Kosher on Campus : Heritage: Religious leaders are reaching out to CSUN’s 7,000 Jewish students. The effort includes turning an ice cream shop into a kosher eatery.

On the day before the start of spring semester last week, Rabbi Aharon Simkin spent five hours on the Cal State Northridge campus immersing pots and food preparation utensils in rapidly boiling water, washing down metal work surfaces with equally hot water and subjecting knives to the intense heat of blow-torches.

Simkin is a mashgiah, a rabbi who ensures that food preparation is done in accordance with traditional Jewish law, and his job that day was to remove all traces of non-kosher food from the Flight ’82 ice cream shop tucked away in a corner of the CSUN Student Union. When the task was completed, Flight ’82 had been transformed into the only kosher eatery on the campus of any public or private college or university in Southern California, not counting strictly Jewish institutions, according to Rabbi Richard Levy, executive director of the Los Angeles Hillel Council.

It is a modest start. Kosher regulations prohibit mixing of meat and dairy foods, limiting Flight ‘82’s menu to ice cream, hot and cold drinks, bagels and cream cheese, muffins and Danish rolls. However, Vernon K. Hale, CSUN’s food services director, said a separate kosher deli restaurant serving a full-range of meat sandwiches is also being planned.

First-day business totaled nearly $400, nearly triple an average day last semester, Hale said. “We went with the ice cream parlor first because it was easy to do and required minimal cost,” Hale said. “Providing kosher food is part of an overall upgrading of our food services while satisfying the university’s various student communities. All students enjoy quality ethnic foods.”

At CSUN, conventional wisdom has long presumed a major Jewish student presence on campus. But because it is a state school, constitutional considerations have precluded any formal survey of religious preference.

However, the B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundation, the world’s largest Jewish campus organization, took what amounts to an educated guess in 1989 and concluded that CSUN, with an estimated 7,000 Jewish students, has the largest Jewish student population of any non-Jewish college or university west of the Hudson River (followed by UCLA with about 6,000).

Nationally, CSUN trails only New York University, which has 15,000 Jewish students, and Brooklyn College, which has about 10,000. Columbia University and Barnard College, which are administratively linked, also have about 7,000 Jewish students between them.

Jewish students are believed to constitute more than 20% of CSUN’s student population, which is also the highest proportion of any school in the western United States, noted Ruth Fredman Cernea, Hillel Foundation’s Washington, D.C.-based publications and resource development director.

“We sort of figured that,” said Ann Salisbury, CSUN public affairs director, when informed of the Hillel Foundation’s findings. “But no one here really knew for sure.”

CSUN has long drawn a large number of Jewish students simply because it is situated in the west San Fernando Valley, which has one of the fastest-growing Jewish communities in the nation. About half of Los Angeles’ estimated 600,000 Jews live in the Valley, according to the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles.

Jewish students are also attracted to CSUN’s strong undergraduate business, engineering and science programs, subjects they have historically gravitated toward, said Rabbi Jerrold Goldstein, CSUN’s Hillel chapter director. In addition, he said, the Northridge school is perceived by Jewish parents to have fewer interracial and inter-ethnic tensions than other schools, including UCLA.

“At some semiconscious level, the campus is viewed as safer,” he said. “I suspect that’s truer for parents than students, and parents have a big say in where their students go.”

As the university has grown, its Jewish population has increased proportionally. Despite that, the level of student involvement in Jewish activities on campus has remained low.

Today, however, Jewish activity is on the rise, campus observers say, and the conversion of Flight ’82 into a kosher restaurant is one tangible sign of that.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve sensed an increasing desire on the part of Jewish students to do something Jewish,” said Michael Katz, CSUN’s associate Hillel director the past four years. “The activity level is definitely up.”

Still, the vast majority of CSUN’s Jewish students do not have any formal relationship to campus Jewish activities. The CSUN Hillel chapter, for example, is the largest Jewish organization on campus, yet it only has about 250 dues-paying members and a mailing list of about 1,100.

Moreover, the low Jewish student participation level is in keeping with the overall poor rate of Los Angeles Jewish community affiliation and the nature of CSUN student life. Only about one-fourth of Los Angeles Jewish families belong to any organized Jewish group, one of the lowest affiliation rates in the nation. Campus officials note that CSUN student activity levels are low for all activities because the majority of students are “commuters” who live off-campus and, often, hold jobs.

Even fraternities that are nominally Jewish in character attract relatively few members. The Jewish fraternity Sigma Alpha Mu, for example, has about 100 members, half of whom are non-Jewish.

“The real enemy at Northridge is indifference,” said Rabbi William Kramer, who taught Jewish studies classes at CSUN for more than two decades until he retired in December. “The Jewish kids at Northridge are indifferent kids from indifferent homes.”

Dawn Gates, a member of the CSUN Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, bemoaned a similar lack of interest among Christian students. “It’s really hard to get people involved on this campus because they mostly seem to leave campus right after class,” said the junior art major from Valencia.

When Robert N. Zonshine came to Northridge in 1959, CSUN was still known as San Fernando Valley State College and it was, he recalled, “a very, very small campus encircled by orange groves.” Jewish life on campus, he said, was virtually nonexistent.

“There were some kids who came from the East Coast who had strong Jewish backgrounds,” said Zonshine, now an Encino insurance and financial consultant. “Those of us from the West Coast knew very little.”

About 16 years later, Richard Macales enrolled at CSUN. He remembered campus Jewish life as being marked by what he termed “total and unconditional apathy. There was virtually no interest in anything Jewish.”

Campus Jewish groups consisted of “a president and two or three other officers” and Hillel “was considered a place for people who couldn’t get into frats or sororities,” said Macales, who majored in journalism and now works as a publicist and administrator in the Los Angeles Orthodox Jewish community.

“I had one Jewish studies class that had eight people in it. Barely enough for the university to sanction it. Ironically, the subject of the class was Jewish identity in the U.S.”

Rabbi Shlomo Schwartz, who was at CSUN from 1970 to 1978 as a representative of Chabad, the Hasidic Jewish outreach organization, recalled a campus appearance by Rabbi Meir Kahane, a firebrand Israeli politician, that raised nary an eyebrow. “Everywhere else Kahane went there were demonstrations. At Northridge there was zip. Jewish life at Northridge was, like, comatose,” Schwartz said.

By the mid-1980s, however, the situation had begun to change. The renewed interest in traditional religion experienced across the nation during that time also touched CSUN, and while still a small minority, more students began participating in campus Jewish life.

CSUN Hillel renovated its facilities located just off campus and expanded its activities, and the Jewish studies program was revitalized under the leadership of Jody Myers, the first Judaic studies specialist to hold a regular faculty position at CSUN.

Today, about 20 courses covering Jewish religion, Hebrew, Jewish political history, Jewish-American literature, Jewish community and family structure and other subjects are included in the program. Most of the courses are taken to satisfy general education requirements, but some 15 students each year make Jewish studies their minor, Myers noted.

The mid-1980s also saw the arrival on campus of a retired dynamo named Ralph Alpert. At age 67, Alpert became re-involved in Judaism and soon after that the former businessman made it his task to stimulate that same interest in young Jews. Now 78 and suffering from liver cancer, Alpert is still a campus fixture, spending an average of four days a week on campus urging Jewish students to express their Jewishness.

“Ralph is tremendous,” said Rabbi Dan Dorfman, who spent eight years as the CSUN Hillel director until he left for a similar post at San Francisco State University in 1986. “He was a major part of the change that took place.”

“I’m fighting with wooden bullets,” said Alpert. “We’re going to have 10,000 Jewish students here someday and we need vision to get them involved.”

Both Alpert and Simkin, who holds informal Jewish studies classes on campus lawns, are Orthodox Jews connected with the Young Israel of Northridge congregation. Hillel, on the other hand, takes a pluralistic approach.

Goldstein is a Reform Jew, a member of the faith’s most liberal branch and the one that most affiliated American Jews favor. His assistants, Katz and Barbara Cramer, are Orthodox and Conservative, respectively.

The three take turns offering religious activities that reflect their individual viewpoints, but Goldstein noted that Hillel’s social activities draw the most students. While Hillel’s Friday night Sabbath dinners and prayer services attract from 25 to 50 students each week--nearly three times as many as attended just three years ago--its monthly Saturday night dances at the Hillel Center draw as many as 300 students--up from 40 to 50 of just a few years ago.

“Few students are spiritual seekers. Their hormones are raging, and a chance to meet someone of the opposite sex is much more important to them,” Goldstein said.

Rather than knock that, Goldstein views it as an opportunity. “Helping young Jews meet other Jews is an important function. Being Jewish is expressed in many ways, and how you socialize is one of them,” he said.