38 | OCTOBER 17 • 2024 

M

any readers of the Detroit 
Jewish News who build 
sukkot in celebration of the 
holiday live in detached homes with 
ample yard space for constructing the 
temporary hut. 
During the years that I lived in 
Southfield, my family built a large suk-
kah on our backyard deck. However, 
for observant Jews living in urban 
apartments, finding a location for 
building a sukkah can be challenging. 
One year when I was a toddler, my 
family lived in an apartment in Boston. 
My parents decided that their best 

option was to build a sukkah on the 
roof of their building. It stood there 
until, halfway through the holiday, the 
trumpeting of a fierce 
New England storm sent 
the walls tumbling down 
to the street. 
For many religiously 
observant urbanites in 
Israel, where apartment 
buildings dominate the 
landscape, the holiday 
of Sukkot brings with it this question 
of where to construct a sukkah. As 
apartment buildings and urban density 

rise, the problem becomes more acute, 
with limited space on the ground and 
on the roof of buildings. While the 
importance of balconies has univer-
sally grown more pronounced since 
the COVID-19 pandemic, in Israel the 
holiday of Sukkot, as well as a quirk in 
the building code, has made balcony 
design an especially important feature 
of many apartment buildings. 

RULES OF BUILDING A SUKKAH
The sukkot we build commemorate 
the nomadic period that the Israelites 
spent in the desert following the 
Exodus. The basic mitzvah of a suk-
kah, as per Leviticus 23:42, is to “live 
in sukkot for seven days.
” Jewish law 
therefore establishes several minimum 
requirements for a sukkah that render 
it habitable. These include a minimum 
area and height, as well as at least 
two-and-a-half walls. However, there 
is another crucial component, hinted 
at by the word “sukkah” itself, which 
relates to covering. The sukkah must 
be roofed with organic material, gener-
ically called sechach, which must be the 
only thing covering the sukkah. It is 
not enough for the sukkah to be out-
side and thatched with sechach; it must 
sit under the heavens and not under a 
tree, overhang or built enclosure. 
This requirement may not have been 
problematic when most Jews lived 
in an agrarian setting, though even 
in ancient Judaea, the rabbis of the 
Mishnah considered and rejected the 
possibility of a double-decker sukkah. 
In the suburbs of Detroit, where 
most houses have lawns or courtyards 
that are open to the sky, it is less of an 
obstacle, though one must still watch 
out for overhanging trees. (I remem-
ber this being an issue at Hillel when 
I was a student at the University of 
Michigan.) However, apartment build-
ings are another matter. Because suk-
kot need to sit under the open sky, it is 
not enough for a unit to simply have a 
balcony; typical apartment buildings 
stack balconies one over another, so 
that all but the uppermost one are cov-
ered. This has resulted in some apart-
ment dwellers in Israel jerry-rigging 
platforms and jutting makeshift ledges 
from their balconies, seemingly held 
together by duct tape and prayers. 

To create an apartment building 
with deliberate “sukkah balconies” 
open to the sky, the balconies must be 
staggered, and the perimeter space of 
the building must be divided so that 
all apartments have a slice. Setbacks, 
like tiers on a wedding cake, can make 
more space available for sukkah balco-
nies, but at the expense of apartment 
size, and at a certain height the reduced 
floor plan makes this unfeasible. In an 
effort to assure at least some exposure, 
building projects might guarantee a 
rather paltry area that can accommo-
date a kosher sukkah, in the range of 
15 square feet. This, too, can lead to 
diminishing results and sukkot that 
can only accommodate a few people 
around a small table, and not the large 
family gatherings that are typical of 
holiday meals in Israel. 
Ensuring that there are even small 
sukkah balconies complicates the 
apartment plan and is only done when 
consumers demand such a feature, 
primarily in neighborhoods slated for 
religious clientele. 

ECONOMICS OF CONSTRUCTION
This balcony design challenge is strict-
ly a Jewish concern, but it mirrors his-
toric problems for all tall buildings. As 
the price of land in cities rose, devel-
opers sought to generate additional 
value by building taller structures. 
But by the time Louis Sullivan and 
Dankmar Adler — the son of Detroit 
Temple Beth El’s Rabbi Liebman Adler 
— were helping to pioneer the first 
metal-frame skyscrapers in Chicago, 
architects were confronting a problem 
of diminishing returns. 
As masonry skyscrapers grew taller, 
their walls needed to grow thicker, 
and increasingly large banks of eleva-
tors and stairs were necessary. These 
requirements ate up the valuable retail 
space on ground floors, and thus can-
celed out any added value provided 
by additional floors above. Similarly, 
as buildings grew taller, they limited 
access to sunlight that renters demand-
ed in offices and dwellings. Steel 
frames and electric lighting helped 
solve these problems and make the 
skyscrapers profitable. The desire for 
sukkah balconies deals with these same 
issues but cannot be solved as readily. 

Sukkot in
Jerusalem

Israeli apartment dwellers want balconies 

that accommodate a sukkah.

Joshia Skarf
Special to the 
Jewish News

SUKKOT

