Long the headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidim, 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood has been considered something of a sacred shrine since the death of the movement’s leader, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, in 1994. For decades, his followers have built replicas of the building across the world for their local communities—not only in Jerusalem and several American cities but also in Brazil, Chile, Italy, Australia, and India. Adam Iscoe relates 770’s architectural history:

The building came into the Lubavitchers’ hands in 1940. “The doctor who first owned the building had interesting taste,” a hasidic architect named Eli Meltzer said on a snowy afternoon last week, looking up at the shul. . . . In the 1930s, the doctor, a Jew, commissioned the three-story, triple-gabled, neo-Gothic Tudor revival (other historians have argued that it’s more neo-Jacobean) mansion from an architect named Edwin Kline. The style telegraphed Old World wealth, like a proto-McMansion. Kline also built a Tudor revival for Oscar Hammerstein, on Long Island.

As the Jewish news outlet the Forward has chronicled, the doctor, who performed illegal abortions in the house, lost his medical license, bribed a judge, and went to prison for tax evasion. The mansion was repossessed by the bank, which sold it to [Schneerson’s] father-in-law [and predecessor as the Lubavitcher rebbe], a rabbi who had just fled the Nazis in Poland and was looking for a headquarters for the Lubavitchers. He didn’t buy the house for its old-timey details (stained-glass sailboats, inset quatrefoils, an oriel window, ornamented spandrels, rumors of a crucifix). The deciding factor? The [then-rebbe], who had been tortured by the Soviets, required an elevator, and the mansion had one.

When he called upon Hamas to end the war and release the hostages last week, the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas was also getting ready for a reshuffle within his regime. On Saturday, he appointed Hussein al-Sheikh deputy president of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which is intimately tied to the PA itself. Al-Sheikh would therefore succeed Abbas—who is eighty-nine and reportedly in ill health—as head of the PLO if he should die or become incapacitated, and be positioned to succeed him as head of the PA as well.

Al-Sheikh spent eleven years in an Israeli prison and, writes Maurice Hirsch, was involved in planning a 2002 Jerusalem suicide bombing that killed three. Moreover, Hirsch writes, he “does not enjoy broad Palestinian popularity or support.”

Still, by appointing Al-Sheikh, Abbas has taken a step in the internal reforms he inaugurated last year in the hope that he could prove to the Biden administration and other relevant players that the PA was up to the task of governing the Gaza Strip. Neomi Neumann writes:

Abbas’s motivation for reform also appears rooted in the need to meet the expectations of Arab and European donors without compromising his authority. On April 14, the EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas approved a three-year aid package worth 1.6 billion euros, including 620 million euros in direct budget support tied to reforms. Meanwhile, the French president Emmanuel Macron held a call with Abbas [earlier this month] and noted afterward that reforms are essential for the PA to be seen as a viable governing authority for Gaza—a telling remark given reports that Paris may soon recognize “the state of Palestine.”

In some cases, reforms appear targeted at specific regional partners. The idea of appointing a vice-president originated with Saudi Arabia.

In the near term, Abbas’s main goal appears to be preserving Arab and European support ahead of a major international conference in New York this June.