Rabbi Eli Gurevitz and his rebbetzin, Blumie Gurevitz, opened their Chabad House at Haverford College in 2006. Now, they plan to stay at the suburban Philadelphia school for another 20 years and beyond.
With $2.3 million raised toward a $6 million goal, they’ve made big strides toward their objective, a new and improved Rohr Center for Jewish Life on College Avenue in the heart of campus. By next spring, the Gurevitzes hope to start construction on 15,000 square feet of Jewish safe space, complete with a cafe, kosher kitchen, music and quiet rooms, a shul and library, offices, multipurpose rooms and even six guestrooms.
They are doing this on the same campus that, over the last few years, has seen anti-Israel encampments, rabid anti-Israel sentiment and a variety of antisemitic incidents. They don’t care. In fact, the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas on Israel and its aftermath helped motivate the rabbi and rebbetzin to launch this project.
“This is a story of Jewish survival,” Rabbi Gurevitz said. “My grandparents are Holocaust survivors; they never talk about what they went through. But what they did do was build families and communities and businesses.”
In a Times of Israel article about the project, Gurevitz admitted that he wondered during the Gaza war whether Chabad should stay on the Haverford campus. The question kept him awake many nights near the end of 2023.
How could he not?
Haverford, a liberal arts college with fewer than 2,000 students, experienced a particularly intense manifestation of trends that played out globally: sympathy for Jews after the Oct. 7 attack, a quick pivot to rebuke of Israel for responding and then activism against Zionism and Israel itself.
Chabad posters on the Haverford campus were torn apart; Jewish events were shouted down; professors made social media posts comparing Israelis to Nazis; and students asked Gurevitz not to post photos of their Birthright Israel trips because they didn’t want to be seen as favoring the Jewish state.
One 2025 graduate, Carina Whiting, decided to attend a Shabbat dinner at Chabad after seeing her mother’s maiden name on a Jewish memorial in Prague. Whiting had grown up Jewish but not religious. She saw that memorial in the same city where Hitler had once planned to build an exhibit to an extinct race.
But when Whiting told a friend about her plan to go to Chabad for dinner, the friend responded with a harangue on the evils of Zionism. Whiting was stunned. She went anyway, and Chabad became her home on campus for the final year and a half of her college career.
“If one of them caught wind that I was sick or under the weather, one of them was outside my room with chicken noodle soup for me,” she said of the Gurevitzes. “There’s so much love and care in that community.”
It’s students like Whiting who pushed the rabbi to keep going. During that sleepless period in 2023, Gurevitz received a call from a friend who told him to pack it in. That’s when he had the vision for the new and improved Rohr Center.
“As long as there’s a Jewish community, it needs to be supported,” he said. “Haverford is anywhere between 10 and 20% Jewish. It’s not like there are five Jews here.”
The rabbi also thought back to his Holocaust survivor grandfather. In 1995, his grandfather was at a family bris three weeks before he died of colon cancer. Before leaving, he turned around, pointed to his grandchildren and said in Yiddish, “These are my assets.”
“Of course, the past made them [my grandparents] who they were. But it was ultimately about building,” the rabbi said. “My hope is that you can come here and feel that it’s better than it was before Oct. 7.”
There are signs that that might be the case. As a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas takes hold, the Haverford campus is quieter, according to the rabbi.
Haverford College President Wendy Raymond has been dressed down by members of Congress for failing to address campus antisemitism. The school remains under federal investigation for Title VI violations under the Civil Rights Act.
Gurevitz has the approval he needs from the Haverford Zoning Board to change the use of his property from residential to a religious center. He is also awaiting a security assessment from Scott Kerns, the security director for the Secure Community Network within the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia.
Anna Braun, a senior at Haverford and a Chabad regular, sought out the house for Shabbat and High Holiday gatherings when she first got to campus in 2021. She made friends, put up a mezuzah for the first time and began wearing a Magen David necklace around her neck.
Braun kept going to Chabad after Oct. 7 and throughout the war. Now in her final year at Haverford, she’s still a regular at the house. Next week, she’s launching a Talmud study group.
“I felt most like myself there,” she said.
