  Spontaneous breaking of chiral symmetry is investigated in the Hamiltonian
approach to QCD in Coulomb gauge. The quark wave functional is determined by
the variational principle using an ansatz which goes beyond the commonly used
BCS-type of wave functionals and includes the coupling of the quarks to the
transversal spatial gluons. Using the lattice gluon propagator as input it is
shown that the low energy chiral properties of the quarks, like the quark
condensate and the constituent quark mass, are substantially increased by the
coupling of the quarks to the spatial gluons. Our results compare favourably
with the phenomenological values.
