Prayer Amid the Office Machines
By: Joseph Berger

This is an article that was published in the NY Times on January 19th, 2004 regarding prayer in the workplace, which is what the Minyan Minder was created for.
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In the bustle and clamor of a Manhattan workday, thousands of New Yorkers take time out from their jobs to pray with one another, often in unlikely places.

At the global law firm of Weil, Gotshal & Manges in the General Motors Building, Jewish men from around the neighborhood gather just before sunset every Monday through Thursday in the 28th-floor office of one of the firm's partners. There, beside tall windows overlooking the groves of Central Park and the swirl of its ice rink, prayer books are passed out, skullcaps are put on, and the men stand and murmur their obligatory afternoon and evening prayers.

At Cuisine of Pakistan, a fast-food restaurant on Ninth Avenue, taxi drivers, merchants and at least one uniformed traffic officer gather every day at lunchtime in the narrow space between the rear booths. They take off their shoes, spread rugs on the tile floor, turn toward Mecca and, while diners linger over mutton curry, recite the opening chapter of the Koran, then bow, kneel and prostrate themselves.

"We don't think too much about what is around us," said Altaff Shah, 53, a civil engineer who often drops in at the restaurant. "We have a direct meeting with the Creator."

These not-so-secret prayer places are honeycombed throughout the canyons of Midtown and Wall Street, offering convenient workday refuges for people who feel obliged to pray several times a day. They seem to have mushroomed in recent years as more companies have adjusted to the religious needs of their employees and as the Internet has spread word of where these sanctuaries are.

Indeed, a Web site that is known as GoDaven.com lists 180 places in Manhattan where Jews can find an afternoon or evening minyan, the quorum of 10 preferred for group prayer and Kaddish. Finding such minyanim can be particularly urgent even for Jews who are not observant but have lost relatives within the last year. The saying of Kaddish, a short prayer that praises God and does not mention the deceased relative, is, like circumcision, regarded as a defining tradition, and strangers try to accommodate a mourner with a minyan.

While some prayer places are mosques or synagogues, like the Garment Center Congregation and the Millinery Center Synagogue, which cater to workers, most are more makeshift affairs. They are located in the offices of prominent financial houses like Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Prudential Securities and at law firms like Kaye Scholer; at public agencies like the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation and the Housing Authority; and at dozens of businesses. At least two Manhattan bookstores have a place for minyanim.

"Psychologically, to be able to break away from your business for 15 minutes and focus on what's important in life is soothing," said Jay Lang, 45, a real estate lawyer who prays at Chabad Lubavitch of Midtown Manhattan, on the second floor of an office building on Fifth Avenue off 42nd Street. "It stabilizes you."

There are two minyanim in the Empire State Building — one in a garment manufacturer's conference room on the 50th floor, in which prayer is in the Sephardic style, and the other on the 6th floor, in Ashkenazic style. There are also two minyanim in the General Motors Building. Such profusion seems to illustrate the old joke about the Jew stranded on a desert island who builds two synagogues because the second is "the one I won't go to."

For more than 20 years, people who work in the diamond district on West 47th Street have been dropping in after 3:30 p.m. at the Diamond Dairy of New York Restaurant, on a mezzanine above the jewelry booths in the National Jewelers Exchange.

There they can choose one of six 15-minute services of mincha, the afternoon prayer. While late diners eat blintzes and potato pirogen, dozens of swaying men in homburgs, fedoras, baseball caps or yarmulkes crowd a 20-foot-long corridor and side room normally used for preparing takeout foods.

"Anytime you come up you always have a minyan," said Samuel Strauss, the restaurant's owner. "People have to daven because they lost a parent," he said, using the Yiddish word for pray. "So here they know they have a minyan." If Muslims want a place more tranquil than Cuisine of Pakistan, which on Fridays is brimming with more than 100 men led by an imam, they can try the prosaic office of a Muslim organization on West 44th Street. (In Islam too, group worship confers a greater reward, though a group can be as small as two.)

During most of the year, Roman Catholics and Protestants are generally not obliged to pray in groups, and those who do feel a need to pray have a wide variety of churches near their workplaces.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, said that churches like St. Francis of Assisi on West 31st Street and the Church of Our Lady of Victory in the Wall Street area offered several daily Masses that are often packed with Catholics "who want to practice their faith more fully."

But observant Muslims, who must pray five times a day, and observant Jews, who pray three, have a far smaller selection of houses of worship near their jobs, and walking to those that are available might take a prohibitive amount of time.

That is why most minyanim are at lunchtime. Some are at sunset, combining the afternoon and evening prayers for those who may not make it home in time to say the evening prayer, maariv, in a neighborhood synagogue.

J. Philip Rosen, a partner at Weil, Gotshal, points out that there is a nice efficiency to the abundance of places to pray, and it saves firms money. "Lawyers aren't taking their time to walk an hour away, but instead spend the 15 minutes inside the shop," he said.

The minyan at Weil, Gotshal was started 14 years ago after Mr. Rosen's father, a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Shanghai, died, and Mr. Rosen had to say Kaddish.

"Friends of mine at the firm said, `Why would you have to go outside to a minyan? We can just do it here,' " recalled Mr. Rosen, 47, a corporate and property lawyer.

Mr. Rosen appreciates the perspective a break from work offers on what matters in life. "It's private time, it's not billable time," he said. "It's a recognition of the importance of religion in your life. No matter what else is going on, you find the time to pray."

Mr. Shah finds a certain social wisdom in daily prayer, giving him a chance to find out about the lives of his fellow Muslims. If regular worshipers don't show up, he wonders if they might be sick, he said. The other day, he said, one worshiper informed him that his father was a pilot on the charter plane that crashed into the Red Sea this month. "If he didn't come, I wouldn't have known that about him," he said.

Few women come to the minyanim and none to the Muslim services. Muslim women are not obliged to pray collectively outside the home, and for Orthodox Jewish women the obligation is not as emphatic or extensive as for men. Virtually all the informal minyanim are organized by Orthodox men and do not have a mechitza, or divider, which is needed to separate the sexes.

"There are women who do pray the afternoon service, but they do it on their own, wherever they find space for themselves," said Mel Zachter, a senior partner at Loeb & Troper, an accounting firm on Third Avenue that has two minyanim. "If there was a request to join the minyanim, which there hasn't been, we would try to accommodate them."

Nevertheless, Chabad Lubavitch, whose second-floor Midtown office is a virtual synagogue, maintains a dividing curtain, and Rabbi Joshua Metzger, its leader, said, "A number of women come here every day to pray because they lost their loved ones last year."

Rigorously observant Conservative and Reform Jews tend to prefer synagogues for daily prayers, even if that means something of a trip, though many saying Kaddish drop in at Orthodox minyanim.

Some of the informal places of worship have their drawbacks.

"People talk about balancing a prayer book between the coffee pot and the copying machine," Rabbi Metzger said of his office counterparts. His space, he notes, is large and has an ark for the Torah.

Still, for some prayer spots there are additional benefits to being the host for prayer services. While profit was not the reason he invited worshipers to his restaurant seven years ago, Umar Darr, the owner of Cuisine of Pakistan, acknowledged that holding the daily service "gives us a blessing."

"Having the prayer here," he said, "my business is going good."