For the second year running, the sukkah in Chicago's Daley Plaza doubled as an art gallery, with 40 works by 27 artists from around the world hung on its outside walls. The show opened on September 23, a few days before Yom Tov, and stayed up through Sukkos, Lubavitch.com reported. The sukkah is put up by Chabad Center for Jewish Life.
Most sukkah decorations face inward, toward the family eating under the s'chach. Rivkah Benhiyoun, co-director of the center, turned that around. Her Sukkah Art Project puts the art on the outside walls, where the thousands of people who cross the plaza every day can see it. She called the walls "an outdoor tapestry of art inspired by Jewish life and tradition."
A sukkah in the middle of the Loop
A sukkah has stood in Daley Plaza, at 50 West Washington Street, since 1979, according to Lubavitch.com. In winter the same plaza holds the city's Chanukah menorah, a 30-foot candelabra that the Center for Jewish Life lights each year with the mayor, WBEZ reported in 2023. The late Rabbi Daniel Moscowitz, regional director of Lubavitch-Chabad of Illinois, was a regular at those lightings, according to a 2014 Illinois Senate resolution passed after his petirah. Under his leadership the Chabad network in the state grew to nearly 40 centers in 21 cities.
The couple behind it
Rabbi Meir Chai Benhiyoun, the center's director, was born in Morocco in 1955 and moved to Israel about ten years later, according to a biography published by Chicago's TimeLine Theatre. He served in the IDF from 1972 to 1975, then studied linguistics and film at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where a Holocaust feature he made won a university award. He came to the United States in 1980 to study for the rabbinate and received semicha in 1986.
In July 1987, the Lubavitcher Rebbe sent him and his wife to downtown Chicago. A 2003 Lubavitch.com profile traces how they started: an office in the Loop, then a townhouse in Lincoln Park about three years later, then a house in the Gold Coast. At the time, that profile said, about 40,000 Jews lived downtown with no mikvah and very little kosher food. Mayor Richard M. Daley backed the Benhiyouns from early on. After a 1994 Chabad dinner he set up a city committee to help them find a permanent building.
Who came this year
Hundreds of visitors stepped inside this Sukkos. They took guided tours, asked about the paintings, and made the brachos in the sukkah and on the lulav and esrog. Several groups came together: members of the Jewish and Assyrian Heritage Organization, about 40 students from Lake Zurich Baptist Church, and a Yachad group, which serves Jews with cognitive disabilities.
The artists brought their own family histories. Jacqueline Kott-Wolle, whose parents and grandparents settled in Canada after the Holocaust, paints from old family photographs and memories. As a girl in a Toronto suburb, she said, her family's sukkah made her feel set apart from the neighbors. Today she builds her own, and seeing her work on a public sukkah in Chicago meant a great deal to her. Riffi Bleichman showed a painting of the word chai, whose letters add up to 18. She made it for her 18th wedding anniversary.
Rabbi Benhiyoun spoke of the sukkah as a home whose reach goes past its own walls. He said Jewish continuity stands on Torah, humor, music and art. The center plans to bring in more artists next year and to work more closely with schools, families and community groups across Chicago.
How we reported this: This story is based on a Lubavitch.com report published Oct. 9, 2026, written by Elie Benhiyoun; we did not confirm whether the writer is related to the center's directors. Background comes from a 2003 Lubavitch.com profile of the center, a TimeLine Theatre biography of Rabbi Benhiyoun, a 2023 WBEZ report on the Daley Plaza menorah, a Loop Chicago event listing and a 2014 Illinois Senate resolution. We could not confirm who first put up the Daley Plaza sukkah in 1979, since the Benhiyouns arrived in 1987. Communities with a Yom Tov story to share can reach us at [email protected].