Sharing the High Holidays at College

Caltech’s Ben Leitner is a man with a mission over the next two weeks.

A third-year graduate student in mathematics, Leitner, 25, is the de facto head of Caltech Hillel, a tiny branch of the 82-year-old international organization of Jewish college and university students.

Caltech demands much from its students, making it hard to find time for anything nonacademic, including Hillel.

When a dozen or so members manage to meet for a Sabbath meal, the participants who want more tradition are usually outnumbered by those who think lighting the Sabbath candles and saying the blessing over the braided bread are more than enough, Leitner said.

“We have a very, very, very small group,” Leitner said, “but it’s important to have.”

This week, he and a handful of other active Hillel members have been e-mailing Jewish students on campus, an estimated 10% of the school’s 2,000 undergraduates and graduate students.

“We have to make sure that the incoming students who are away from home for the first time have some place to go for the High Holidays,” Leitner said.

The e-mails tell the students they are welcome -- and don’t have to pay for tickets -- at nearby Chabad of Pasadena and Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center.

With Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, beginning at sundown Monday and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, beginning at sundown Oct. 12, Hillel programs at more than a dozen Southern California campuses are in overdrive.

According to David Levy, executive director of Los Angeles Hillel Council, the regional organization serves 25,000 college students in Greater Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

The programs at UCLA, USC, UC Santa Barbara, the Claremont Colleges, Cal Poly Pomona, Occidental, Santa Monica College and others are as different as the campuses themselves, with fellowship, holiday celebrations, kosher food and social action the common threads.

“Hillel is the only glue that holds together Jewish college students across the country at this period in their lives,” said Rabbi Stephen Robbins, president and co-founder of the Academy for Jewish Religion, California, a rabbinical and cantorial school in West Los Angeles.

Robbins, who is also rabbi at Temple N’vay Shalom, was a Hillel leader in the 1970s.

“Hillel is a very large tent,” Robbins said. “Any Jew who has any claim on Jewishness at all is welcomed and treasured.”

The campus Hillels are especially important this time of year for students far from their families and childhood synagogues.

The groups do their own fundraising and receive support from the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles, International Hillel, the Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles and other benefactors.

Hillel began at UCLA and USC shortly after the parent organization was formed near the University of Illinois campus in 1923, a time when many American colleges had quotas limiting the number of Jews.

According to UCLA Hillel Executive Director Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, many young American Jews today are “religiously indifferent while, at the same time, maintaining a positive attitude toward their Jewishness.” A smaller number are “Jewishly involved” in a more traditional, observant way.

“What they all have in common,” said Seidler-Feller, “is a quest for spirituality.”

That search for meaning typically includes social action. In recent years, Hillel has increasingly reached out to Jewish students instead of waiting for them to discover the center, said the 30-year veteran of the Westwood Hillel.

As part of its “engagement” effort, it plays host to a weekly kosher dinner and social at a dorm, drawing up to 100 students. Sabbath is also celebrated weekly, followed by dinner and a program.

Seidler-Feller acknowledges that Chabad and other Orthodox groups that have reached out to young Jews for decades helped set the example for Hillel’s new activism.

“One needs to learn from others,” he said.

UCLA Hillel will offer traditional, liberal and Orthodox holiday services, on campus or at its 3-year-old Yitzhak Rabin Hillel Center. Jewish faculty and staff often attend UCLA services on the High Holidays.

USC Hillel also welcomes the campus community to its High Holiday services, Executive Director Steven Mercer said. Services on both Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur will be conducted by Rabbi Jonathan Klein in the “inclusive communal setting” of the USC Hillel Foundation next to campus.

Besides helping students explore their Jewishness, Mercer said, Tikkun olam, the Jewish principle of “healing the world,” “is a major focus of what we do.”

USC Hillel students are currently putting together a consciousness-raising campaign called “Never Forget, Save Darfur” and expect to spend spring break helping clean up the Gulf Coast, post-hurricanes, with students from the campus NAACP.

Many of the estimated 3,000-plus Jewish students at Valley and Pierce colleges live at home and attend High Holiday services with their families, said Nomi Gordon, executive director of Hillel for the two San Fernando Valley community colleges.

Still, Valley and Pierce students can go to services at any of the larger Hillels, including nearby Cal State Northridge.

This week, Hillel representatives set up booths on both community college campuses and handed out honey straws for Rosh Hashana. In Jewish tradition, honey represents the hope for a sweet New Year.

Gordon and her small staff have also been planning their seventh annual “Feed Your Sins to the Ducks” Tashlich Service and Picnic, to be held at 1 p.m. Tuesday in Encino’s Balboa Park. Tashlich is Hebrew for “you will cast away.”

Last year, 20 students and guests met in the park on the first day of Rosh Hashana, prayed and threw bread crumbs into Lake Balboa. Since the 14th century, Jews have gathered on the first day of the New Year by a body of water and symbolically thrown their sins away.

“It makes the ducks very happy,” said Gordon.

Santa Barbara Hillel will hold its Tashlich service on Goleta Beach, and UCLA members will go to the campus botanical garden.

Remy Goldberg, 20, said the small but increasingly active Hillel chapter at Loyola Marymount University, a private Roman Catholic school in West Los Angeles, “is sort of an escape in a place where every classroom has a crucifix on the wall.”

The Loyola administration has created “a very tolerant environment,” she said, that encourages its Jewish students to express themselves. But she recalled how shocked she was to learn during her first semester there that two major tests were scheduled on Yom Kippur. Both faculty members were very understanding, she said, and promptly allowed her to take the tests at another time.

This year, Hillel Director Michael Barclay made sure that Loyola’s Jewish students would be able to attend High Holiday services at two nearby synagogues without paid tickets. Goldberg is grateful because she remembers how difficult the holidays were when she was a freshman two years ago.

“I went home for Rosh Hashana. It just happened to fall on a weekend. But Yom Kippur I spent in my room,” she said.

While the non-Jewish world bustled outside her door, she fasted and prayed alone.