WASHINGTON — Bennett Pittel bore the tiny imitation Torah, its pages creased and unraveled from the wood-colored plastic rollers, on a yellow dish rag.
Rabbi Yudi Steiner leads George Washington University students in song and dance as they mark the destruction of an imitation Torah in a frat house in Washington DC, Nov. 1, 2021. (Ron Kampeas)
Pittel’s brothers in the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity strode alongside him through the streets that make up the urban campus of George Washington University on Monday, Nov. 1, a couple of them holding real Torahs, the kind that are inscribed by hand and blessed and cost thousands of dollars.
The Torah Pittel gingerly bore in his arms as the light faded in Foggy Bottom from bright blue to burnished red was not the genuine article; it was the kind you get for maybe $20 in a temple gift shop, the kind awarded as a prize in Hebrew school.
Gag or gift? None of the 40 or so brothers in the TKE (knowns as “Teek”) house could tell you the imitation Torah’s provenance, but they could tell you its importance: It was used in a basement ritual to initiate the 12 brothers who were Jewish.
And they could tell you about its sordid end, sprinkled with detergent in a pre-dawn raid on the basement where pledges are initiated. The walls were splashed with hot sauce and there was an attempt to remove smoke detectors.
But it was the Torah’s demise that went viral online and, in person, brought hundreds of students at GWU together to mourn intolerance and to wonder at the rancor that could have spurred such an act.
Police are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime but have made no arrests. There were no signs of forced entry, and it is not yet clear who the vandal was.
Still, the fraternity’s leaders and a Chabad rabbi on campus, along with thousands of people who expressed alarm and anger on social media, say they know what happened at TKE.
“Saturday night’s break-in was a direct affront to the safety of my chapter,” said Chris Osborne, the chapter president, who seemed a little overwhelmed at the hundreds of people packing 22nd Street, where the frat house is situated, and which was blocked off by local police.
“It was a blatant act of hate and anti-Semitism,” said Osborne, who is 22, at the launch of the rally, speaking from the frat house’s steps. “I witnessed the pain this has caused my Jewish brothers and my heart aches for the entire Jewish community at GW who have to endure yet another act of hate. Change needs to happen.”
Rabbi Yudi Steiner, who runs the Rohr Chabad Jewish Student Center on campus, led the crowd in traditional songs of joy and mourning on a parade that included three stops to affix mezuzahs upon townhouses near the Foggy Bottom campus.
The parade culminated in a Torah reading at a plaza in front of the George Washington University library.
“We quickly realized that we needed to channel the Jewish tradition of responding to darkness with light,” he said. “When anti-Semitism rears its ugly head, we respond with Jewish celebration.”
There was dancing and there was prayer. There were also whispers among the students, about the female student who just reported being sent a swastika, about how triggered some students felt when they heard about what happened at the Teek frat house on 22nd street.
What happened exactly is not yet clear. Osborne in an interview said he is certain it was an act of anti-Semitism because the text used to swear in Christians was untouched.
“We had a Bible and a Torah in our original equipment set and the Bible was left alone and the Torah was damaged,” he said.
In an interview, Steiner said he had questions about why an imitation Torah was used to pledge frat boys, but they were for another time.
“There was a range of emotions, people who were crying, and were really, really hurting,” Steiner said of his first meeting, post-raid, with the frat brothers.
“We need more time to speak with them to understand what the Torah was doing there in the first place. It’s a fair question, ‘What are you doing with a mini-Torah in a non-Jewish house?’”
What they were doing — initiating pledges — the frat brothers plan to keep on doing, but this time with a real Torah, donated during the event by the campus Hillel.
Osborne wants better security assurances from the campus and the reports of anti-Semitism to be more seriously addressed. “We need to be more inclusive, we need to make people feel like they can practice their religion on campus,” he said.
About a quarter of GWU’s more than 12,000 students are Jewish, according to Hillel International, which supports and tracks Jewish life on college campuses.
Last week, Hillel and the ADL released a report finding that a third of college students said they personally experienced anti-Semitism in the last year. Like many campuses, GWU over the years has been the site of Israel-related controversies, as well as anti-Semitic vandalism and harassment.
The session ended with a song, with lyrics handed out on laminated cards: “The Place Where I Belong,” written in 2010 by an Orthodox singer named Abie Rotenberg about a Torah who sings in the first person about surviving Nazi raids in Kiev only to find its way to a warm shul in America.
Such was not the fate of the little imitation Torah at TKE House. “It’s going to be put in shaimos,” Steiner said: Wrapped and buried.
