Jewish student group Hillel and the Muslim Students Association will host a collaborative service project for students across campus to participate in Nov. 23.
According to Haroon Zahid, president of MSA, students of any faith will be able to stop by a Michel Student Center table run by Hillel and MSA students and make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which will be donated to South Side Mission.
“We wanted something easy to do, [and] peanut butter and jelly sandwiches aren’t that hard to make,” Zahid, a senior business management and administration and management information systems double major, said. “We said, ‘We’ll start small somewhere, and we’ll just keep working on our relationship from there.’”
The service project has been a student-initiated, student-led effort between the student members of both Hillel and MSA.
“We’re a pretty independent group,” Bridget Berkow, a junior hospitality leadership major and president of Hillel, said. “But we wanted to connect a relationship with MSA and be able to do events with them in the future.”
Zahid also said a big motivation for hosting the event was to get different religious groups on campus to work together.
“I know a lot of the religious organizations in the past used to do a lot of interfaith events, and they used to work together, and that’s something that kind of died down,” Zahid said. “We just wanted to kind of rekindle that and re-build the connection between the different religious groups on campus.”
Hillel’s faculty adviser Seth Katz, associate department chair of English, stressed the importance of fostering a healthy relationship between the different faiths on campus.
“The impetus here is to work against the current of popular opinion and popular feeling,” Katz said. “On the whole, Bradley is a really good place to do this. Judaism, Islam and Christianity all share some fundamental ideals and ideas about social justice, the responsibility of the individual for others, righteousness, charity. It’s incumbent of the faiths to take care of others’ [respect for human dignity].”
Interested students can stop by the Hillel and MSA table on Monday, Nov. 23 in the Student Center to make a sandwich. The project will run from noon until 3 p.m.
“Here’s an opportunity to fulfill a fundamental commandment of Judaism, Islam and Christianity: feed the hungry,” Katz said. “You’ll be giving somebody lunch. By a small act, you will make a big difference in someone’s day.”
