Mitzpeh

When junior accounting and economics major Ely Cole moved into South Campus Commons Building 1 this semester, he spent about five hours kashering his kitchen; however, kosher students living in newly constructed Commons buildings 5 and 6 will have an easier time setting up their kitchens.

The ide of what keeping kosher means is often misinterpreted as being mystical and holy, but the term basically signifies that items are fit and prepared properly, Chabad’s Rabbi Eli Backman said.

Because the kitchens in the new apartment buildings hadn’t been used before the start of the semester, “the apartments pretty much start off kosher,” Cole said.

Although students moving into Buildings 5 and 6 are dealing with unused kitchens, they still have to make sure everything is kosher and decide whether common kitchen items, such as ovens and dishwashers, are to be used for both meat and dairy items and kosher and non-kosher foods, Backman said.

“A lot of it in a new kitchen is the designating and figuring out the usage of the kitchen,” he said.

Before making an apartment kosher, kosher students and their roommates must determine what aspects of the kitchen are to be used for meat and dairy products and set aside utensils for meat and dairy and sometimes pareve (neutral) food.

This process can become complicated in a kitchen with limited space and only one dishwasher and oven.

When kosher students have roommates who don’t keep kosher, further complications arise, including buying sets of kosher and non-kosher utensils and washing non-kosher dishes by hand if the dishwasher is to be considered kosher, Backman said.

An important ritual in new apartments is the purifying of new items, including utensils and dishes. Before an item is used, it is generally taken to a mikvah, a body of water used to make things pure. Once this process has been done once, it doesn’t have to be done again, Backman said.

The process of kashering a kitchen is painstaking and time-consuming, even for students living in the new Commons apartments. As a result, a group of students to lobby Capstone Development Corp., the parent company of the South Campus Commons complex, to set aside certain apartments as kosher apartments.

Capstone, however, said it was unable to mark kitchens as kosher, citing the Fair Housing Act’s clause against specializing any housing due to religious reasons, to the surprise of kosher students, Cole said.

“It’s not really special housing. It’s the same stuff, not anything special,” he said.

The Resident Life Department also doesn’t set aside any university-owned apartments or dorms as kosher, but that doesn’t stop students from maintaining kosher apartments.

Often, seniors and juniors living on the campus try to “pull in” underclassmen who keep kosher to live in their already kosher apartments. As long as students follow through with this practice, there will be unofficial kosher apartments on the campus, Backman said.

For more information about koshering your apartment, call Rabbi Backman at (301)-277-2994.

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