 "Photo: JARED P.L. NORMAND / The Daily Reveille")
Members of the Jewish student organization Hillel and other student groups gathered Wednesday night to celebrate the holiday of Sukkot by remembering the impermanence of shelter, which has been reemphasized since hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
The group of about 50 met on the outskirts of Free Speech Plaza around a flimsy wooden dwelling, known as a sukkah in Hebrew, that Hillel members built Sunday.
Sukkot, which means "the time of rejoicing" in Hebrew, is a seven-day holiday that commemorates the Jews' Exodus from slavery in Egypt and their 40 years spent wandering in the desert in search of the holy land of Israel. During this holiday, Jews traditionally build sukkahs with deliberate holes in the roofs to remind themselves that life is fragile and always changing.
Members of the Black Student Union, the Dove Interfaith Association and the Muslim Student Association joined Hillel around the sukkah, where they ate Middle Eastern foods such as hummus and couscous, as well as Raisin' Canes chicken.
"We sent this invitation out to all student organizations to create campus-wide dialogue," said Daniel Novak, faculty adviser or Hillel. "We wanted to focus on groups we had former alliances with or traditional conflicts with to meet under the sukkah in peace."
Novak said the hurricanes have broken barriers "between religions, races and people of all backgrounds," which has allowed Hillel to take this opportunity to educate the community about this holiday as well as promote a sense of unity among people of different faiths.
Lila Pinksfeld, interim director of Hillel who was displaced from her home in New Orleans and job at Tulane University, said this year Sukkot and the idea of temporary shelter is a concept that more people can relate with.
"I know what it's like to live in a temporary shelter. Strangers' homes have become my shelter," Pinksfeld said. "Baton Rouge has become a temporary shelter for people from New Orleans."
Stephen Blitz, electrical engineering sophomore and member of Hillel, said he was pleased to see "non-Jews and Jews alike sharing in education."
"It's important to have any type of education of learning other cultures any time of the year, whether I'm sitting down at a Turkish dinner or sitting down at an Islamic dinner," Blitz said.
Several of the non-Jewish students who attended the multi-cultural event said they came because they were interested in the practices of the Jewish faith.
Jarel Francis, business pre-law and religious studies junior and member of the Black History Month Committee, said he came because he wanted to learn "hands-on about the culture, religion and people of a subject they really don't cover [in his classes]."
Francis said he was interested to learn how closely the holiday coincided with the affects of the hurricanes.
"It educates people about where different religions came from and where they are now and helps us appreciate the little things," Francis said.
Yosef Javed, international trade and finance sophomore and member of the Muslim Student Association, said he was "interested to see what the purpose was of the small Jewish community" on campus.
He said the way the media portrays the relationships between Muslims and Jews is "mostly fictionalized and more of a political issue" that does not affect the groups on campus.
Chaunda Allen, director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, said she is pleased to see people coming together to "create the diversity on campus that we're trying to achieve," Allen said.
Moshe Cohen, a member of Hillel and math graduate student, said he was pleased with how different religions could identify with Sukkot.
"The problems that affect us as Jews are problems that effect the people of the world and the people of this campus," Cohen said.
Charles Isbell, assistant professor of religious studies, said bringing together people of different faiths is important because it "puts an emphasis on the similarities of our cultures."
"As the world gets smaller and smaller, we have to respect and value each other," Isbell said. "It's better to talk with you than to fight with you. It's easy to hate a whole group of people, but it's hard to hate an individual that you know. Talking breaks down that wall that causes me to fear you."
Isbell, who is Jewish, said the hurricane has "leveled out the differences" between people of different faiths.
"If I had been stranded on a roof and someone had rescued me, I wouldn't ask 'Are you a Jew?' If it was a Muslim that rescued me, I'd say 'thank God for sending someone to save me," Isbell said. "Mother nature makes us all equal."
Contact Rebekah Allen at rallen@lsureveille.com
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