IRVINE – Pushing his glasses up above the bridge of his nose, a rabbi leaned toward a table, took a white feather quill pen and carefully penned a Hebrew letter on a parchment scroll.
As Rabbi Leib Groner and other honored guests joined an expert scribe to write the last Hebrew letters that made the scroll official, some 100 members of the UC Irvine Jewish community on Monday applauded the completion of the first Torah created just for them – rare for a college campus.
“You have now on campus a special blessing,” Groner told some 100 students, alumni, staff members and others gathered at the campus Cross-Cultural Center.
Moments later, the group moved outside, singing and dancing to music to celebrate the completion of the scroll that calls for an expert scribe to write down 304,805 letters on parchment made from animal skin that is cured, tanned, scraped and prepared according to Jewish tradition. The process can take as long as a year and even one smudge or small error can void the entire 54-portion parchment.
The Sefer Torah, a handwritten scroll of the holiest book in Judaism, was dubbed the Unity Torah and will be stored in an ark at the Rohr Chabad affiliated with UCI, said Rabbi Zevi Tenenbaum.
Most college Jewish organizations have borrowed Torah scrolls and rarely commission their own, Tenenbaum said. The Torah that was completed Monday cost about $45,000, with money coming from donations by students, alumni and others.
At UCI, Israel is at least once a year, and sometimes more often, the target of protests from students who call Israelis “occupiers.” Every spring, groups like the UCI Muslim Student Union and Students for Justice in Palestine stage “Anti-Zionism Week.”
On Monday, Chabad supporters staged their ceremony inside the campus Cross-Cultural Center, which is home to many of the groups that have protested and at times disrupted Israeli-related programs on campus. When the Jewish group moved outside near the Student Center Monday, people danced at the same spot where the pro-Palestinian groups annually stage a mock wall symbolic of the one built in Israel following terrorist attacks.
“There are times that Jewish students have to see very unpleasant displays that can be uncomfortable,” Tenenbaum said. “We wanted to have a positive experience on the same location.”
UCI’s history of conflicts between supporters of Israel and Palestine was perhaps most notably in 2011, when 10 students were found guilty for conspiring to disrupt a speech by then-Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren. More recently, UCI administrators sanctioned a student Palestinian-support group, last fall, for disrupting an event featuring young veteran Israeli soldiers.
While some Jewish families say they are cautious about sending their children to UCI, many others say discrimination is rare.
“I was never harassed. I have Muslim and Arab friends, and I never had a problem,” said Devin Yaeger, a 2014 UCI graduate who was at the ceremony with his parents from Westwood after donating toward the new Torah.
Matthias Lehmann, director of the UCI Center of Jewish Studies, called the new Torah “a beautiful symbol of the Jewish tradition. … I love the idea that this is called the Unity Torah,” he said. “I think it’s important for all of us to come together and to show UCI is a welcoming place for all students.”
