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An upstart synagogue is poised to take over a former health services site on the Upper East Side for its first permanent home.
The three-year-old Altneu congregation has purchased 107 E. 70th St. for $34.5 million, according to a deed that appeared in the city register on Monday.
Signing the deed for the Altneu was the synagogue’s president, Alexander Tsigutkin, the founder of AxiomSL, a tech firm known for its risk-management software for bank transactions that’s now owned by Nasdaq.
Tsigutkin went into contract on the building, a five-story edifice with leaded-glass bay windows near Park Avenue, on Feb. 14 and completed the acquisition on March 29, the deed says.
The seller was VNS Health, a nonprofit care group with roots in the 19th century with a rocky recent history. In 2020, the organization settled a years-old case over alleged billing fraud by shelling out a hefty $57 million fine, though VNS refused to admit any wrongdoing in the process.
Dan Savitt, who has served as VNS’s chief executive officer since 2021, handled the transaction for VNS, according to the register.
A VNS spokeswoman did not return an email seeking comment, and an email sent to the synagogue was also not returned. Also an effort to reach Tsigutkin through his former company was unsuccessful.
The Orthodox-focused Altneu, which translates to “old-new” in Yiddish, is led by Rabbi Benjamin Goldschmidt, who was fired in 2021 from a different shul, the nearby Park East Synagogue, after high-profile clashes with its longtime chief rabbi, Arthur Schneier.
Dozens of congregants signed a letter protesting Goldschmidt’s firing, and a year later, Goldschmidt announced that he and his wife, journalist Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, had co-founded the Altneu, which has so far been holding services at the Explorers Club on East 70th Street and other borrowed Upper East Side sites.
With its purchase of 107 E. 70th St., the Altneu has acquired a building completed in 1922 as the five-story home of Thomas Lamont, who served as chairman of Wall Street bank J.P. Morgan in the mid-20th century.
After the death of Lamont’s wife, Florence, 177,000-square-foot property was donated in 1954 to the Visiting Nurse Service of New York, the predecessor of VNS Health. (The Lamonts were also the great-grandparents of current Connecticut governor Ned Lamont.)
VNS Health, which offers home-care and hospice services, appears to have used the Tudor Revival brick-and-terracotta building for its offices and also to host fundraisers.
For his part, Tsigutkin, who immigrated to the U.S. from Ukraine in 1980, founded AxiomSL in 1991 and helmed the company until tech buyout group Thoma Bravo snapped it up in 2020 for undisclosed terms.
A year later, Thoma Bravo, which declined to comment, merged the firm with Calypso Technology and gave the combined software company a new name, Adenza Group. Nasdaq bought Adenza in 2023 in a $10.5 billion deal.
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C. J. Hughes , 2024-04-16 19:58:22
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