Rabbi Zalman Tiechtel had reason to celebrate two days before the start of Sukkot. Last Monday night, he helped serve the first-ever kosher dinner in the student dining hall at the University of Kansas.
“It was unbelievable!” exclaimed the rabbi just hours after the dishes were cleared away. “We sold out in half an hour. We had to turn people away.”
Tiechtel, co-director of the Rohr Chabad Center for Jewish Life with his wife, Nechama, pushed for the availability of kosher food for a while now. After all, some 1,800 to 2,000 Jewish students attend the university in Lawrence, Kan., out of a student body of about 23,000—a solid 10 percent of the population.
The original accomplishment was a kosher hot dog stand last year at Allen Fieldhouse, the school’s basketball stadium—the first college venue to have one, says Tiechtel. “It was a huge hit. Basketball is so big here. The alumni are heavily invested in sports, with many Jewish fans attending [Kansas Jayhawks] games.”
That helped spur the creation of a kosher hot dog stand this season at Fighting Illini basketball games at the University of Illinois, where his brother, Rabbi Dovid Tiechtel, runs the Chabad Center for Jewish Life at the University of Illinois and Champaign-Urbana.
Next came kosher lunches, twice a week. And now, hot kosher dinners will be served throughout the academic year on Monday nights, the quietest day for most students and when space was best available. They can pay per meal or buy a special plan that includes an entree, salad, sides and beverage, and just swipe their meal card.
“Our goal was to feed 50 people,” says Tiechtel, with an inaugural dinner of orange chicken and jasmine rice. “Next week, we’ll triple the food! It just goes to show you that if kosher food is available, they will come.”
He adds that K.U. dining—and the university itself—has gone “out of its way to make this work.” It’s a win-win for all, he says: It helps make sure that student needs are met, and it opens a window for more Jewish students to consider attending the university.
“Looking at tables of Jewish kids eating together in a room full of other students, it creates a tremendous sense of unity,” says the rabbi.
A Part of History
Michael Lebovitz, a senior studying linguistics, agrees. The 23-year-old serves as the mashgiach and manager of both the new dinners and the existing kosher food stand at the basketball games.
“When I came to K.U., I was the only shomer Shabbos [Sabbath observant] and kashruth student,” he says. An avid cook and a former yeshivah student, he made do during the week and went to Chabad for Shabbat meals.
He says he trained long and hard for his current position, working previously at a kosher Subway restaurant in Kansas City, and believes in the importance of having kosher meals at the ready.
“Making it easy and available is the first step to having people keep kosher,” he says. “It’s already started to change the campus—people are becoming more and more aware of a Jewish presence, and are encouraging other Jews to come to campus. All of a sudden, it’s on the map for other students.”
To back up his point, he says people were buzzing about the fact that “There’s kosher tonight!”
“It’s exciting,” says Lebovitz, a Kansas native. “And it’s cool to be a part of this kind of history. It’s a big deal.”
As for his own sustenance at the Sept. 16 dinner, “we vastly underestimated how interested people would be. I wound up serving the last portion to a group of friends. I was able to get a little rice,” he says good-naturedly.
But there’s always next week.
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