The opening of a new Chabad building in Ottawa has brought almost 15,000 library books back to the capital’s Jewish community after they spent nearly a decade in storage.
Chabad of Wellington West was founded in 2022 by Ottawa-born Rabbi Moshe Caytak and his wife, Sheina Caytak, when they moved from Brooklyn, N.Y., to Ottawa with their three-month-old son. The couple co-directed the centre in their home for several years, inviting some of the neighbourhood’s 600 Jewish households to Shabbat and holiday dinners.
Rabbi Caytak says they’ve raised around $1.7 million to open the new centre, in a heritage building at 166 Huron Ave. N., also called the Connors House, since the start of their 2021 capital campaign. This money has allowed them to rezone the building from residential to institutional and make some changes to the property’s safety features.
“It’s a home away from home,” Rabbi Caytak says of the new building. “We just had an event, the first event after we got our occupancy permit, for Shavuot. The place was packed. There was only standing room in these rooms in here.”
He says the property will be the new site for the Jewish Youth Library of Ottawa, founded in 1983 by his mother, Devora Caytak.
Devora originally ran the library out of her home’s basement. But with six years of monthly shipments of Jewish novels, Judaic studies and Chasidic philosophy texts, Hebrew literature, and educational books on the Holocaust, her collection quickly grew beyond her limited shelf space.
In 1989, Devora took out loans to purchase 192 Switzer Ave., across the street from her home. A preschool was launched in that building five years later, and, by 2017, its attendance hit more than 40 students annually, making the building too busy to accommodate the library’s 15,000-book collection. The books were moved to storage that year.
Watching the shelves fill up in her son’s new Chabad centre has made Devora excited to reintroduce books to the community that have since gone out of print.
“Some of these books are not replaceable,” she says, adding that they plan to make the catalogue more accessible to modern readers by allowing them to reserve books digitally. “It’ll be done within the year.”
Some of the books at the new Chabad centre. (Photo: Zenith Wolfe/The CJN)
The Jewish Youth Library has the largest collection of any Ottawa-based Jewish library. The Greenberg Families Library at the Soloway Jewish Community Centre is second with around 14,300 books, while Kehillat Beth Israel’s Malca Pass Library has around 4,000 items, including DVDs and CDs.
Rabbi Caytak says re-opening the library makes him feel like he’s bringing Jewish knowledge into Ottawa homes. He also sees the building itself as a symbol of Jewish continuity.
“A home that’s a hundred years old is a thriving Jewish centre at a time when antisemitism is rampant in Canada and even in Ottawa,” he says. “There’s a sense of insecurity when you look around, and we see how there’s a Jewish centre being built from the ground up — that’s a massive statement.”
The property was designed in 1915 for City of Ottawa assessor Edward P. Connors by Francis Sullivan, one of the few Canadian pupils of prolific American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The city of Ottawa designated the Connors House a heritage building in 1985.
A bylaw statement submitted that year says the building deserves its heritage status because it “bears the unmistakable mark of Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous ‘Prairie’ style of architecture” and shows “that as early as the first decades of (the 20th) century more modern structures were being built in the capital.”
Because of its heritage status, Devora says it took three years to get construction permits from the City. It then took another two years to make necessary renovations to the fire escape, sprinkler system and landscaping.
The Caytaks hired Michelle Lenson, an architect with the Ottawa-based firm Dredge Leahy, to negotiate with contractors and help make safety changes to the building. Lenson says the Chabad co-directors never wanted to change details that would compromise the property’s historical value, but they did need to work with a structural engineer to accommodate the increased weight from books and larger groups of people.
“We had to make sure that the loading of the floor had the capacity, and then we had to reinforce the existing structure. And it’s all concealed. You would never know this ever happened,” Lenson says. “Having the Jewish Youth Library there, that’s an incredible opportunity to preserve that architectural history because no homeowner wants to inherit something that they can’t adapt to them.”
Sheina and Rabbi Caytak’s centre is the third new Chabad building to open in Canada’s capital over the last 12 years. Ottawa Torah Centre Chabad moved to Lamplighters Drive in Barrhaven in 2014, and the Finkelstein Chabad Jewish Centre hosted its grand opening downtown in late 2025.
Rabbi Caytak says Chabad centres are “thriving” in Ottawa because they keep an open mind when connecting with local Jews and helping them meet the community’s needs.
“We operate like startups. We look at challenges as opportunities. If there’s a decline in Jewish education, we have to figure out how to get more kids into the door,” he says. “We’re very low office administration. If we want to start a program, it’s not like we need to have meetings and board discussions. We’re able to start programs within days.”
Chabad of Wellington West will offer Sunday Hebrew school, Shabbat and holiday dinners, women’s events run by Sheina, adult courses from the Jewish Learning Institute (in addition to one-on-one classes), a café and a teen lounge created with help from a Chabad International grant.
The centre’s grand opening event starts at 11 a.m. on July 12. Author and founder of California’s North County Chabad Centre, Rabbi David Eliezrie, will be a guest speaker.