Hillel Building Boom Enhances Jewish Life on College Campuses

c. 2005 Religion News Service (UNDATED) David Yaron belonged to a Jewish fraternity at Johns Hopkins University, but it wasn’t until the creation of the Hillel house that he felt a sense of pride and belonging with the campus’ broader Jewish community. The 16,000-square-foot complex built in the spring of 2004 is the central Jewish […]

c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) David Yaron belonged to a Jewish fraternity at Johns Hopkins University, but it wasn’t until the creation of the Hillel house that he felt a sense of pride and belonging with the campus’ broader Jewish community.

The 16,000-square-foot complex built in the spring of 2004 is the central Jewish address on the Baltimore campus, offering everything from Shabbat services and study rooms to comfy lounges where students can project DirectTV’s “NFL Sunday Ticket” onto a huge screen.


“It’s basically creating a lot of buzz about the stuff that we do,” says Yaron, a junior studying neuroscience who runs an outreach program to Jewish students.

What’s happening in Baltimore is a nationwide trend. Since 1994, Hillel _ also known as The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life _ has begun constructing or renovating buildings at 37 campuses across the country. In doing so, the Washington-based Hillel has rebranded itself and changed Jewish life for many Jewish students like Yaron.

Roughly 450 of Johns Hopkins’ 4,000 undergraduates and 300 of the 1,500 graduate students are Jewish. To boost Jewish participation, Hillel _ the world largest Jewish campus organization _ worked with university alumni and the Baltimore Jewish community to build the Smokler Center for Jewish Life.

Yaron, who likens visiting the center to “hanging out with your friends at home or having Shabbat dinner with your family at home,” says it’s “very cool that you can just say to your friends, `Meet me at the Hillel house,’ and they know what you’re talking about.”

That marks an about-face from an earlier time, when the Hopkins Hillel was housed in a couple of offices in the campus interfaith center.

Nationally, the Hillel building boom is a result of several factors.

For one, Hillel itself has undergone a revolution.

The organization got its start in the 1920s, developing as a campus network of Jewish chapels led by rabbis. But with the civil rights breakthroughs of the 1960s came a new social order that marginalized Hillels, according to Jay Rubin, executive vice president of Hillel, who wrote about the group’s transformation in a summer 2000 article in the Journal of Jewish Communal Service.

Decreased support for religious life in America coupled with new campus opportunities for Jewish students, who until then faced religious discrimination, meant decreased interest in Hillel. Meanwhile, Hillel’s funder, the fraternal group B’nai B’rith, was losing money due to some of the same reasons.


But Hillel reinvented itself in the 1990s with a new CEO.

From 1998 to 2002, Richard Joel brought charisma and leadership to Hillel, converting its campus chapels into full-scale Jewish community centers that offered a variety of services and programs to match modes of religious practice and affiliation.

He created performance standards, developed a cadre of estimable Jewish philanthropists like former Seagrams CEO Edgar Bronfman and Wall Street mogul Michael Steinhardt, and in 1994 brokered Hillel’s independence from B’nai B’rith.

He also devised new models of student outreach, engaging students in their residence halls or fraternity houses.

At the same time, Hillel was getting a second look from donors eager to bolster the Jewish identity of young Jews in the wake of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey, which showed decreasing affiliation and rising intermarriage rates among American Jews.

Because of that study, sponsored by the Jewish community’s main charitable network, the North American Jewish federation system, federations assumed new funding responsibilities for Hillel.

Jewish philanthropists and organizations started eyeing college students as a prime target for Jewish outreach.


“They were decidedly not synagogues,” Joel says of the new Hillel houses, saying that some contain self-service laundries or gyms in addition to chapels.

“There are multiple ways of finding your way in the Jewish community so the facilities themselves kind of become beacons of that,” says Joel, now president of Yeshiva University. “This is a generation that is much happier to participate than they are to affiliate.”

In addition, Hillel is responding to a social trend in which people are seeking meaning, Joel says.

“The ’60s were about free love, and the ’70s were about free drugs, and the ’80s were about free money, and young people got schlepped into each of those realities,” Joel says. The 1990s created an opportunity for this generation “that has everything but feels bereft, for them to say, `Wait a minute, there has to be something more or deeper or more real.”’

In the last 10 or 15 years the attitude toward Jewish life on campus has gone from negative to neutral or positive, says Jeremy Brochin, who has directed Hillel at the University of Pennsylvania for more than 30 years.

“Now there’s either a positive attitude or a sense of `I don’t know anything about it,”’ he says.


When it builds, Hillel tries to integrate into the university.

Take the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Hillel at Steinhardt Hall, completed two years ago.

“Many people see the building simply as a university building that is certainly a center for Jewish life and Jewish culture, but is also open,” reflecting the increased comfort of Jews in American society, Brochin says.

Penn Hillel has a theater group that’s part of the university Performing Arts Council, and kosher dining that’s considered a university dining hall. Non-Jewish students and faculty also use the building for their own programs and meetings.

In fact, the “if you build it, they will come” philosophy has drawn Jews and non-Jews alike to Hillel’s grounds.

Before the new building was built, the Hopkins Hillel held a pancake breakfast the first day of class that would draw about two dozen people, says its director, Rabbi Joseph Menashe. The barbecue to kick off class this fall drew more than 350 students, about half of whom were Jewish, he says.

The new space, with all its charms and opportunities, provides a “lower hurdle to cross for students to experience something Jewish,” he says.

“It puts us on the map of the campus.”

MO/PH END RNS

Editors: To obtain photos of Hillel buildings on campuses, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.


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