The re-opening of the Kosher Kitchen on Monday, Jan. 26 in the basement of Butterfield A marked the end of a two-year long process involving members of both the Jewish and Muslim communities on campus. The Kosher Kitchen strictly follows all Kosher dietary laws, which ban the consumption of certain types of meats and all seafood, as well as the mixing of meat and dairy products. The kitchen is also compliant with Halal, the Muslim dietary laws that requires that all meat products are slaughtered using proper Islamic rites.
The Kosher Kitchen has long been a fixture on the Wesleyan campus. Open since 1992, its inception was overseen by Rabbi Elise Kramer, the University Jewish Chaplain at the time.
“[Rabbi Kramer] spent time there, and she served as mashciach, a Kosher inspector,” said current University Jewish Chaplain, Rabbi David Leipziger.
Kramer left Wesleyan in 2000, leaving the University without a Rabbi and the Kosher Kitchen without a mashciach for two years.
When he arrived on campus, Leipziger realized immediately that the kitchen needed work.
“When I arrived in 2002, I was very much struck at how the kitchen was in need of a major overhaul…It had poor lighting, the soda machine didn’t work. It looked kind of grungy and seedy,” Leipziger said. “My understanding is that it was sort of a self perpetuating cycle. It wasn’t very popular among students… and the University and Aramark did not address the issues of the need of improvements.”
Students who experienced the dining facility echoed Leipziger’s remarks.
“The Kosher Kitchen was in a bad way. Literally, no one was eating there, there were probably six people there a day,” said Rachel Wertheimer ’06.
In response, Leipziger formed a small committee of Jewish students, called the Kosher Kitchen committee, made up of Dan Janvey ’06, Selina Ellis ’04, and Wertheimer. This group met in the spring of 2003, and created what Leipziger referred to as a “wish list” of items that the campus’ kosher dining option should have.
A draft written by the committee in April of 2003 recommended that food be “delicious, aesthetically attractive, fresh” and that the kosher standard be “Not kosher style, but certified kosher with a hashgacha (Rabbinic Supervision).” The committee also asked that the location of the kitchen be moved to “a bright, centrally located venue, with windows,” as opposed to its location in the windowless basement of Butterfield A. The proposal suggested Summerfields as a potential site.
This issue of location was one of the most contentious of the entire process. In early planning, Aramark proposed that Montague’s Deli in the campus center be replaced with a kosher deli.
“We started to pursue [this proposal], and we heard very loud and clearly from the student body that people did not want to see that venue be replaced with a great kosher deli,” Leipziger said.
An idea was raised by a number of Jewish and Muslim students to keep the Kosher Kitchen in its current location, while installing a Kosher/Halal cart on the third floor of the campus center. That cart, proposed to be placed in an alcove of the dining area on the third floor, would have served Middle Eastern style foods, including falafel, schwarma, and soups.
“[It] would have been perfect…it would be new foods, it would be fresh, it would be in the campus center, which is a busy place,” Leipziger said. “It would solve many problems at once. It would have been a unique formula, and it would have been a nice step that would have proved ‘look how Jews and Muslims can get along.’”
The plan ran into problems with the logistics of creating a safe cooking space in the campus center, a building originally designed to house classrooms.
“You can’t just put a fryer [in the Campus Center],” Leipziger said. “You need ventilation systems, you need safety. It’s not just, hey, let’s put in a stove and cook some falafel. Things become very expensive.”
Eventually, it was decided that, since the Campus Center will move to a new building in three years, it wasn’t worth the investment to install the cart.
Instead, the Kosher Kitchen in Butterfield A was renovated, repainted, given new chairs, tables, and two couches. Even the menu was revamped. The general design for the room now includes purple and orange chairs around small, four-person tables and two brown couches. Dana Raviv ’06 and Wertheimer were responsible for choosing the design of the room, which consists of a bar of decorative colors high along the walls of the room and a striped border along the walls of the entryway.
“We don’t have any Jewish paraphernalia or Jewish designs,” Wertheimer said. “That was a big part of what we wanted to do with the space, to not make it an exclusive space, so that anyone could fell comfortable eating there.”
“We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we got some of the things we [did]…We now have a Kosher Kitchen that is also Halal. It was done fairly quickly. It’s attractive, it’s well decorated, it’s got a nice atmosphere to it, we have a new chef…It’s got longer hours, and it is already proving to be an alternative to crowded, busy places like Summerfields, the Campus Center, and MoCon,” Leipziger said.
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