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Jewish at Trinity

The history of people of the Jewish faith at Trinity College is a vast subject whose contours have not been fully excavated through research and reflection. This encyclopedia entry is a very preliminary draft which hints at the subject but makes no claims of representativeness or comprehensiveness. The Encyclopedia's editors invite readers to conduct their own searches of the Trinity Digital Repository or other sources for additional information.

History of Jewish Enrollment

There were not many Jewish students on Trinity's campus prior to 1900. Following the turn of the century and the increased immigration from Eastern Europe to the United States in the late 19th/early 20th century, the amount of Jewish students enrolling in the school increased as more Jewish families settled in and around Hartford. The percentage of Jewish students increased from 2% of the student body in the 1904-1905 school year to 13% in the 1916-1917 academic year.

The increased enrollment was met with “alarm” in 1918 by certain students who thought that they were taking up too large of a proportion of the student body. In a letter to the Board of Trustees, the Student Senate wrote that though they acknowledged Jewish students were performing well academically, they were not engaged enough with campus activities because they lived off campus. The perception thus emerged that they were only taking and not giving to Trinity. Other antisemitic remarks expressed in this letter included claims that the Jewish student body was deterring other applicants, complaints that Jewish students were not enlisting in the military, and assertions that they were introducing “Russian socialist expression” into Trinity classrooms.

The school president at the time, President Luther, agreed that the number of Jewish students was an issue in a meeting with the Board of Trustees held in June of 1918. His “solution” at the time was to enforce mandatory chapel attendance for all students, but this was disregarded due to prior lax enforcement of attendance over the years. Partially in response to a short-lived “Red Scare” outbreak in Hartford that resulted in several Jewish citizens getting charged with sedition, the “issue” of Jewish students at Trinity was brought up again in April 1919.

Americanization

The proposed “solution” was introduced by the Student Senate and was titled the “Student Movement for Americanization at Trinity”. This would require all undergraduates to live in buildings controlled by the college. Americanization of students was one goal of the rule, as it was easier to influence students when they lived on campus rather than at home. The secondary goal resided in the belief that it may discourage local students from applying, as they would not want to pay the additional housing fee when they could just live at home and commute if they attended a different local college. This was especially relevant to the lives of Jewish (and other) immigrants/sons of immigrants, who resided in larger cities like Hartford. It was approved by the Trustees to be implemented in the fall of 1919, ultimately requiring “all students of alien birth, and of all students whose fathers were of alien birth” to live on campus for their first two years at Trinity.

The rule was revisited by President Ogilby in 1921. In June of that year, he told the Board that he did not want to keep the policy if it had been “intended to keep out the members of one single race, it is not honest and rules out too many good students who would otherwise be with us.”. The Trustees approved Ogilby the power to waive it on a case-by-case basis. The increasingly large problem of lack of dormitories to house all undergraduates on campus gradually gave less power to the policy.

However, it is unclear when the college officially stopped enforcing the policy. It was only ever posted as a supplemental page to the 1918-1919 Trinity Catalogue. The rule did not appear in any subsequent Catalogues, or any other Trinity publications or Board Meeting minutes.

In the decades following 1920, Trinity still admitted Jewish students. Their proportion to the student body fell, however, as the total size of the student body increased. At other schools around the time period, such as Yale and Harvard, quotas were implemented to decrease the number of Jewish students. Trinity never implemented such quota, partially because the school was so dependent on local enrollments, to which many Jewish students contributed, and partially because enacting such quota would go against Trinity's charter that ensured that no applicant would ever be held subject to religious testing.

Jewish Life on Campus

Trinity's Hillel Society for Jewish students was officially established in 1948. It was originally a chapter of the B'nai B'rith Hillel Organization and was led by the Rabbi and director of the University of Connecticut's Hillel Foundation, Rabbi Maurice L. Zigmond. In the early 1970s, recommendations were approved by the Trinity College Council to find a permanent home for Hillel. This, for a period of time, was a building located on 30 Crescent Street. The group was able to hold Shabbat dinners and services using the space, as well as sponsor various events and host different speakers.

The push for an established Jewish studies program also began in the 1970s. A dinner was held in March of 1970 that recognized the existing Jewish Studies Program and advocated for more funding. Speakers at the event included multiple rabbis and President Lockwood, who was quoted as saying “I feel that we must dedicate education in behalf of human experience. We welcome the contribution which Jewish Studies can make to this goal.” Despite this support, the program remained relatively small in the following decades. In 1972, there was the threat that the only course offered on Judaism would be cut from Trinity's curriculum due to budgeting. The course ultimately remained, and the Jewish studies major was officially established in 1998.

In 1998, the College began planning the construction of three cultural houses, Hillel being among them. The new Hillel House is located on Vernon Street and opened in December 2001. The building is 8,000 square feet and contains a kosher kitchen, a multi-purpose prayer space, a dining room, a library, and a variety of other meeting rooms. Its official title is Zachs Hillel House, named after the Trinity College alumnus Henry Zachs. Zachs graduated from Trinity in 1956, and served on many committees and made many donations to the school following his graduation; he was awarded the Eigenbrodt Cup by the College in 2006. Jewish community building was an important cause to him, hence his generous endowment to construct the new Hillel House.

2012 saw the implementation of a kosher food station in Mather dining hall. This was after complaints by the student body from as early as 2005 about the lack of kosher options for Jewish students following orthodox diets. The station was named the Kassow Hillel Kosher Eatery after Lisa Kassow and Samuel Kassow, two prominent Trinity faculty members involved with Jewish life on campus.

Jewish students have been involved with Greek life on campus from as early as 1950. In these earlier years, Trinity fraternities accepting Jewish members were violating the national fraternity laws, which often only accepted “Christians of the Caucasian race”. In 2016, Trinity student Aaron Kirshenberg officially established a chapter of Alpha Epsilon Pi, the world's largest Jewish fraternity, on Trinity's campus. Kirshenburg's original motivation for the founding was wanting to bring together Jewish men on campus in a “less religious” setting. Membership is open to anyone and is not limited to only Jewish students.

Challenges

Jewish students have also faced repeated challenges and antisemitism on campus. Students have made repeated complaints about major campus events, like Parents Weekend and class registration days, happening on important Jewish holidays. In the early 1980s, Hillel constructed a Sukkah on the main quad for the celebration of Sukkot. It was desecrated, and Hillel built it behind Hillel House for the following 9 years due to the attack.

A major recent event occurred in 2022 when a Jewish student had 3 swastikas carved into their dorm door. Though the perpetrator/s of the hate crime were never caught by the school, Trinity responded by opening up a campus-wide discussion about antisemitism. The response was partly organized by the Campus Climate Incident Response Team and included workshops, lecture series, and an “open dialogue” between speakers and the campus community.

Notable Jewish Students and Faculty


Sources

History of Jewish Enrollment

Uncovering Unwritten Rules Against Jewish and Black Students at Trinity College.

Trinity College in the Twentieth Century (2000) by Peter and Anne Knapp, p. 57-61 & 164.

Jewish Life on Campus

The Trinity Tripod, 09/27/2016.

The Trinity Reporter, Winter 2014.

The Trinity Tripod, 11/01/2005.

Trinity College in the Twentieth Century (2000) by Peter and Anne Knapp, p. 165.

The Trinity Tripod, 10/06/1998.

The Trinity Tripod, 04/14/1998.

The Trinity Tripod, 09/25/1973.

The Trinity Tripod, 02/01/1972

The Trinity Reporter, May 1970.

The Trinity Tripod, 01/15/1947.

Challenges

The Trinity Tripod, 09/27/2022.

The Trinity Tripod, 10/20/1992.

The Trinity Tripod, 10/10/1989.

Notable Jewish Students and Faculty

The Kassow Legacy at Trinity.

The Trinity Reporter, Winter 2014.

Trinity College in the Twentieth Century (2000) by Peter and Anne Knapp, p. 234.