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Jonah S. Berger â21, a former Associate News editor, is an Economics concentrator in Cabot House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.
For nearly 30 years, a grandiose 19,500 square-foot building in the center of campus has served as a hub for Jewish life at Harvard.
With three large prayer spaces, a beautiful circular courtyard, a Kosher dining hall that serves cultural staples each Friday night, and a plethora of full-time staff members, Harvard Hillel offers Jewish students the full range of religious activities, services, and possibilities for connecting with their faith, culture, and each other.
Most importantly, though, Hillel provides a refuge for hundreds of Jewish undergraduates, a place they know they can fall back on in times of need. In October 2018, after an anti-Semitic massacre at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Hillelâs building was just that: a space for healing, comfort, and, most of all, safety, aided by an around-the-clock Harvard University
Photograph by Meena Venkataramanan
The first time I moved to Harvard, I stuffed my suitcases with things I knew I’d never need: glittery lanyards, quill pens, a pack of Big League Chew bubblegum I’d been gifted by a friend as part of a Boston-themed high-school graduation present. My mother made a last-minute shopping trip to the Target in Central Square and naïvely bought me an iron and ironing board, which sat idly in the corner of my dorm room before I sold them to another student the following year. My Amazon order history from late 2017 is a miscellany of items I’ve since discarded: a bulletin board, a printer, a foldable drying rack. I sold the first, abandoned the second on a Cambridge street corner after it jammed, and don’t know what happened to the third.