instilling in him an entrepreneurial spirit. 

“At Chabad you build,” he told the crowd. “You don’t wait for the culture to change. You shape it. You don’t whine about what’s wrong. You create what’s right.”