By Yonatan Simkovich, Staff Writer
The beginning of the semester for first time on campus (FTOC) students is filled with an overload of syllabi and more emails than students can easily keep up with. But this year, there was one item — all the way at the bottom of an email about campus policies — that demanded attention. “If you are walking near the Wilf campus at night and are confronted by someone demanding your personal belongings,” the notice read, “please comply with their requests to ensure your safety.”
The reputation of Washington Heights among many members of the Yeshiva University community is largely associated with safety, or a lack thereof. As a result, caution has kept many in YU from considering their connection to the neighborhoods that border their campus.
If they did, however, they would learn that there is much more to know about Washington Heights and its people than crime and safety. YU’s relationship with the Washington Heights community has undergone dramatic change throughout its history. Today, the nature of the Wilf campus’ relationship with its surrounding neighborhoods bears little resemblance to when the campus first opened.
When YU first broke ground on its Upper Manhattan campus in 1927, the area was generally populated by Jewish, Irish and Russian immigrants and was home to a dozen or so synagogues. Irish street vendors sold a variety of groceries, Jewish newspapers were displayed in storefronts and it was possible to encounter half a dozen languages on a single block. Residents of the Heights, though diverse, maintained positive connections across cultural gaps in a still-spacious neighborhood. By the end of the tenure of Bernard Revel, the first president of YU, in 1940, over a third of Washington Heights’s residents were Jewish. Yet over the next few decades, the demographics of the neighborhood were drastically reshuffled.
The cornerstone of Rubin Hall was laid in 1956, at a time when roughly 4,000 Puerto Rican immigrants were moving into the Heights per year. This gave the area its first taste of the Hispanic flavor which would later become and remain the dominant culture of the neighborhood. The Jewish community, meanwhile, slowly began to move away from their European heritage toward a more Americanized culture, while German and Yiddish speakers began to move out to the suburbs.
As the scaffolding rose in 1968 around the exoskeleton of what would soon become Belfer Hall, so did Hispanic immigration from countries undergoing periods of internal instability. This was especially true for people from the Dominican Republic, whose large influx into Washington Heights was for the most part caused by the civil war that was sparked by the assassination of dictator Rafael Trujillo. One of the reasons these immigrants were able to retain unusually high amounts of their native culture was their ability to easily travel back and forth between New York and their birthplace, an opportunity which was not available to immigrating Jews, African-Americans and Europeans.
The first half of 1986, Rav Joseph B. Soloveitchik’s last year as a rosh yeshiva at YU, brought the crack cocaine epidemic in full force to the Heights, along with the violence associated with it. According to the Los Angeles Times, in a single 22-square-mile area in northern Manhattan from January to June of that year, there were 169 murders on record, up from 106 during that same period the previous year, an increase of 59.4%. YU was largely insulated from the crack epidemic, as the student body was likely not seen as a potential customer base by dealers, increasing its isolation from the issue.
In a 1987 article titled “Yeshiva University and Her Neighbors,” the writer depicts the relationship between YU and the surrounding community as fragile yet filled with potential. The article, though it does attempt to portray the situation positively, still reveals the underlying tensions of the time. Peter Bonachea, the then chairman of the Washington Heights-Inwood Coalition, was quoted as saying that any ethnic tensions in the neighborhood “are not insurmountable” and that people generally hoped that “Yeshiva is here to stay.” Although many of those interviewed expressed approval of YU, their language and tone reveals the underlying tensions of the time. The article’s location directly next to an article lamenting the crack epidemic makes the author’s level of optimism genuinely impressive.
Perhaps one of the reasons for the instability at the time is that YU and the Hispanic community had not yet had many years of exposure to one another. The pedestrian mall located between 186th and 187th Streets on Amsterdam Avenue, for instance, was presented in the piece as a flash point for issues such as available parking spaces and housing availability, whereas an article published five years later on the same topic confidently describes the mall’s positive impact, as it was one of the few places in northern Manhattan at the time where one could safely relax at all hours.
Demographic issues played a large role in the tensions of the time, especially after the 1992 Rodney King riots, when the contrast between the comparatively well-off administration and student body of YU and the nearby Hispanic and African-American communities was sharply thrust into the spotlight.
By the time construction of the Glueck Center and its beit midrash was completed in 2009, demographics had stabilized, reducing tensions caused by abrupt cultural changes. Apartment residencies intended for young families were for the most part traditionally and unofficially allocated towards either YU and its alumni or its neighbors, thereby preemptively reducing possible controversies over a lack of available housing.
The lack of public friction in headlines today illustrates the degree to which the relationship between YU and Washington Heights has slowly improved. This is partly due to the decline of violence and the slowing of the crack epidemic, but also because YU students have joined several outreach initiatives in recent years. These include organizations like Project FEED, an initiative dedicated to serving food to residents in the community who may otherwise not have access to a filling meal. “It’s a good outlet for chesed,” Yaakov Suldan (YC ‘27) told the YU Observer. “Somebody told me about it and I thought it would be a cool opportunity.”
Extracurriculars like Project FEED have been crucial in fostering personal connections between YU students and other residents of the neighborhood, and in recent years, these efforts have been rewarded. Despite the alarming and increasing prevalence of antisemitism over the past few years, there have been few incidents on the Wilf campus in recent years. Despite the fact that the Washington Heights is majority left-wing and located in a large city, a common hallmark of those belonging to the modern anti-Zionist movement, no protests or marches which had the potential to threaten the Jewish community have occurred since October 7. In fact, nearly all of the security staff tasked with protecting Wilf students from antisemetic violence are themselves residents of the Heights.
The cultural divide between YU and the rest of Washington Heights may occasionally feel too glaring to ignore, and there are still reasons to be hesitant to walk through certain areas during late hours. Through advancing dialogue, however, the low level of contemporary controversy increases safety, and with that comes the benefits that productive interaction brings to both sides.
Photo Credit: Yeshiva University