For two years nobody talked about anything other than the name arrangement. There was no fund-raising and no progress being made on construction and design.

I love New York, but I'd felt like an outsider here.

How do you design it so that people can form a space of their own, and feel quiet and contemplative?

New York was a place I wanted to live and work all along. If I wasn't going to live in Israel, I had to live in New York.

I believe that people are fundamentally are decent. And, yes, you will have people that sometimes will misbehave.

I think my desire to imagine a future for this site came out of trying to come to terms with the emotions that day aroused.

I had a dual role: designer and advocate.