The University City has a vibrant Jewish population, with a vibrant, retail community of Jewish-owned enterprises to go with it.
At sundown this past Friday, Rosh Hashanah, the celebration of the Jewish New Year, drew to a close.
Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement follows this Friday.
Monday is the anniversary of an event no one wants to remember: The Hamas attack on Israel.
The initial targets were young people attending a music festival.
Just as the religious holidays from all faiths are about family at the heart of it all – wars, it can equally be said, are just as much about real estate as they are ideology.
Andrew Fried, meanwhile, is trying diligently to focus on the former, even as he worries about the latter.
Fried is a WVU senior from Oyster Bay, Long Island, N.Y., majoring in Sports and Adventure Media.
He’s coming off a run of plenty of adventure, in fact.
The student who wants to be a sportscaster did a production internship during the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris just recently – but the year before that, he was in Israel on another study program, where he got to know the land and people of his family.
Like Levy before him, he’s a young person of the Jewish faith who fell in love with a certain land grant institution in predominantly Protestant West Virginia.
Many times, he’s the first Jewish a person a Mountain State native going to school in Morgantown meets.
“I love being in that role,” he said. “I love representing my faith.”
That includes answering a lot of questions, he said, mostly earnest and mostly the tenets, traditions and rituals of that rich practice – though one classmate did ask one time if Fried was “legally allowed to believe in Santa Claus.”
“I actually did not have a response for that one,” he said.
Ask him about his feelings for Israel, which is now battling on two fronts against Hamas and Iran as it goes into the High Holiday season, and he has a response without hesitation.
Now, those rituals of his faith are more important than ever, he said, even as he can’t help but worry about the friends he made during that homeland sojourn in 2023 – friends he’s still in contact with, via social media.
He appreciates the good humor and persistence of his faith and its decree (in all-but-gone Yiddish), which decrees: Man thinks … God laughs.
Outbreaks of anti-Semitism on other campuses normally regarded as bastions of tolerance, acceptance and liberal thought also give him pause in these divisive days, he said – but not enough to publicly slink away from an identity for the ages.
“Honestly, it’s a little scary, but if I hide my Star of David necklace, it’s like I’m not proud of my heritage – and I’m not going to do that.”
It is a balancing act, Rabbi Joe Hample of Morgantown’s Tree of Life congregation said.
He knows there’s a cultural divide of sorts in the country right now: Older, more devout Jews are generally pro-Israel, he said – with younger, secular Jews not always agreeing.
“It made for some interesting conversations around the Thanksgiving dinner table last year,” he said.
Now, he said, talks need to commence, diplomatically.
“There needs to be a cease-fire,” he said.
