The Edmond J. Safra Synagogue, a Beaux-Arts house of Jerusalem stone on a townhouse block off Fifth Avenue, home since 2003 to a Sephardic congregation. You stand in the stone lobby with the bronze doors open onto the round sanctuary: twelve stone piers, a ribbed wooden dome lit round its rim and open to the sky at its crown, the reader's platform in the middle and the bronze ark in its niche with the lamp burning before it. The New Yorkers hang in the lobby, the Heritage Library downstairs, the social hall and the roof garden, never in the sanctuary.
The Edmond J. Safra Synagogue at 11 East 63rd Street, between Madison and Fifth Avenues, is the home of Congregation Beit Yaakov, an Orthodox congregation of the Sephardi rite. It was designed by the architect Thierry Despont as a work of Beaux-Arts revival, with its facade and its interior both in Jerusalem stone, and bronze doors with a Tree of Life motif by the sculptor Mark Beard. The building was completed in December 2002 and officially inaugurated in October 2003. It stands in the Upper East Side Historic District, so its design needed the approval of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.
Source · Edmond J. Safra Synagogue (Manhattan), Wikipedia ↗
The Jerusalem stone front with its arched bronze doors and tall arched window, the stone lobby, the round sanctuary on a ring of twelve piers, the ribbed wooden dome with its lit cove and oculus, the gallery between the piers, the round reader's platform with the curved benches round it, the cylindrical bronze ark in its stone niche with blank tablets, the lamp on its long chain, the wood panelled Heritage Library, the social hall, the roof garden over the dome, and the brownstones of East 63rd Street. Mood: friday afternoon, stone, wood and light. Everything is procedural geometry with painted surfaces; nothing is a scan or a photograph. The room is an interpretation, and it hangs the New Yorkers the census recorded at this place first.