IU’s Hillel Center headed for bigger home

Center for Jewish life outgrows current site, plans new facility

By Nicole Brooks 331-4232 | nbrooks@heraldt.com
August 23, 2008
Reprinted courtesy of The Herald-Times

The Hillel Center has outgrown this facility, built in 1993 on East Third Street. Designed to accommodate about 1,000 students, IU now has nearly 4,500 Jewish students.
Nicole Brooks | Herald-Times

Former Indiana Gov. Paul McNutt's home at 712 E. Eighth St. houses Indiana University history department's offices. The home will be part of the Hillel's Center's land purchase.
Nicole Brooks | Herald-Times

Hillel's director, Rabbi Sue Shifron, left, plans student welcoming activities with associate director Amy Jackson.
Nicole Brooks | Herald-Times


Kenny Hall readies Hillel's dining room Friday afternoon. The kosher kitchen can serve about 100 students at a time, and with more than 4,000 Jewish students on campus, Hillel staff want a new, bigger facility.
Nicole Brooks | Herald-Times

Stewart Moon | Herald-Times

Indiana University’s “Jewish home away from home” has outgrown its current digs, and after much scouting, a solution is in the works.

“It’s just perfect,” Rabbi Sue Shifron, director of the Helene G. Simon Hillel Center, said Friday of the plot of university property earmarked for the center’s new home.

The IU Board of Trustees at its last facilities committee meeting voted to declare the university-owned property at East Eighth Street and North Fess Avenue surplus. Property must be declared surplus before the university can move forward with a sale, Lynn Coyne, an assistant vice president who handles real estate, told the trustees.

That site, many months and millions of dollars from now, will be the new home of the Hillel Center, a privately funded organization that provides religious, cultural and social programs that help students “express their Jewishness in many traditional and creative ways.”

Hillel has outgrown its building at 730 E. Third St., built in 1993.

“When we built it, there were 1,000 Jewish students on campus, and we thought it would last forever,” Shifron said. The center now serves between 4,000 and 4,500 Jewish IU students, she said.

“We can seat about 100, not comfortably, in our dining room. We are just busting at the seams,” she said.

Hillel staff had approached the university a year ago about expanding or moving, Coyne said. Adding a wing to the current home is impossible, he said. The Hillel Center is sandwiched between the new optometry clinic and Alpha Tau Omega.

Shifron isn’t sure who came up with Eighth and Fess as a potential site. The spot is special because former Indiana Gov. Paul McNutt’s house sits there, at 712 E. Eighth St.

According to the Indiana County History Preservation Society, McNutt enrolled at IU in 1910 and graduated with honors in 1913. After earning a law degree from Harvard, he returned to Bloomington in 1917 to join the IU law faculty. McNutt served as Indiana’s 33rd governor from 1933 to 1937. At the end of his term, President Franklin D. Roosevelt made McNutt high commissioner of the Philippines. During the 1940s, McNutt and President of the Philippines Manuel Quezon worked to “side-step quotas and issue visas” to thousands of Jewish refugees escaping Nazi Germany, according to the Center for Holocaust and Humanity Education.

“McNutt succeeded in finessing U.S. State Department bureaucrats to turn a blind eye and quietly allow Jews to enter Manila at a rate of 1,000 a year,” according to a 2005 article in the Phillippine News.

“What an opportunity, for Jewish life to be in that location,” Shifron said of being adjacent to the McNutt house.

The house, which now has some history department offices inside, is in terrible condition and would require extensive renovations, Shifron said. How and if the new Hillel Center would incorporate McNutt’s house is unknown, but Shifron said some kind of tribute to McNutt is in order.

There are not yet architectural plans or a budget for the new center, but the project will move forward after the real estate transaction. Gov. Mitch Daniels will be asked to appoint three appraisers to determine the value of the land. IU will acquire Hillel’s current home on Third Street as part of the deal, Coyne said.

Visit www.iuhillel.org to learn more about the Hillel Center.