Chabad at USC Opens New Center With Campus’s First Kosher Restaurant

“A proud Jew rather than a fearful one.”

That, student Noah Razak told some 400 people gathered on Severance Street Sunday night, is what Chabad at USC made of him. Razak, a senior and student co-president, was speaking at the grand opening of a new 12,000-square-foot home — a $10 million restoration twenty-six years in the making, in the middle of Fraternity Row.

The building was never supposed to be this. When Rabbi Dov and Runya Wagner first drew up plans some fifteen years ago, the idea was modest: raise a million dollars, add about a thousand square feet to the dining room. The project grew roughly tenfold. “We thought we were doing a little addition,” Runya Wagner told the crowd Sunday. “G-d had something much bigger in mind.”

Getting there took years of permits and historic-preservation review on a Victorian mansion that Chabad bought abandoned in 2003. “Anyone who’s done construction in Los Angeles knows what you would expect,” Runya said. The Wagners’ daughters, who spoke together, put it more simply: “A lot of construction. Like, a lot.”

The most consequential thing in the new building may be the kitchen. Chabad estimates some 2,000 Jewish undergraduates at USC and another 1,800 graduate students — and until this month, none of them could get a kosher dinner on campus. “There’s been a long history of trying to get better kosher availability on campus,” Rabbi Wagner said. “At some point we realized that if it wasn’t going to happen on campus itself, then we should do it.”

So Chabad built one — a commercial kitchen and a rooftop restaurant serving shawarma, schnitzel, wraps and burgers on weeknights, shaded by a canopy of twenty-foot bamboo poles sourced from the Amazon rainforest. The bamboo does double duty: come Sukkot, it serves as schach, the natural covering a sukkah requires. The Rooftop, as the new eatery was named, came together only days before classes began, with help from senior administrators. Any USC student on a campus meal plan can now use their meal swipes at Chabad.

The rest of the building leans hard into what was already there. The historic designation kept the front rooms at their original size and shape, so the entry is still a small dark vestibule of mahogany paneling and coffered ceilings. But there are Jewish fingerprints throughout — Jerusalem stone at the entrance and along a wall in the sanctuary, and custom chandeliers, some inscribed “Chabad — University of Southern California,” others with the Shema Yisrael prayer. Upstairs, there are apartments where students live year-round.

One of them is Ava Schwartz, the other student co-president, who has lived in the house for three years. She arrived at USC with Jewish values but no religious practice, she told the crowd, and is now fully observant. “I did not become a follower,” she said. “I was galvanized to become a leader.”

Sunday’s ceremony filled the lawn with about 400 alumni, parents, donors and students. USC President Beong-Soo Kim spoke, as did Board of Trustees Chair Suzanne Nora Johnson and Dean of Religious Life Varun Soni, who has been Chabad’s principal campus partner since 2008. The mezuzah on the front door was affixed by alumni Shelly and Dr. Moshe Bernard Baseri.

Then the ribbon came down, as nightfall brought in Chai Elul, the eighteenth of the Hebrew month and the birthday of both the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Chasidism, and the Alter Rebbe, founder of Chabad. Eighteen is the numerical value of chai, life. “Our prayer is not simply that this building will be filled,” Runya Wagner said. “Our prayer is that it will be alive.”

It already is. Two nights before the opening, 400 students turned up for Shabbat dinner and Chabad was seating people in the front hall again. “We’re bursting at the seams from this new space,” Rabbi Wagner said.

Noah Razak was thinking about that Friday night when he got up to speak. He had come to USC in part because of this house, promised to him as a construction site during Admitted Students Weekend, and now he was standing in front of it, finished. “After Shabbat dinner on Friday,” he said, “you might want to consider starting construction on an even bigger house.”