Shortly after Lela Sarnat started graduate school at Stanford University in 1969, her parents came to visit her. Her father served on the board of Hillel in Los Angeles, and the first thing he wanted to see on campus was the Hillel facility.
His daughter showed him three rooms in a basement.
“Can’t they do something about this?” Harold Ziff asked his daughter. Over the years, he continued to ask: “Have they done anything about that Hillel yet?”
Ziff died 10 years ago, but last week, Sarnat — who lives in Portola Valley with her husband, Gerry — was able to observe his yahrzeit and say Kaddish for her father in the new Harold & Libby Ziff Center for Jewish Life, named after him and his wife, on the Stanford campus.
Sarnat told that story to several hundred onlookers as she hung a mezuzah on the doorpost of the building Sunday, Feb. 27.
The new Hillel center, formerly known on campus as the historic Dunn-Bacon House, was built in 1899 in the Greek Revival style. Light gray with black shutters, the two-story house has imposing Ionic columns. The interior features dark wood wainscoting. There is a hidden staircase that has already become the favorite of some of its users. It has 3,700 square feet of space.
Sunday’s festivities in Kresge Auditorium featured many speakers, including Stanford alumnus Richard Levin, who is the president of Yale University, and John Hennessy, the president of Stanford.
Adina Danzig, executive director of Stanford Hillel, said in her address that “buildings are not the focal point of our lives — how we live within them, and what emanates from them, is.
“The ancient Temple was beautiful,” she said. “And not by accident. Space can become holy through our actions.”
Stanford was the last major undergraduate university without its own Hillel building. The project cost $4.8 million, including renovation costs, a 51-year-lease, a $1 million endowment fund, plus additional costs and furnishings.
This was just phase one of a much larger project for the Ziff Center. Phase two will include an additional 10,000 square feet of space. After the completion of phase two, the expanded complex will retain the Ziff Center name, but the former Dunn-Bacon House will be called the Taube Hillel House, after Stanford alumni Tad Taube who just announced a major gift to the new center.
Carla Fenves, president of Stanford’s Jewish Leadership Council, spoke of a new center that is bustling with activity: A queer Jewish group studying sexuality in the Talmud, a class on Maimonides, a meeting of 10 students going to Nicaragua on spring break with American Jewish World Service and yoga are all happening at the same time.
She also tearfully told that some 50 students were able to gather recently in the new Hillel center to say Kaddish with a fellow student who had just lost her mother. That they were able to do so in a house, the traditional site for Jewish mourning, was so much more meaningful, she said. “That could not have happened in the old basement.”
After the speeches, three past presidents of the Jewish Leadership Council carried the Torahs, with community members following, from the auditorium to the new center. (Luckily, a downpour started only after the Torahs were safely put away.) Sarnat affixed the “inner peace” mezuzah, made by local artist Aimee Golant.
Sarnat had spoken to her 96-year-old mother, Libby, that morning, who said, “They should have a good time.”