Amid a week-long, anti-Israel encampment at the University of Chicago, the Jewish community proudly showed up to the groundbreaking ceremony for a $3.2-million expansion of the Rohr Chabad Center on campus. The new expansion will include a large multi-purpose room that can comfortably seat 150. There will be dedicated study spaces, a student lounge, extra bathrooms and an enlarged kosher kitchen. In addition, the new basement area will include a mikvah, the first ritual bath in Hyde Park since 1976.
The student lounge will be named for Ilan Naibryf, a rising senior and Chabad student board president who died in 2021 in the tragic collapse of the Champlain Towers South condominium building in Surfside, Fla. He was 21 years old.
“We believe that when Jewish students are in a crisis like this, the best thing to do is to build and to grow,” said Baila Brackman, who has directed Chabad-Lubavitch at the University of Chicago and Hyde Park with her husband, Rabbi Yossi Brackman, for the past 22 years.
