By Janis Siegel , JTNews Correspondent
There’s a city, not even a hundred miles north of Seattle, that is home to a rare community of modern Jewish Vikings who hope to expand their numbers — once they move into a new building that will house their growing community.
The Viking, as any Bellinghamster or student in those parts can tell you, is Western Washington University’s sports mascot, and the Chabad Jewish Student Organization there will be celebrating Sabbath dinners, and other Jewish holidays in its newly renovated, 4800-square-foot community center once they widen the kitchen and make it kosher, design a student lounge with computers and a Nintendo Wii, extend the synagogue space, and make room for a small kosher café where students can have kosher sandwiches for lunch or grab a kosher snack.
“Our goal is to have every Jewish student know they have a homey, warm environment in a family setting where they can have a Jewish dinner,” Rabbi Avremi Yarmush, one of the co-directors of the soon-to-be-open Chabad Center told JTNews. “We’re a two-minute walk from the center of campus, and right across the street from the dorms.”
The Brooklyn-born rabbi, his wife and CJC co-director Nissa, and their two boys, ages 3 and 1, can’t wait to open their home to as many Jewish students that show up at their doorstep. That’s why they’re remodeling the upstairs offices into their family living quarters. The Yarmushes hope to be fully settled there by April 2012.
“Chabad on campus has a very special system,” said Yarmush, “where we bring students into our own home, into our own environment, a Jewish environment….The idea is a Jewish home away from home.”
Today, WWU has a Hillel chapter and a Chabad Jewish Student Organization, which Yarmush and his wife run. The Chabad organization collaborates with the other Jewish groups, including the Hillel there and the larger one in Seattle at the University of Washington. He would like to increase the inter-group activities and their own outreach to the student body there.
“Our goal when we came here was to have every Jewish student know they have a home in Bellingham, where they can hang out,” said Yarmush. “We would love to have 300 to 400 kids over for Shabbat dinner. I’m an ideologue because that’s what I want.”
This new center will be the first full-fledged Chabad Center in Bellingham, even though the Chabad organization has had a presence there since 2006. Yarmush and his wife have been working out of their own home for the last three years.
“Friday night dinners are the mainstay of our programs,” Yarmush said. “It’s the most popular event, by far. Between 35 and 45 students come over for Shabbat dinner, but we are busting out of the seams of our home, so we couldn’t stay there. I have seen an increase and it really should help.”
WWU experienced its largest-ever freshman enrollment in the school’s history this year. Yarmush and his wife plan to take advantage of their new digs to add new programs and community outreach projects that might engage an increasing number of Jewish students on campus and fill a need in people’s lives at the same time.
“We’ll be opening a Jewish preschool,” said Yarmush, “We’ve started to work on that, and we would love to expand into doing some community work. A program we really love is called “˜Loaves of Love,’ where we get students to bake challah and bring it to seniors in the community.
“As we get more settled, we’d like to expand that program to where seniors in the Jewish community have people to listen to them and the students get to hear something about what the world used to be like. They can have a connection with a generation or two before them.”
The Yarmushes said they would also like to start a Jewish library.
Most of the money for the reportedly $880,000 deal for the property located on Highland Drive in Bellingham was granted to Chabad by George Rohr, a Florida businessman who Yarmush said is as committed to Chabad and its campus ministries as much as he is to the business side of his everyday projects. The new center, the Rohr Center for Jewish Life, will honor his contribution.
According to Yarmush, Rohr’s spirituality and his entrepreneurship go hand-in-hand.
“He has an affinity for Chabad on campus, has an affinity for the younger generation, and it’s something he really loves,” he said.