Hillel Milwaukee nourishes students while building community through Jewish Cooking Club

The first episode of the Emmy-winning comedy "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" takes place the night before Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. As Joel Maisel is packing to leave his family, his wife, Midge, confronts him.

Midge: Tomorrow’s Yom Kippur.

Joel: I’m not happy.

Midge: Nobody’s happy. It’s Yom Kippur.

Mrs. Maisel is not wrong. There is nothing fun about Yom Kippur, also known as the Day of Atonement. The Yom Kippur vibe is solemn and reflective with a 25-hour fast as a major component. Yom Kippur occurs shortly after the celebration of Rosh Hashanah; together, these are known as the High Holy Days.

This year Yom Kippur runs from sundown Sept. 24 until sundown the next day.

As college students return to classes, observing the Jewish High Holy Days away from family can be challenging. But one organization provides a home away from home for Jewish students from 11 local campuses including Marquette, Concordia, The Medical College of Wisconsin, Mount Mary and Waukesha County Technical College.  At Hillel Milwaukee, students can participate in religious services and enjoy social events, but the biggest draw might just be the food.

Creating a 'haimish feeling of family'

The Hillel staff understands the assignment: If you feed them, college students will come.

“College students want a free meal, and they love to eat," said Rabbi Joshua Herman, Hillel's executive director. "Food gets them in the door, but we’re not just ordering pizza — there's also a ritual around these meals. There are blessings before and after, and they're sitting with friends and strangers around a table with a tablecloth."

Last fall, the staff at Hillel created a Jewish Cooking Club where students work with staff members to prepare food for holidays, special events and the weekly Shabbat (Sabbath) Friday night dinner.

“I think we have that haimish feeling of family — even though you're not with your family, you kind of are,” Herman said. The food has to be special, too. “It's sometimes home-cooked and sometimes catered, but it's still this style of food that you associate with Shabbat dinner. You're having chicken or brisket and it all feeds into the feelings of home, warmth and togetherness."

Menus may vary from week to week, but one item has a permanent place on Hillel’s table: green dip. This creamy, zesty, savory blend of freshness is a student favorite, and the recipe is a well-kept secret.

“At my first Hillel Shabbat dinner in March, all the students were talking about was this green dip. ... It has this sort of mythology around it,” Herman said. “Hillel is a transitory population; you have students who come in for three or four years and then they move on. So there aren’t a lot of deeply set traditions."

But Green dip is a deeply set tradition.

“They (staff) refused to let me in the kitchen while they were making it, so I wouldn't see what goes in it. Then they laughed as I tried to guess the ingredients. I was completely off in every way, shape or form,” Herman said. The recipe is only given to graduating seniors who are sworn to secrecy.

Writer’s note: I’ve made green dip. My daughter learned it at Chabad, a Jewish student organization in Madison. I won’t divulge the recipe, but it’s easy and quite delicious. If a fresh spring day was a food, it would be green dip.

Think fast: Jewish holy day practice offers spiritual and health benefits

Club highlights a variety of Jewish foods

When Anna Goldstein Koenig came to Marquette from the Chicago suburbs in 2013, she quickly found her way to Hillel.

“The High Holy Days were in the middle of the week that year, so I wasn't going to be able to go home. Since I was going to a Catholic school, I knew I needed to have some Jewish friends and a support system. I was really looking for connection,” Goldstein Koenig said.

As a student, Goldstein Koenig held a variety of leadership roles at Hillel. After graduation, she took a full-time role at the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and eventually joined the staff at Hillel, where she worked until a few weeks ago. Before she began a new position as executive director of the Milwaukee Jewish Free Loan Association, Goldstein Koenig shared the story behind Hillel’s Jewish Cooking Club.

“There's been an unofficial culture of students coming to help out in the kitchen; students have always been helping the staff bake challah and make dessert,” Goldstein Koenig said.

Last fall, she was instrumental in creating the club, which spotlights a variety of styles of Jewish foods.

“We’ve explored different cultures of Judaism through food, whether it be Eastern Europe or Spain, the Middle East or Ethiopian. Tasting food from that culture really gives you a deep insight into the values and the richness of the history,” Goldstein Koenig said.

But when it comes to serving a meal to sustain a 25-hour Yom Kippur fast, Hillel sticks with tried-and-true Ashkenazi (Eastern European) dishes.

“You don't want anything super carb heavy before a fast, so we go very traditional, usually chicken soup and maybe a salad; obviously we have vegetarian options available, and we usually order a protein from a kosher caterer,” Goldstein Koenig said. “We'll do the veggies and side dishes in-house, and that's really a team effort of Hillel staff and, hopefully, students."

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sophomore and cooking club participant Aviva Hurwitz loves to stir the pot at Hillel — literally.

“Last year I chopped all the ingredients for a soup, then I got to be in charge of stirring,” Hurwitz said. “Working as a group to get a big meal out is fun."

Another perk of a meal at Hillel? Leftovers.

“You get to take food home to have for the weekend, because they always cook more than needed," Hurwitz said. “I put the leftovers in the microwave, and then I don’t have to go to the cafeteria that weekend.”

Leftovers of another sort play a role in Yom Kippur, too, when fasting symbolizes something bigger.

“In some ways, it’s easier to just not put food in your mouth for 25 hours than to do what you're supposed to do. You want to try to search out the depth of your soul to understand the ways you’re fundamentally coming up short as a human being,” Herman said.

One way to not come up short and be a better person is by trying to repair the world, a concept known in Judaism as Tikkun Olam. Yom Kippur has a built-in vehicle for this: donating the food you aren’t eating is a common practice. Synagogues organize Yom Kippur food drives to help address Milwaukee’s food insecurity issues.

Finding community through food

For the students at Hillel, the meals are about more than the food, too.

“None of my roommates or suitemates are Jewish and they don’t understand Judaism very much, but they definitely respect it,” said Hurwitz, a Chicago native.  “At Hillel, you get a chance to be around people who maybe grew up with the same food, the same traditions, and who may have struggled with the same things."

Menu planning for today’s college students has to cover a lot of bases.

“We try to be inclusive and make sure that we cover gluten allergies, lactose intolerance and so on and so forth. Ultimately, it’s about making people happy with food that just tastes good and fills their bellies,” Herman said.

Thanks to Hillel, Hurwitz can begin her fast with a full belly. She plans to stop by Hillel as she powers through the day without food.

“I think (fasting) will be easier at Hillel. Well, maybe not easier, but at least it will be more fun fasting around other people doing the same thing,” she said.

Turns out Mrs. Maisel was wrong, because at Hillel Milwaukee, students are happy, even on Yom Kippur.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Hillel Milwaukee builds community through Jewish Cooking Club