feature story
Students at Villanova University Hillel events
Photos by Sean Culley
kind of amorphous,” Marchione said. “It’s still such in
its early phases that it’s hard to draw any conclusions at
this point.”
St. Joe’s’ Jewish community has been even more
ambiguous in recent years, with the school’s few Jewish
professors doing their best to engage with the campus’
Jewish students.

Nancy Fox, a professor of economics at St. Joe’s, has
helped lead the charge in building Jewish community
on campus. She’s worked at the college for 37 years but
only began engaging with Jewish students aft er 10 years
of teaching.

Fox had an epiphany when speaking to a colleague,
Sister Francis. During her previous teaching career
at New York University, she made hamantaschen for
Purim every year for her sizable Jewish population. She
debated making the cookies for her students at St. Joe’s
and fi nally decided to aft er Sister Francis told her that
Catholics also study the story of Esther.

“And that’s when it clicked,” she said.

With the help of congregants at Congregation
Beth El-Ner Tamid in Broomall, Fox and members of
Campus Ministry dropped off shalach manot to Jewish
students on campus.

Fift een years ago, Fox helped organize an interfaith
service to kick off the spring semester, complementing
the Catholic mass that took place at the beginning of
each fall semester. She’s helped organize a Passover
seder at the college for the past ten years.

Th rough her time working with Jewish students and
organizing interfaith activities with Campus Ministry,
she’s noticed a parallel between their stories and hers:
“It kind of awakened their Jewish identity. Most of these
students, to my knowledge — the ones who I know —
do not actively practice Judaism. And I have a feeling
that this reminds them that they’re Jewish.”
With little infrastructure in place to support Jewish
community before Greater Philly Hillel’s involvement,
why would Jewish students choose to attend a school
where they knew they would be the religious minority?
When they knew, in the case of Villanova, that they
would enter buildings donned with crosses and learn in
classrooms adorned with a crucifi x?
18 OCTOBER 13, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
Evan Koss, who is in his last semester at St. Joe’s,
matriculated to the school because he was drawn to
their food marketing program, which he deemed highly
competitive. He grew up in the area and attended
the Conservative Kesher Israel Congregation in West
Chester. As he was getting ready to graduate high
school, he knew he wanted to stay in the area for college.

“St. Joe’s is right next to Lower Merion, which is a very
heavily Jewish area,” Koss said. “I have family that lives
in Ardmore, kind of minutes away, so I was familiar
with the area to begin with.”
According to Culley, other Jewish students at St. Joe’s
share Koss’ experience. Th ey are commuter students
from the heavily Jewish Main Line wanting to major
within one of the competitive but specifi c programs St.

Joe’s has to off er.

At Villanova, Jewish students are drawn to the col-
lege’s basketball team and its lively campus life, Culley
said. Th e college off ers good fi nancial aid.

Th ese Jewish students are aware of what they’re get-
ting into.

“I fully accepted the risk of going to a religious school
that wasn’t my own and all that would entail with it,”
Koss said.

During his four years at St. Joe’s, Koss doesn’t recall
instances of antisemitism, but he has become an “unin-
tentional mouthpiece,” having to educate some of his
classmates about his religion.

“Th ere’s just a lack of education because a lot of stu-
dents ... they’ve been in Catholic school since they were
kindergarten through 12th grade, and then they went
right to a Catholic [college]; they may not have been
exposed to Jewish people or Jewish culture,” Koss said.

While Koss didn’t mind doing some work to educate
his classmates, he was also looking to connect with
students who shared his Jewish upbringing. Before the
semester began, he talked with six Jewish students, most
of whom had not previously been interested in becom-
ing involved in Jewish life on campus.

Koss worked with Winaker and Culley to create a
Jewish presence at activity fairs, where students inter-
ested in Hillel could put their emails on a listserv. Beth
Ford McNamee, assistant director in the Offi ce of
Campus Ministry, has worked with Greater Philly Hillel
and the Jewish students to try to eliminate barriers
to holding programming, such as reserving spaces or
navigating the student organization formation process.

According to McNamee, St. Joe’s has always tried to
be respectful of religious diversity; it’s part of the core
tenets of Catholic values. Villanova has shared simi-
lar values, following the changing philosophy of the
Catholic Church, according to Villanova’s Director of
Multifaith Ministry Rev. Julie Sheetz.

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council met and created
the declaration Nostra Aetate, “when the church really
began to wrestle with its relationship to modernity,”
Sheetz said. Among other ideas, the declaration grap-
pled with its role in antisemitism and the fate of Jews
during the Holocaust, advocating for increased corre-
spondence with other religious groups.

In 1967, St. Joe founded its Jewish-Catholic Institute,
promoting coursework on non-Christian religions and
speaker series promoting interreligious connections.

“Synagoga and Ecclesia in Our Time” marked the 50th
anniversary of Nostra Aetate and acted as a reminder
of the work St. Joe’s still had to do to create a truly reli-
giously diverse campus climate.

Villanova has a similar reaction to Nostra Aetate’s
50th anniversary. According to Sheetz, the theology
department hired a professor of interreligious studies
and a Jewish professor for Hebrew Bible and Jewish
studies courses.

As both Villanova and St. Joe’s faculty and staff have
coalesced to support Jewish students, and with increas-
ing Jewish infrastructure created by Greater Philly
Hillel, the onus to build a sustained Jewish community
is now on the students.

While Marchione and Culley have seen evidence of
momentum and excitement from students, students
need to continue to lend their insights and time to
ensure these projects can come to fruition.

“It’s sort of chicken-and-egg,” Sheetz said. “It’s hard to
attract more Jewish students if there’s not already vibrant
evidence of a lot of Jewish students on campus.” JE
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com