This month, the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA), Fordham’s Jewish Students Organization (JSO), Campus Ministry, the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) and the Center for Jewish studies are running a Jewish Heritage Celebration. The celebration combines events from all groups celebrating Jewish culture at Fordham. The events include lectures, exhibitions and a Chocolate Seder.
“The problem we face is that the official Jewish American Heritage Month is in May — a month when classes end and students and faculty leave the campus. So we had to think creatively about celebrating that when everyone is still on campus,” said Magda Teter, Shivler Chair in Jewish studies.
Many of these organizations have been sponsoring events such as these for years, but this is the first time they have all been publicized together.
“This was an opportunity to not necessarily create something new, but to collate everything together in one place where we could showcase it,” said Director of Campus Ministry at Lincoln Center Erin Hoffman.
OMA spearheaded the celebration as part of their increasing number of diversity celebrations and different cultural months.
“[They recognized] that an area they weren’t really tapping into as much is the faith diversity on campus so we started to partner more on that,” said Hoffman.
One of the main events of the celebration is a student-curated exhibit about Passover. The exhibit will be in the display cases outside the Henry S. Miller Judaica Research Room in Walsh Library.
“I was happy to inspire, supervise and, ultimately, also learn from the exhibit curated by Fordham’s first year student Miriam Krakowski about Passover, which is beginning next week.” said Teter.
Additionally, JSO is hosting a Chocolate Seder, a yearly event where students enjoy an abbreviated version of the traditional seder meal with chocolate and candy instead of traditional Passover foods. The seder will happen on April 19 in O’Hare Hall room 364.
“What we tend to do is partner with the student faith-based clubs because there’s just more buy-in when the students are involved and it’s something that they’re interested in and they’re asking for,” said Hoffman.
OMA has recently hired their first Director of Jewish life and Director of Muslim life. These will be full-time positions beginning May 1.
“One of the hopes and goals for those positions is to really do an assessment of the needs of the community in the first year,” said Hoffman. “[They can make] recommendations for how we can best educate about Jewish life as well as serve the needs of our Jewish community, and those aren’t always the same.”
Fordham sponsors a lot of interfaith events including interfaith prayer and picnics with the president.
“I think one of the things that is really important at Fordham is that we’re a faith based institution. It’s a place where faith matters and the values of our whole community matter,” said Hoffman. “We want to be a place where people can come here and grow in their faith tradition and connect with other people who are part of that community as well as learn about the faith traditions of other people.”
This Wednesday, April 17, the celebration is hosting a webinar, “Learning History Through Kibbutz Haggadot.” Hosted by collector Hollis Granoff Landauer, it will discuss the Holocaust in Kibbutz Haggadot from Mandate Palestine.
The hope from involved organizations is that the celebration will increase student involvement in Jewish culture events.
“I think a lot of our Jewish students who I’ve spoken to anyways don’t necessarily know about those resources, so my hope would be that by putting together these events into one place it can show people that there are resources here for them,” said Hoffman.
