Growing up in College Park

COLLEGE PARK, MD — Most residences near campus are occupied by university students whose afternoon and nightly activities include studying for exams or partying- and either way, crawling into bed at 2 a.m. But for some city dwellers, the daily routines are a little different.

“From 4p.m. to 7p.m., from when my kids come home until they go to bed, it’s family time,” said Nechama Backman, explaining her family’s routines in their home on Hopkins Avenue.

Then again, with help from her five children, Backman hosts what may well be one of the biggest parties of the week in her own home.

Backman heads the Chabad house along with her husband, Rabbi Eli Backman, and is very devoted to keeping the center “a home away from home,” for Jewish students. This is why every Friday night, hundreds of students pile into what was once a fraternity house for a homemade Shabbat dinner hosted by the family.

“Our children are very involved with everything,” said Nechama Backman.

Her eldest son, 11-year-old Mendel, said he loves to fry fish for Friday night dinners, while 7-year-old Chaiky (who insisted it be known she will be 8 in less than a month) prefers to chop and peel veggies and keep the younger kids occupied while her mom cooks. Yossel, the Backman’s 9-year-old son, prefers to grocery shop and help fill some of the eight carts Eli Backman says is average for one of the family’s shopping trips.

“A lot of kids grow up thinking that shopping means you go once a week and fill up a cart and its fine for your family,” Eli Backman said. “But when we are shopping for programs every other night besides a family of seven, we’re shopping all the time.”

But the Backmans aren’t always focused on keeping Maryland’s Jewish community fed; sometimes they prefer just to do what normal families do.

“We go over to the public school on Sundays and do a little bike riding,” Nechama Backman said. “We don’t have a backyard because we put in this extension [the family once lived in the basement of the original part of the house] but I won’t let the kids out front unsupervised. Being near a college campus I have to be careful.”

Having such a strong connection to the university through their parents and pure proximity, the children also have to endure year after year of some of their best friends graduating. “It’s a big issue to my kids,” Nechama Backman said. “They develop these friendships [with students], and become very, very close and then they don’t understand but all of a sudden they leave.”

But in turn, “the kids become each other’s best friends, they play beautifully together, they work together,” she said. “This is just what they know.”

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Mendel Backman, who has lived on Hopkins Avenue all his life, said “We’re used to the noise, so it’s our background, like singing us to sleep.”

Although children have little choice as to where they grow up and how- as Mrs. Backman said, “We chose this lifestyle, we didn’t ask our kids,”- the children who call their home College Park certainly don’t seem to be complaining.