When Berlin Rabbi Yehuda Teichtal first talked about his dream of building Germany’s biggest Jewish educational and cultural complex since the Holocaust, most people who heard about the plan were skeptical.

But five years after the groundbreaking, Teichtal, a Berlin rabbi and head of the local Chabad community, stepped onto the seventh-floor balcony of the new curved, blue-tiled building overlooking the campus amphitheater, garden, playground and a plot that will eventually become a sports field.