Students find Jewish experiences off campus
When Alexandria Ross arrived at Barnard College three years ago looking for Jewish prayers, she thought she had nowhere to go. The Ashkenazic services were too hurried and quiet, and the Sephardic Club met too infrequently.
Ross, now a rising senior, has turned to the larger community around her for her Sephardic needs. Every Saturday morning during the academic year, she walks a mile and a half to Congregation Ohav Shalom for the West Side Sephardic Minyan. Ross is one of many students in New York who has ventured off campus in search of a fulfilling Jewish experience. Some get together with other students in a space close to campus or search out synagogues in the area, while others choose to express their Judiasm in secular, neighborhood activities.
For Ross, the synagogue provides a taste of her tradition.“The main attraction for me to that synagogue is mainly just the fact that it’s a Sephardic synagogue with Sephardic melodies and customs,” she said. “In the Sephardic minyan, there’s more time taken in all of the prayers. I feel like more care is taken to really do everything out loud.”
Meeting people of different ages and backgrounds at the synagogue has also provided Ross with a fresh perspective on living in New York. “I always think to myself, ‘It’s nice being around real people.’ They have real families. They have real jobs,” she said. “Sometimes, we tend to just get absorbed in our college life bubble and it’s nice to get out of it.”
The Columbia Hillel provides avenues for its students to explore such Jewish options in the surrounding community. “We encourage students to explore New York City, everything that New York City offers,” said Hillel President Aviva Buechler, a rising senior at Barnard, adding that Hillel “can’t provide everything, but we want to provide as much as we can. My goal for students and part of our mission is to allow students to engage Jewishly and explore Judaism in whatever form they would like to.”
One student who took advantage of the Jewish world outside of campus is rising Columbia senior Aryeh Hillman, who had a hard time fitting in when he first came to school. Though he attended Orthodox synagogues growing up, he wanted to explore other streams of Judaism and felt like the Modern Orthodox crowd dominated the campus community.
“I didn’t hang out with a lot of Jews when I started Columbia,” he said. “People say Columbia’s Jewish, but in a way it’s harder for a more average modern Jew to integrate into the Columbia Jewish community. I feel that [at] other schools there’s a lot more options for kind of secular Jews.” When he tried going off campus for the High Holidays, staff at a Portuguese synagogue sent him to the basement because he had not bought a ticket.
Hillman’s dissatisfaction dissipated in the summer of 2010 when he moved into the Columbia Bayit, a communal Jewish students’ house located several blocks from campus. “I hope that by moving here, I might be able to find a better community, find more like minded people,” he said upon moving. Though it maintains a kosher kitchen and some of its residents keep the Sabbath, Hillman found that the house maintained a friendly, welcoming atmosphere, especially over its weekly Friday night dinners.
Another Bayit resident, rising senior Esther Wolff, came to the house for the cohesiveness–not the challah. “I never really search for Jewish activities on Columbia’s campus. I just didn’t need it,” said Wolff, who takes classes in Columbia’s School of General Studies. “I don’t really know many of the Jewish organizations, even [that] exist on campus.” What Wolff wanted was a community, religious or otherwise.
Inspired by the Bayit, Hillman has become more eager to explore his Jewish identity, both on and off campus. “I suspect I might start going to Chabad. There’s more secular Jews there, ironically,” he said. He also wants to explore other religious opportunities in a manner similar to Ross’s Sephardic experience. “I think I’d definitely be open to Reform shuls. Living in the Bayit, it’s made me [feel] less bad about not being able to fit in at Hillel. There are lot of great people here I can have great conversations with.”
Wolff also loves the Bayit for its laid-back attitude toward Jewish participation. For Wolff, living in the house and participating in dinners is the “the extent of my Jewish activity,” religious or otherwise. While she and other Bayit residents may discuss Jewish topics at dinner, they mainly focus on issues that concern all college students.
Other students have gone farther off campus–and outside the Jewish community–in their quest to seek diverse settings for their Jewish engagement, like Louis Cholden-Brown, a native of upper Manhattan and a student at Columbia and the Jewish Theological Seminary, Cholden-Brown has found religious fulfillment representing his home neighborhood for New York City Community Board Seven.
As the chair of the Strategy and Budget Committee for CB7, Cholden-Brown reviews zoning applications and votes on board resolutions. For him, the commitment stretches beyond the scope of Jewish life. “This really is an education opportunity for me to join together with some people who devoted their entire lives to this, to redesign both the public and private realm for the Upper West Side,” he said. Still, he added, “It’s becoming more evident religious communities play a crucial role in the delivery of social services.”
Cholden-Brown has found that religion can cause problems in local affairs. Community efforts should be secular, not religious, he says, so that all can get involved. “There shouldn’t be a Jewish community planning effort,” he argued. “There should be a communal planning effort that may integrate Jewish religious leaders.”
An Urban Studies major at Columbia and a Jewish Thought major at JTS, Cholden-Brown is studying the effect of religious communities on local affairs. “My central conceit has to do with the issues that arise when government creates room for the religious delivery of services,” Cholden-Brown said. Each religious group controls pieces of the local community, he continued, so when one religious institution gets involved in general social affairs, the effort may not elicit a favorable reaction from the local population. This problem “raises questions about the role religious mores play in shaping the nature of those services,” Cholden-Brown said. He suggested not identifying each effort with a particular religious group and including religious leaders of varied faiths in every initiative.
Wolff agrees that though religion may facilitate community, it need not be what defines a shared setting, even at meals. As with Ross, Hillman and the slew of others who journey outside of the dorms for religious life, what this means for Wolff is that she can have greater freedom in defining her Jewish–and communal–experiences when she leaves the familiar space of campus. “Yes, we’re all Jewish. Yes, occasionally someone says Kiddush in the beginning,”she said. She added, though, that “even Friday night, there’s nothing particularly Jewish about it.”
