Chabad to Open Permanent Home at Wesleyan U.

With one of the highest proportions of Jewish students at any campus, Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT, will finally have its on-site Chabad representatives.

Rabbi Levi and Chanie Schectman will be joining new students this fall as Chabad’s full-time representatives at this New England liberal arts school, where roughly 25-30% of the 2,766 member student body is Jewish.

As early as 1979, Rabbi Yosef Gopin, today director of Chabad of Greater Hartford, began a weekly Talmud class at Wesleyan. Chabad has since expanded its social and educational offerings. As the numbers of interested students grew, Rabbi Yosef Wolvovsky, who ran programing at Wesleyan and serves as executive director of Chabad East of the River in nearby Glastonbury, felt “the time was ripe” for a full-time representative.

The Schectmans, are excited to tap into the school’s atmosphere of independent study and personal discovery.

“During our previous trips to Wesleyan, we were struck by the inquisitive and open nature of the students,” Levi says. “We’ve found their desire for personal study and discovery similar to Chabad’s passion for Jewish study and identity building.”

Dr. Vera Schwarcz, the Freeman Professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan, welcomes this development.

Since coming to Wesleyan in 1975, the school’s Jewish Studies department has grown, Schwarcz noted, but Jewish practice has been less vibrant.

“The nature of academia is such that the pursuit of knowledge can be entirely isolated from one’s personal life.”

Schwarcz spoke about Chabad’s unique opportunity to connect the studies of Wesleyan’s Jewish students as they grow “intellectually and academically” to “equally challenging Torah learning.”

“I often tell my students that my own academic work has been greatly enriched by living a more observant Jewish life and by Chabad teachers whom I have encountered from New York to Beijing,” she observes.

“[As such] I, personally, am grateful for the commitment and inspiration that leads the Schectmans to move to Middletown in order to serve Wesleyan’s sizable Jewish community.”

The Schectmans will begin serving Wesleyan full-time at the beginning of the fall semester, with a grant from the Rohr Family Foundation in conjunction with Chabad on Campus.