California Students Get Their Own Torah Scroll

For students of California State University, Northridge, Chanukah celebrations were much brighter this year thanks to the dedication of a new Torah scroll completed just days before the festival.

Donated by CSUN parent Steve Dorfman in honor of his father Alex Dorfman, the Torah was welcomed by more than 500 students, parents, alumni, faculty members and local residents. A group of 100 students took the opportunity to help a ritual scribe fill in 100 of the holy scroll’s Hebrew letters.

According to Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Chaim Brook, director of the campus-based Chabad House, the Torah will enable more frequent services, freeing organizers from having to borrow scrolls from area synagogues.

Jewish students comprise about 10 percent of the 36,000-strong CSUN community. In the five years since the arrival of Chaim and Raizel Brook, weekly Shabbat meals have grown to include an average of 80 students, while each school year sees the addition of more Torah classes and holiday programs.

Students say the one thing missing until last week was their own Torah scroll.

“Hopefully, this will attract more Jewish students, because the main thing that we didn’t have is here now,” says Sandra Bram, a sophomore communications major who is on the Chabad House’s board. “I’ve been so passionate about Chabad and our new Torah ever since I met the rabbi with my sorority at one of his monthly barbeques.”

Bram, along with other members of the board, planned the Torah completion ceremony for more a year. For the students involved, the event was bittersweet.

“We had been planning it for so long, taking care of every single detail,” she relates. “It was so amazing. I was really tearing up during the march from campus to the Chabad House. We’d been waiting for this for over a year, and now it actually happened.”

Tiffany Alyesh, the center’s student president, considers the new Torah to be another example of the Chabad House’s tremendous growth in a short amount of time.

“Before we had the Torah, we already had a huge student organization,” explains Alyesh, a junior communication disorders and sciences major. “But now, more students will come knowing that they can [pray] here. We’ve been waiting for this for so long, it’s a dream come true to finally have it. We really have everything now.”

According to Brook, the Torah dedication ceremony brought together the CSUN campus in an unprecedented way.

“You could feel such a Jewish energy on campus,” he says. “It really brought out great Jewish pride in the students when we marched with their own Torah on campus.”