Students get ready for Rosh Hashana

Tallahassee, FL – When Sam Zaila, 24, started college at Florida State University in 2000, he felt like he was the only Jew in the city.

“It was a culture shock,” he said.

Zaila is from Aventura, a suburb of Miami, which has the second-largest Jewish population in the United States behind New York City. His parents are Israeli. Some Jewish college students give up the faith, while others keep kosher, hang out on Thursdays and explain to teachers the importance of the High Holidays.

“When I first came here, I threw (Judaism) out the window,” said Zaila, an FSU mechanical engineering graduate student.

Not anymore. Zaila will celebrate the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashana, this weekend at the Chabad House, a synagogue and community center. This weekend, Jewish students will gather for service and celebrate by drinking sweet wine and eating sweet foods such as pomegranates, apples and honey in hopes that God will give them a favorable year. Rosh Hashana is a day of judgment for Jewish people and a time to recognize that God is king.

Zaila will mark the holiday with Rabbi Schneur Oirechman of the Chabad Lubavitch of the Panhandle -Tallahassee, whom he met his sophomore year at a lecture by Holocaust survivor Elie Weisel.

“Our goal is to create a home away from home for students,” Oirechman said. “We want to encourage and console and help them out through difficult times.”

Being a minority on campus can have drawbacks.

“I am explaining to teachers why I can’t come take a test on Yom Kippur,” said FSU senior biology student Nyssa Silbiger, 21.

“(Being Jewish) affects how we go out,” said Jaime Kornick, 20, a junior business management student from Chicago.

To keep the Sabbath, she stays in on Friday nights and can’t hang out until after sundown on Saturdays.

Students who are culturally Jewish stand out in a crowd, Zaila said. “People take a second look.”

FSU is a top-20 public college chosen by Jewish students, according to a ranking by Reform Judaism’s fall issue. It is ranked No. 20, with 3,000 Jewish undergraduate students making up 10 percent of the school’s population.

There are about 4,000 Jewish students total on campus, said Melanie Annis, director of Hillel at FSU, a foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

“No one likes to stand out,” Zaila said. “If I do something, I represent the whole Jewish population in Tallahassee.”