Hillel's funding cuts in this year's Student Finance Committee (SFC) allocations prompted angry students to post fliers aroung campus calling parents to protest. Hillel is in the process of submitting a budget appeal to the SFC in an attempt to remedy what they believe was an unfair budget cut.
Hillel's budget was cut to $12,437.81, a 30 percent cut from last year's budget of $19,154. Most of the cuts were realized in Shabbat funding which was cut by 50 percent. Hillel maintains that their traditional Shabbat dinner will not be able to continue after early next semester because of lack of funds.
Hillel members met with President of the College Nancy Dye in mid-September to try to get the president's office to guarantee that Shabbat would not be discontinued. However, the president's office told Hillel representatives that it could not extend emergency funding to Hillel. According to Hillel co-chair Erica Seager, the president mantained she could not offer such a large grant to a religious organization.
"There is no need that Shabbat be discontinued.... The President's office doesn't fund recurring ongoing student activities," Dye said. "I'm distressed about this because I worked late last spring and summer to find a way to finance Shabbat," she said.
"It has basically incapacitated us," Seager said about the cuts to Hillel's budget.
The cuts precipitated a response by Jewish students on campus to post signs alerting parents and visitors to the cuts and the president's response. According to Seager, the fliers campaign was not organized through Hillel.
Seager said the poster campaign was partially in response to Parent's weekend and partially in response to a meeting with Dye earlier in the year.
"She is listening; she just doesn't believe us," Seager said.
Shabbat, which is observed every Friday as a day of rest, costs Hillel $5.50 per student. Campus Dining Service (CDS) reimburses Hillel for students who eat on board who participate in Shabbat but at a rate of $3.75 per student. Hillel contracts with the Kosher Co-op to prepare and serve Shabbat dinner. An agreement with the Oberlin Student Cooperative Association (OSCA) regarding reimbursment for OSCA students who eat at Shabbat has yet to be reached, but Seager said Hillel is in the process of asking OSCA to reimburse them. An OSCA representative was unavailable for comment.
Approximately 80 percent of Hillel's budget finances Shabbat. The treasurer of the SFC Becca Barnes said, "Shabbat is something way too big for a student organization to handle [monetarily]." She said she believed the other avenues of payment of Shabbat are not being persued in earnest by Hillel.
"If they run out of money, it's their choice," Barnes said.
Hillel uses a system of taking a list of names of students who eat at Shabbat that are on board and submits the names to CDS which then reimberses them. However, Seager said the number of OSCA students who eat the Shabbat meal far out-numbers the number of on-board students and thus Hillel does not get as much money back.
Barnes said Hillel does not submit its names to CDS regularly and therefore does not get reimbursed as much as they should. Barnes felt Hillel should not be asking for more funds if they were not persuing CDS reimbersment fully.
Seager said, "We've been taking names very vigilantly."
Treasurer of Hillel Shawn Steiman said Hillel does submit names to CDS every week, but he said there may be weeks when it doesn't get done.
Controller Ron Watts, who oversees the allocation of funds to student organizations, was given the task of solving the financing problem by Dye. He is devising a system so that all the people on board can easily get credit from CDS.
"The President has asked me to make sure this process gets going," Watts said. The process by which Hillel asks for reimbersment is currently too complicated, Watts said.The new plan might ask that on-board students who would like to eat the Shabbat meal to simply quick mail CDS stating their intentions and their cards would be activated in such a way that funds would be allocated to Hillel automatically.
Watts said a student could progam a dining card so that whether the student went to the Shabbat meal or not, the meal cost would go to Hillel. The programming of the card would not have to be done on Friday which is a problem for some people who interperet the list as work which is religously prohibited. Watts said he would be meeting with Hillel in the near future but that he had not been contacted by them yet.
The issue of Hillel's funding cuts struck a deeper chord with many members of the Jewish community. "For the College not to make the continuence of this community as a priority is unacceptable," Seager said.
Hillel co-chair senior Melissa Prager said, "Students have been taken aback about how the administration has been totally insensitive to our needs."
"If, if we scrape by this year what will happen next year?" Seager said.
Hillel is working on creating an endowment fund for the long term funding of Shabbat, she said.
"The idea is that the College ask the Jewish alums to contribute to a special endowment for Shabbat," Seager said. The fundraising department has the capabilities to set up such an endowment, she said.
Steiman said the endowment idea has been proposed before but that it has never gotten beyond the planning stages.
"If enough noise is made like it has been recently, then who knows?" Steiman said.
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