The next thing is not to expect perfection. Perfection, according to Jewish law, is something reserved for the world beyond, its seller stressed. So if the walls are unfinished and bent nails curve from the ceiling rafters, it should not be a big deal.
It is an unusual sales pitch, to be sure, but this is no regular listing. The building houses Torah Animal World, a collection of hundreds of taxidermied and otherwise preserved animals that represents the wide range of creatures depicted in the Old Testament. It is famous in the neighborhood, and for some of the thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jewish children who have come on tours, it is the closest they have ever been to a natural history museum.
Rabbi Shaul Shimon Deutsch, the exhibition’s creator, is ready to consolidate the collection with a biblical antiquities museum he runs a few doors away, and with two smaller collections he has in upstate New York and in New Jersey, because the operating costs of running all the locations have gotten too high. So though Torah Animal World will for now leave Brooklyn, he said he hoped the animals would soon migrate to larger quarters there.
“My real goal was to create a zoo in Brooklyn,” Rabbi Deutsch, 47, said on a tour last week, after pointing out the ibex and orex, the African Cape buffalo and the kudu in the house’s teal exhibition space. “But we didn’t want any wild lions getting loose in Borough Park, so we did the next best thing and used taxidermy.”
The property, at 1605 41st Street, has been on the market for several weeks, and given its contents, people have noticed. Poking fun at the listing’s police-lineup-style photographs of grazing animals in the living room and the rundown state of the property, the real estate blog Curbed called it “the funkiest listing in recent memory” and pronounced its asking price of $ 995,000 absurd.
Yet even though Rabbi Deutsch did not try to stage the 1,900-square-foot building, there has already been an offer from a man on the block, if below asking price, said the broker, Menachem Trietel of Weichert Realtors. “When I took pictures of the property, I tried to do as little animals as possible,” he said of the listing’s offbeat snapshots. “But obviously, it’s impossible.”
It may not matter. With the exponential growth of the Orthodox Jewish community, and young families being priced out of Manhattan and trendier parts of Brooklyn, the quiet enclave of Borough Park has become an unlikely hot neighborhood, several brokers said. Houses generally sell as is, because the inventory of homes is so low, and most end up being gut-renovated, anyway.
“I mean, the front of the house has a big giraffe on it, so it’s a pretty tall and wide house,” said Charles Fabbella, an owner of Ben Bay Realty, in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, when asked to consider the property’s price. “It’s going to go. It’s a house in a prime neighborhood.”
The first floor is an open, barnlike space, with rows of taxidermied animals and simple wooden benches for visitors, who pay a suggested donation of $ 10 each. All the windows are boarded up, so rooms are cavelike. Outside, a 10-foot-tall image of a giraffe looms over the doorway, next to a fiberglass moose head.
“We didn’t want it to look perfect,” Rabbi Deutsch said. “We wanted it to look like you were going into an animal kind of environment.”
Upstairs, taxidermied ducks and geese swoop over tall birds, like an ostrich. In the back, visitors can sit among animals that appear in prayers, including a white-tailed deer.
“Like a deer that stands on a mountain thirsting for water, so, too, my heart thirsts for you, God,” Rabbi Deutsch said, providing an impromptu translation of Psalm 42.
Amish groups have visited, as well as senior rabbis, to mull over displays, like the one that shows 30 kosher birds (a peacock is among them). Uniquely, visitors may touch the animals. They can also hold many of the ancient artifacts at the Living Torah Museum, which Rabbi Deutsch has been operating two doors down since 2002.
There, the expensive relics, amassed through donations and visits to antiquities dealers, sit in niches meant to resemble walls in ancient Jerusalem. “This here is an original signet ring that belonged to the minister of a pharaoh,” Rabbi Deutsch said, sliding open a glass case and pulling out a gold ring with a scarab. “Would you like to try on a $ 165,000 ring from ancient Egypt?”
“You see, I got sick and tired of kids sitting in class and thinking history was boring,” he said, explaining how his life’s work began. “We are the only museum in the world that lets its visitors touch ancient items. And I do it so that it becomes more real to them.”
Rabbi Deutsch’s home is between the two museums, and accessible through a connecting room from Animal World’s main floor. Because he owns three buildings, he has been advised by brokers to sell them as a lot, so that a cluster of million-dollar condos could be built at the site.
But according to Jewish law, he cannot, he said, because the synagogue he runs on the first floor of the antiquities museum must first have somewhere to go. So the building that houses Animal World is on the market first, to provide capital for the future move.
His dream, he said, would be to find a 40,000-square-foot warehouse with plenty of space for the animals, the antiquities, the 50-family Liozna synagogue and the charity food pantry the synagogue runs from the basement.
The ideal buyer of the house containing Animal World, he said, will be someone who wants to start from scratch. “You can do a tremendous thing; you can do your vision in this building,” he said.
Yahoo Local News – New York Times
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via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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