The Orbis

Issue date: 2/20/07 Section: News/Features

Media Credit: Madeleine Fentress

"Community, community, community." As I spoke to Ur Barzel, program director of Vanderbilt's Hillel, he stressed that this is what Hillel is all about. Housed in the Ben Schulman Center for Jewish Life next to Branscomb and the Student Life Center, Hillel provides a place for Jewish students (and non-Jewish students, as I discovered) to meet, interact and find a sense of community away from home. Though Hillel is near the geographic heart of campus, the organization's precise contributions to Vanderbilt's religious community are unfamiliar to many students.

On Friday nights at 5:30, about 50 students on average attend student-led Shabbat services in the Schulman Center. About half of the students stay downstairs in the spacious room behind Grins (the vegetarian and kosher café also housed in the Schulman Center) to attend a Conservative service in which a student stands with his back to the congregation and leads prayers and songs in Hebrew. Meanwhile, upstairs in the Reform service, students sit in a circle of chairs and are led in song and prayer by freshman Jessi Solomon, who plays guitar and sings. Though some schools' Hillels have full-time rabbis who lead services, Vanderbilt's Hillel does not employ a rabbi, allowing for a high degree of student involvement. Barzel explained that the distinctions of Reform, Conservative and Orthodox refer to "branches" of Judaism, not "sects" or "levels," meaning that no way of observing Shabbat is more right or "more Jewish" than another. After services, more students arrive for a delicious kosher dinner, during which 100 students on average can enjoy a sense of community.

Though a Jewish population existed at Vanderbilt for many years before Hillel came to campus, executive director of Hillel Ari Dubin describes 2002 as a landmark year for the Jewish community. Despite the fact that there were only 200 or 250 Jewish students on campus at the time, the 10,000 square foot Schulman Center opened in 2002 to house events for this small yet vibrant community. Barzel points to Chancellor Gee as the instrumental figure in increasing Vanderbilt's Jewish population by 10 percent in the last five years. Only 3 percent of the student body in 2002 was Jewish; now the number has jumped to 13 percent, thanks to active recruitment, which Chancellor Gee announced in a 2002 Wall Street Journal article. "The chancellor has been very outspoken in making this a place to encourage and strengthen Jewish identity," stated Barzel.

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