WASHINGTON — Jeremy Hershman can’t live in a Yale dormitory. It’s not that he doesn’t want to; his religious beliefs prevent it.
The 19-year-old from Cedarhurst, N.Y., has repeatedly told Yale officials that his Orthodox Jewish convictions are not compatible with the mixed-sex atmosphere of dormitory life.
But Hershman, who is set to enter his sophomore year when school opens next week, is in a bind.
Yale housing policy requires that all freshmen and sophomores live on campus unless they are married or over 21.
Hershman and four schoolmates have threatened to sue Yale if the school does not change its policy. Yale has threatened disciplinary action if the students do not live on campus.
But this has not deterred the two sophomores and three freshmen who have decided that come next week, they will live off campus, paying thousands of dollars for rooms they will not use.
“Yale permits and often encourages a lifestyle in the dormitories that there’s no way a fully observant Orthodox Jew can live in,” Hershman said in a telephone interview from his home on Tuesday.
He said he will live with two Orthodox graduate students near campus and will pay $7,000 to Yale for room and board in addition to his rent this year.
Last year, when they were entering freshmen, the school had assured Hershman and Lisa Friedman, another Orthodox student, that a single-sex dorm would accommodate them.
But when Hershman arrived on campus, he found bathrooms used by both men and women.
He also attended an orientation lecture that included a speech on how to politely ask a roommate to leave “when you want to have sex,” he recalled.
He never slept in the dorm.
“The obligation to exercise care and modesty in living accommodations so as not to permit even inadvertent inappropriate encounters between men and women is a long-standing rule of Jewish religious observance,” Nathan Lewin, an attorney, recently wrote to the dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead.
“Their religious convictions forbid them from residing in dormitories that are readily accessible to members of the opposite sex for extended periods of time, including overnight visits,” Lewin said of the students.
After the university received Lewin’s letter, which threatened legal action, Yale’s general counsel called Lewin.
“He kept impressing on me that this is an important policy of Yale, to have kids live in dormitories,” said Lewin, who said he knew of no similar problem at any other university.
Tom Conroy, deputy director of public affairs at Yale, said Yale emphasizes small residential communities, including libraries and dining services, as the hub of student life.
Conroy said such living is an “integral and important” part of attending Yale.
He said the university is open to discussing a solution for the students that would not involve living off-campus. Hinting that Yale might drop its threat to discipline the students, he added that the college does not conduct bed checks.
For Lewin, a prominent Washington attorney who has frequently represented Orthodox Jews in discrimination claims, this is a simple case of “religious discrimination.”
He vowed to file a lawsuit if Yale does not change its policy.
So far, Yale is not budging.
“We certainly do not believe that Yale is under any legal obligation to grant a waiver to these students. We have no plans to do so,” Conroy said.
In an exchange of letters last spring between Friedman and the college’s dean of students, Betty Trachtenberg, the school made its position clear.
“Rather than addressing the religious concerns expressed by the few students,” Friedman wrote to Trachtenberg, “you said that students with those religious views should not have sought admission to Yale.
“It is hard to believe,” Friedman continued in her letter, “that a university which boasts around the world that it has a diverse and multicultural community would be inhospitable to individuals with these sincerely held beliefs.
“My parents cannot and should not be forced to bear the cost of double lodging, as they have been compelled to do this past year. To impose this tax on them is to penalize them for their, and my, religious beliefs.”