“The whole high holiday season is ramping up into this at the end — like, ‘We did it, and now we’re here!’” Conservatory fifth-year and Chabad Student Leadership Board member Jason McCauley said. “There’s this electric feeling about Simchat Torah that I really, really like. Simchat Torah to me is just this wonderful exaltation of joy.”

In the Ashkenazi tradition, a congregation’s Torah scrolls are removed from their ark and paraded around the synagogue seven times, and all are invited to join in festive song and dance. Children run around eating candy that seems to shower from the sky. 

“One would think that the holiday would be celebrated by study of Torah, but it’s not,” Director of Chabad at Oberlin Rabbi Shlomo Elkan said. “It’s celebrated by dancing, and anybody can dance. … It shows that Torah is meant to be accessible to everybody at whatever level they’re at — it’s meant to be accessible to every single Jewish person.”

This year’s Simchat Torah with Chabad at Oberlin will be unlike any that came before. The celebration will feature a guest of honor, one that hasn’t emerged from Oberlin’s Special Collections on the fourth floor of Mary Church Terrell Main Library for nearly 40 years: a Torah scroll of North African origin, written in the 14th century. University of Virginia Religious Studies Professor Greg Schmidt Goering placed the scroll in historical context.

“Besides the [Dead Sea Scrolls], the oldest Hebrew manuscripts we have are from the 10th and 11th centuries,” Goering wrote in a 2004 correspondence to Ed Vermue, special collections and preservation librarian of Oberlin College Libraries. “Thus, the Torah scroll that Oberlin possesses is really only about 400 years younger than the principle manuscripts that serve as the basis for modern study of the Hebrew Bible.” 

The scroll was donated to the College in 1912 by Rev. William Barton, who acquired it on a trip to Palestine in 1902, and — based on existing archives — probably didn’t grasp the sheer antiquity of the manuscript. The scroll was presumed to be a “commonplace 19th-century artifact” with no particular historical significance until its appraisal in 1984 by expert Jewish scribe Tuvia Mechaber, whose assessment was later corroborated by experts at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Mechaber identified the scroll as “redacted in the thirteen hundreds in Africa in one of the communities of Morocco,” then brought to Spain and later expelled with the Spanish Inquisition. 

“From there it wandered along with the Spanish exiles to the Balkans or Turkey or Palestine, and the hand of Providence brought the scroll to where it is at present,” Mechaber wrote. 

Mechaber’s investigation of the scroll owes itself to the curiosity and entrepreneurial spirit of Roberta Milston, OC ’86, a Religion student who brought the Torah home with her to New York and entrusted it to Mechaber for restoration.

Then-Director  of  Libraries William Moffett, who expressed in a 1985 staff memo that he had not been sufficiently consulted during the process of greenlighting the transportation and restoration of the ancient text, wrote to Mechaber requesting insight into his conclusions about the scroll’s origins. The scribe politely declined.

“I am not prepared to mention the particulars (lit: reveal the secrets) of the vocation in which my expertise lies,” Mechaber wrote back to Moffett. 

However, Mechaber had pointed earlier to several unique features of the manuscript that indicated where and by whom it was redacted, including the Sephardic practice of writing on the exterior side of the leather — a rare material for Torah scrolls — and supralineal text. 

“What sets this Torah apart from all others executed in recent centuries, according to the experts who have seen it, is its inclusion of supralineal words, corrections in the text penned above the lines,” an article published in a 1985 issue of the Oberlin Alumni Magazine reads. “Such practice was acceptable in the 14th century, but is not acceptable today under Jewish traditional law.”

Mechaber’s duty in restoring the Torah was not just to preserve it by patching wormholes and repairing worn stitches but also to make it kosher for public reading, which meant re-tracing faded letters and occasionally correcting mistakes made by the original scribe by scraping off the top layer of leather and penning in a new word. According to contemporary Jewish law, the wrongful deletion of even a single letter disqualifies a Torah from use. 

“The scrolls are subject to an entire corpus of laws and traditions regarding the formation of the letters, which are believed to have an independent existence, a sacredness, and a power of their own,” the label for the Torah scroll reads.

Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Religion Shari Rabin recently brought students in her Introduction to Jewish Studies class to view the ancient Torah. Students examined the scroll in the context of a broader discussion about the Cairo Genizah, the largest known trove of sacred Jewish manuscripts, ranging from writings of Maimonides to erroneous marriage certificates, all of which contained the name of God and therefore couldn’t simply be thrown out but instead required ceremonial burial. The Genizah served as a place for documents to await their eventual entombment — a sort of morgue.

“I think what the Genizah speaks to is this real reverence for textuality in general Hebrew language, and the name of God in particular,” Rabin said. “They’re seen as having such import that when they can no longer be used, they have to be treated with proper respect.”

After restoration of the scroll was completed, Oberlin College Libraries staff hoped that it would be “made available to Oberlin’s Jewish community for selected religious services,” as written in the 1985 Oberlin Alumni Magazine article. However, according to Vermue, Sunday’s Simchat Torah celebration will mark the first time the Torah has been used ritually perhaps since its acquisition by the College in 1912.

“I’m pretty pleased about it,” Vermue said, regarding the Torah’s imminent role in holiday festivities. “That’s exciting, that our special collections are not just the dead bones of the past — biblically speaking — but they’re vital, living things that still have this performative, ritualistic dimension that allows them to be used.”

Vermue was careful to note that library staff will simply loan the Torah to Chabad at Oberlin, not host the event themselves, which could potentially compromise the Libraries’ status as a “secular, egalitarian institution.”

The  delicacy  of  the 14th-century Torah scroll determined the venue for this year’s Simchat Torah celebration. Since it cannot leave Mudd Center, the 700-year-old scroll will lead a procession downstairs from Special Collections to the basement-level Moffett Auditorium, joined by its two-year-old counterpart: a scroll commissioned for Chabad at Oberlin in 2021 and paid for by donations from Mark and Chava Finkel, OC ’76. Once in Moffett, the two scrolls will be used in festive song, prayer, and dance. 

“Judaism isn’t something that’s meant to be behind the glass case,” Elkan said. “It’s meant to be lived and breathed and engaged with, including our holy texts. It’s not a relic of the past — it’s very much ancient wisdom informing modern times. So, I think the message of taking it out of its case in an archive, quite literally, and engaging with it on our terms, is particularly poignant.”

The Torah scroll will be chaperoned by Vermue himself, who will oversee its proper handling and ensure it has a good time. 

“There’s an inherent risk involved in all teaching that we do,” Vermue said. “We take as much care as we can, but you don’t want to be protective to the point where your items can’t achieve their purpose.”

Elkan can’t be certain that the old Torah is kosher for public reading — after all, the last time it was inspected by a scribe was in 1985, and letters may have cracked with disuse. However, it’s customary to dance with every Torah scroll on Simchat Torah. Even the non-kosher scrolls are removed from the ark to mingle with members of the congregation. 

“In terms of Hasidic learning, the Torah is the will and wisdom of Hashem — of God,” McCauley said. “And that’s a very nonphysical thing. But then also, when it’s being brought down into a physical form, it’s an object imbued with something spiritual, a literal piece of God. That’s what we are — a physical thing being imbued with a literal piece of God.”

While Ohio Republican legislators initially denied that the August referendum on Issue 1 was about anything other than curtailing the influence of “out-of-state special interests” on the Ohio constitution, Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who initially proposed the issue, publicly stated in May that the measure was “100 percent about keeping a radical, pro-abortion amendment out of our constitution.” This was in reference to a proposed constitutional amendment establishing a state-wide right to abortion that will appear on the ballot in Ohio’s Nov. 7 general election. 

The widely acknowledged reality that August’s special election was an effort to impede an amendment establishing a right to abortion in Ohio fueled spirited campaigns on both sides of Issue 1, which drove unusually high turnout for a summertime special election. Based on  unofficial results from the Ohio Secretary of State, 1,744,094 Ohioans voted against the proposed amendment, while 1,315,346 voted in favor. 

 In Lorain County, Issue 1 failed 53,834 votes to 31,832 votes, or 62.8 percent to 37.2 percent. Supporters of Issue 1 included the Ohio Republican Party, Ohio Chamber of Commerce, and Ohio Right to Life. Opponents included Lorain County Rising, the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, the Ohio ACLU, Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights, and Planned Parenthood Advocates of Ohio. 

According to Executive Chairman of the Lorain County Republican Party David Arredondo, the Ohio GOP, which was banking on low August turnout, was out-campaigned by the opposition. 

“Their message came out a full month before us — and what you want to do in politics is, you want to define your opponent before they define you,” Arredondo said. “They did very well with it through their media, and through their TV ads. And, you know, we couldn’t catch up.”

Most importantly, Arredondo argued, the “No” campaign was vastly out-spent.

“They had dark money,” Arredondo said. “Most of their money came from out of state; it wasn’t from Ohio. And so, they were able to get left-wing groups that contributed. They recognized that if Issue 1 passed, it would make it impossible to get their abortion issue on the November ballot.”

The official “Yes” campaign, called Protect Our Constitution, only raised around a third of the “No” campaign’s funds — $4.9 million to the opposition’s $14.8 million, according to campaign finance reports. The opposition, One Person One Vote, received around 85 percent of their funding from donors outside Ohio, most notably $2.5 million from the left-leaning dark money group Sixteen Thirty Fund and $1.9 million from the California-based Tides Foundation. Protect Our Constitution received 82.5 percent of its funding in the form of a $4 million donation from Illinois billionaire Richard Uihlein. 

These campaigns don’t seem to have resisted the influence of monied special interest groups. However, Executive Director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio Jen Miller argues that the passage of Issue 1 would have only given large spenders more sway over elections. 

“Good government groups, like the League of Women Voters, have been trying to get the Ohio legislature to update campaign finance laws to reduce dark money influence in elections, to no avail,” Miller said. “We were firmly opposed to Issue 1 in August, because it would mean that only deep-pocketed groups would be able to have successful constitutional amendment campaigns — that it actually would make it cost more … and make it impossible for groups like the League of Women Voters, that would rely primarily on volunteers, to get on the ballot.”

Nevertheless, Arredondo maintained that Issue 1 ought to have passed, regardless of what the best strategy for minimizing outside influence in Ohio campaigns may be in the name of holding the Ohio Constitution to the same standard as the U.S. Constitution, which requires a two-thirds vote in each house of the U.S. Congress to ratify an amendment. 

“In 240-some years, the Constitution has only been amended 17 times, because it just is not easy to do,” Arredondo said. “It’s not a direct democracy, which is what the No people were making out … that’s not what a constitution is supposed to be.”

Miller takes a different view of a citizen’s role in altering their state constitution. 

“You have a constitution as a people’s document,” Miller said. “It’s supposed to be a living document that can be changed, and we know in the past that many issues that are very positive have not passed by 60 percent, like bond initiatives for infrastructure improvements across all counties, integrating the Ohio National Guard with people of color and women, and even protecting the Ohio Constitution from monopolies.”

In Oberlin, students also played a role in voting. According to Lili Sandler of Lorain County Rising, 70 percent of students who requested absentee ballots turned theirs in. Sandler noted that since August, special elections are “notoriously poor for turnout,” and discussed her efforts within the county.  

“I led the canvassing that happened in the county, getting people to knock on doors and getting yard signs out and literature,” Sandler said. 

Arredondo and Sandler both look forward to November when Ohio voters will decide on a constitutional amendment to protect abortion rights. 

Sandler hopes that the majority of Ohians will vote yes, to amend the state constitution to codify reproductive rights. Sandler says that a yes vote will “restore everything that we lost with the Dobbs decision last year.”

Arredondo expressed that a priority for the Lorain GOP going into the November election is passing the 7-district plan, which would replace the three-member Lorain County Board of Commissioners with seven county council members, each one elected from a Lorain County district with roughly 45,000 members.

“We want to be more responsive to not just our voters, but Independents and Democrats, to show that we can have more than just three Republicans or three Democrats, which has been the norm for a number of years,” Arredondo said. “We’ve got all three commission seats, so it’s fine if we were still able to control the commission with four or five commissioners and then still allow Democrats to have a voice in government.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You started working at the Review the first semester of your fourth year. What initially prompted you to apply, and how has the job shaped your last year of college?

I was hoping to get a job this year to get some of my own income, and then I saw the Campus Digest announcement about the Review hiring. My mom is a copy editor, and my dad is a writer — I’m a bit of an editing nepo baby, if you will — and I thought it’ll be fun to try it out, because copy editing is something that I’ve grown up around and am pretty familiar with, without having done it as a job before. And so I thought, “Hey, why not?”

I’ve definitely gotten a wider view of campus culture, and what’s going on in the Oberlin community as well. As a Production editor, you get to read all the stories from all the different sections, so getting a really broad view of everything was really cool. Also, I think working at the Review improved my work ethic, because you’re forced to get a certain amount of things done in a certain period of time. There were, of course, some nights in Production where I distracted myself and my coworkers by, uh, discussing the pieces that we were editing.

Critically discussing.

Critically discussing the pieces that we were editing. But I think, generally, it was a good break from schoolwork while still involving intellectual brainwork.

You mentioned your mom is a copy editor, but you didn’t want to be one. Explain your reluctance to go down her path — did it feel like the equivalent of inheriting the family general store?

I think I just felt like I shouldn’t just do what my mom does; I should forge my own path and find something else. But it’s turned out to be something that my mom and I can really bond over. Like when she visited last semester, I was showing her the edits I made on a piece that really needed to be beaten into shape. And we were both laughing over, you know, silly stylistic or syntax things that most other people wouldn’t notice. And it’s kind of cool to connect with someone else with a copy editor’s brain who notices that kind of thing, and to become someone with a copy editor’s brain.

I wonder if you have any childhood memories associated with copy editing.

Yeah, actually I do. When I was in kindergarten, our teacher told us, “Remember that ‘a lot’ is two words, and not one — and go home and tell your parents, because they might not know.” And so I went home and told my mom, and I was angry that she knew already, when knowing that was literally her job. I was frustrated that I couldn’t be smarter than my mom when I was a child.

But also, I remember looking over her shoulder while she was editing, and if she was looking at a specific instance of a stylistic inconsistency, she would show me what that meant, and point out the patterns to me in the wording that she was looking out for. And then when I got older, every so often, if I stepped into her home office and she was working on something, we would talk about a specific edit that she was making, and I would give my suggestions — and sometimes she would take them. It’s a kind of beautiful thing that I can now take that and bring it into my own life.

Would your parents edit your high school essays?

My mom never really butted in and was like, “Show me your essay so I can edit it.” But there have definitely been many circumstances where I would show my parents a piece of writing that I’d done for school, just to show them, and I could tell when my mom was reading it, she was copy editing it in her head. And I was like, “Mom, I see what you’re doing. That’s not what I’m looking for right now.” And she’s like, “I’m sorry, I can’t turn it off.”

What made you realize you actually like being a copy editor?

It was a gradual realization that this was something that I both was good at and really enjoyed doing. I think I’ve always been a good editor, but I haven’t had an editing job before, so I didn’t consider it as a career path. I was thinking about being a translator for a while, and being an editor is not too far away from that. But I realized that my Mandarin Chinese skills would have to improve exponentially in order to reach a place where I could feasibly do translation as a career. So editing, I think, is a way for me to still work with the intricacies of language, but in a language that I’m already fluent in.

Have you noticed overlaps in the skills you use as a translator and as a copy editor?

Yeah, I definitely see similarities between translation and editing. A lot of translation is combing through specific word choices. Also, you have to pay a lot of attention to sentence structure because often, the sentence structure of the language you’re translating from won’t completely match onto the language you’re translating into. And so, you have to figure out how to make things make sense in the language you’re translating into, while also choosing how much of the original language you want to carry into your translation.

As a copy editor, sometimes you’ll get handed an article that makes certain claims that it can’t necessarily back up, and so you have to figure out how to reword some of the author’s writing so that we don’t get sued, while also doing justice to the author’s argument.

What was your favorite moment in the Production room this year?

Hands down, “pleasurable jolt of inundation.” For our readers, I’m gonna give a little context — that was a line in one of the pieces that I looked at, and I thought, one, “This is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen,” and two, “We cannot publish this.” Production has a good amount of inside jokes of really strange phrasing that has come up in some of our pieces, that we have absolutely adored, but had to say goodbye to.

Something else that I enjoy is — well, I won’t say it’s hazing, because hazing is not condoned in the state of Ohio. But, I would say it is an initiation ritual for Production editors to have to edit a piece either about the Gibson’s Bakery litigation or Professor Mahallati — specifically, to have to do a fact read on a Gibson’s or a Mahallati piece. I had to do that, our new Production editors had to do that. I believe it builds character. As soon as you announce to the Production room that you’re doing a fact read on one of those two topics, everyone will just give a groan of sympathy, because they’ve also had to do that. I think the camaraderie around doing difficult fact reads is what kept me going when I was stuck having to comb through pages and pages of legal documents, or City Council notes, or the directives of what birth control Catholic hospitals can provide. Fact reads are not my favorite thing in the entire world, but because they were nobody’s favorite thing, it was always a very supportive environment when someone had to do a tough fact read.

How has working at the Review clarified your future plans?

I really would like to pursue something in the editing field. Something that’s frustrating is that so many job postings are looking for a combined writer/editor, and those are two completely different skills. I don’t want to do the writing part — I just want to take apart other people’s writing, because it brings me pleasure and joy.

It’s been really nice working at the Review and having my fellow Production editors affirm my editing skill. I do take it as a compliment when you have handed me the tough pieces to edit and fact-check, as much as it pained me to do them, because that meant that you trusted my judgment, and you trusted that I would be thorough and committed to doing a good job. I think getting that affirmation of my editing work ethic was really positive in helping me picture a future of doing this for a career.

My last question is, how did you make the crossword? I have no idea how you made the crossword.

See, I also don’t know how to make a crossword. I know how to make other people’s crossword clues better. I took that upon myself because I had clever little quips to share with the world at large, and needed to put them into action. But, yeah, making a crossword, it’s a mental puzzle to just arrange the words together so they’ll fit. You have to rotate the words in your mind — your little crossword mind palace.

The property was annexed, but not rezoned, into the City in 2020 to enable a connection to Oberlin’s sanitary sewer system. If the proposed amendment to the zone map is approved, it will enable the developer of the property to build a wide range of mixed-income, multi-family housing. The current proposal lists “120 [mixed-income] multifamily apartment units, 144 townhouse units, a clubhouse for development residents’ use, [two] recovery homes, and retail/office spaces,” as well as “a dog park, community gardens, a play area and a bike path.” For a mixeduse residential and commercial development, a PDD is the only appropriate designation under the Oberlin zoning code.

“A Planned Development District is a flexible district that allows for mixed uses, allows for more creative arrangements of buildings and lot sizes,” Oberlin Director of Planning and Development Carrie Porter said. “And so it’s kind of a case-by case basis zoning. They’re going to do this development plan, and the development plan will be very detailed, and when that gets approved, that’s exactly what they have to build.”

Existing development on the property, which is owned by Omega Health Services, includes The Alpha House, a “faith based drug and alcohol recovery program … helping men and women that struggle with addiction from intake through re-entry.” Organizational Development Director at Omega Health Services Lee Partee offered insight into the goals behind the application to construct additional housing on the property.

“With the ongoing housing supply shortage facing many communities in Ohio and beyond, we were compelled to explore how we might be a part of the solution,” Partee wrote in an email to the Review. “We have approached the City of Oberlin with some ideas and to gain their input and perspective as those ideas continue to develop, the first step being proper zoning for our property since our annexation.”

The development would aid graduates of The Alpha House in transitioning out of recovery housing and into an apartment within a pre-existing community. However, the benefit former residents of The Alpha House would derive from the development is just one component of its overarching purpose.

“Very few houses seem to come up for sale at any one time, so people scramble when something does come up for sale,” Porter said. “It’s opening up more choices for sure — for probably almost everybody. The housing market study said we needed housing of all types, for all types of incomes and demographics. I would say this could satisfy a lot of different housing needs.”

In response to a 2014 proposal to develop affordable housing on the Green Acres Project, the City commissioned a survey to determine whether Oberlin residents felt there was a need for such housing within City limits. That survey, the 2017 Oberlin Comprehensive Housing Market Study and Needs Analysis, identified an overwhelming need for more housing across all income brackets.

According to the community survey, “88 [percent] of survey respondents strongly agreed or somewhat agreed that ‘we need to expand housing choices’ in the City. ‘A range of housing options for people in different stages of life’ was also ‘very important’ to 81.2 percent of survey respondents.”

The proposal for the development on SR 58 appears to account for many of the housing needs cited by survey respondents. The planned 144 townhouse units will be sold at market rate. However, the 120 multi-family apartment units are intended as tax-credit housing — a status that requires the developer to apply for an allocation of federally funded housing tax credits through the Ohio Housing Finance Agency, which would mitigate the costs of renting the apartments out at an affordable, slightly below market rate to potential tenants. According to Robert Chordar, president of TC Architects, these multi-family apartments will have accessible living units on the first floors.

“By code, we’re required to have five percent accessible units that are designed already into a home — we also made these so they’re adaptable,” Chordar said, in reference to the units on the first floors of the multi-family housing. “So any of these could be converted at any point in time.”

Porter indicated that a wide range of current or prospective Oberlin residents, especially vulnerable populations like seniors, could stand to benefit from increased availability of such housing.

“I think we have a lot of seniors that are still in their single family homes [who] would like to live somewhere more maintenance-free and probably more accessible,” Porter said. “I would see that seniors would take advantage of this, especially the first-floor units, … and I think families — especially young families. If you want to live in Oberlin, it’s hard to find a place that’s rental, that’s affordable. So it would be nice to have housing that you could rent and try Oberlin out and then look for a house.”

Porter also addressed the perception that the housing development would be isolated from the rest of the City.

“We’re adding the bicycle pedestrian trail up and down [State Route] 58 to connect the older part of the city there at Hamilton Street, where the sidewalks kind of end, with U.S. [Route] 20,” Porter said. “I think visually, with having that path going down 58 to connect things, people will start to see it as, ‘It’s all Oberlin.’ I think for this development, they see it as a plus that it’s gonna be next to Walmart and ALDI, and some of the commercial stuff that’s in the plaza — Wendy’s, as jobs. You can walk to your job; you can get groceries without having a car.”

According to College second-year and OUI board member Lily Baeza, undocumented students face unique difficulties. Professional development training for students may not always offer a roadmap for individuals who don’t have work authorization and can only receive payment via non-employment stipends for jobs secured through the College — which can’t pay them for contracted work because the College keeps a record of students’ undocumented status. Similarly, while U.S. citizens may receive information on filling out the FAFSA, undocumented students who don’t qualify for federal student aid turn to each other for guidance in filling out their annual financial aid forms, which is a separate process entirely.

“The biggest hurdle, I feel like, is getting here,” Baeza said. “And once you’re here, it’s just trying to survive. You don’t have a way to legally work, so how are you going to get money? And on campus, one of the only ways to get money as an undocumented student is through [the Bonner Scholars Program], cause they pay through stipend … if you don’t have Bonner, what are you going to do for work?”

After they graduate, undocumented students also face a different reality than their documented classmates. 

“A lot of people are excited to graduate, but I feel like as an undocumented student, once you graduate, you’re done,” Baeza said. “Because you have your degree, you have all this knowledge, you have experience, you can do the jobs, but you don’t have citizenship, which is what a lot of jobs require.”

OUI hosts fundraisers throughout the year, like the Pajama Solidarity Walk, to contribute to the OUI fund, which was created to alleviate the financial burden carried by undocumented students with severely restricted employment opportunities. But before the current iteration of the fund was created, OUI raised $50,000 toward an undocumented student fund, which was endowed by the College in 2016 to ensure its stability and longevity. It was officially titled the DREAM Endowed Fund for Undocumented Students. However, with its new designation as a scholarship, the fund lost much of its usefulness, according to student recipients.

“It can only be used for tuition, which is an issue, because many undocumented students already have full tuition scholarships,” College fourth-year and OUI board member Minerva Macarrulla said. “It was envisioned as a fund that could be used for anything, like for emergency funding, for room and board costs, for DACA renewals. …  So, we were really frustrated with the fund. And also, there’s no way to apply to it. We have one student who, at one point, saw on her bill that she was given the fund, and it had no impact on how much she was paying at all.”

In the years before the COVID-19 pandemic, OUI lost a point of connection with the Multicultural Resource Center after a restructuring eliminated community coordinator positions. Community coordinators, who often worked with identity groups that corresponded with their own, would act as channels between student organizers and faculty members. 

“The capacity for leadership development in student organizations, the capacity for institutional memory in student organizations, was incredible, because their role was literally to pass down that institutional memory — to train people who were leading student organizations to be better leaders, to mediate conflicts between people in these organizations and just really to honor the work that people who lead marginalized student organizations do,” Macarrulla said.

This year, OUI has made significant headway in rebuilding relationships with administrative offices across campus. In regular meetings with the MRC, OUI board members have been developing an UndocuAlly training tailored toward faculty and staff, to equip them to provide resources for undocumented students, even in the form of information.

“We’ve been working a lot with [Vilmarie Perez, assistant director for career readiness at the Office of Career Exploration and Development],” Baeza said. “She’s been great. She’s helped us figure out summer experiences, summer funding — anytime she finds out about an internship or something, she always emails us about that. She’s also been present at most of our meetings, so even her advocating for us a lot has been great.”

OUI’s willingness to take initiative in establishing and maintaining administrative contacts, as well as occupying a more visible role on campus, is a fairly recent development within the organization. 

“We’ve changed OUI a lot in our time,” Macarrulla said. “It used to be very secretive … there was a really, really big emphasis on confidentiality. And I don’t think that we’ve lost the emphasis on confidentiality where it really matters. Like, we never ask anyone to disclose their status at OUI meetings.”

Now, the organization’s presence on campus is difficult to miss, with events publicized on bulletin boards, through posts on social media, and College publications. The change was catalyzed by a meeting staged between OUI board members and a fellow organizer for undocumented students operating on a different campus. When OUI members expressed their hesitancy in publicizing an UndocuChill session exclusively targeted toward undocumented students, their contact suggested a radical reorientation.

“He said, ‘Invisibility is just damaging’,” Macarrulla said. “He really emphasized the power of visibility in building support for undocumented students, and the fact that something always could happen — but better that you be visible as a campus organization and have something bad happen to you, than have no one know that you exist and have something bad happen to you. Because then you can draw on more of a network of support.”

OUI has not only increased its visibility but has also leaned into the intersections between their organization and other identity-based student groups, to broaden their community and share resources between organizations working toward mutual goals. 

“I think it’s just us realizing that if, as identity orgs and as POC orgs, we don’t support each other, nobody else will,” Baeza said. “During our events, like during the art gala, a student came up and promoted [African Student Association] events. As identity orgs, we’ve definitely realized that if we’re not there for each other, then nobody will be.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Your fourth-grade class loved having you as their teacher. How did you undertake the decision to leave the classroom?

Once a student is my student, they’re always my student. One of the things I’ve really enjoyed here in Oberlin is seeing students in our building whose parents I once had as students. That’s just special. And what really warms your heart is when the people who are parents now ask you things like, “Do you remember when?” and they share things from your class years ago. I don’t know if there’s many other professions that get a chance to do that, but I know it’s something that makes teaching and being an administrator especially unique. There’s always something in every profession that everyone’s envious of, and I hope our envious piece is the relationships with kids and families. I didn’t feel like moving out of the classroom was a tough decision or a hard decision. I knew there would be elements of teaching that I would miss, but I was so happy to be able to take the things that I loved about it and expand it to a wider population — being able to talk with more kids, inspire them to do more, having someone be a champion for them.

What direction do you hope OES will move in under your leadership as principal?

A big piece is continuing implementation of the district strategic plan. We had three really big focus areas this year, the first of which was expanding our knowledge of cultural competency, humility and methods of inclusion. We worked closely with Dr. James Knight this year — he wrote a book called Heart: A Journey Toward Cultural Humility. This book is a component of the professional development training that we’ve done with our entire staff all year long. Another part of the strategic plan is working on Tier 1 instruction, which is providing staff with professional development resources that empower them to deliver strong instruction to all of our students. The third part is working on creating systems that help our families in the community and becoming collaborative with a more holistic approach to student needs and family needs beyond academics. What are their social emotional needs? What are barriers they might be facing, and how can we assist as a school district to help them? And if we don’t have the right resource within our district, let’s see what we can do within the community to hook them up with someone who can. Speaking of meeting students’ needs, how will OES continue to support students who struggled during the remote learning period and are currently working hard to rebound and meet standards for their grade level? There’s not a one-size-fits-all strategy. It just takes consistent progress monitoring and saying, “This is the information we’ve gathered about this student, and what their needs are — how can we provide and meet those needs here within the building?” One thing in Oberlin that I’ve enjoyed is when we have family nights for math and literacy — seeing the investment families have in their kids. I’ve been a lifelong believer that all parents want their children to succeed, and it’s really the partnership between home and school that can make that relationship stronger. If they’re hearing it at home and they’re hearing it at school, then they’re like, “Okay, I can do this.”

What other programs and community building events are being hosted by Oberlin City Schools in the coming months? What resources should parents be aware of?

Right now, we’re participating in the Ecolympics, which has been a big deal — the kids are really, really enjoying it. We actually have members of Oberlin College coming to teach our students about composting in the cafeteria. I even had a student today say, ‘Mrs. Webber, do you know what? At home, I am making my family turn off the lights.’” So it’s really cool to see the things that we’re doing here at school transfer over at home. We also have some upcoming English language classes that the district has been offering to family members of students. Our district family support coordinator, Jay Nimene, is helping us with enrichment programming for students over the summer — families can access that information on our website. And, of course, we always like community events. Later in May, we’re gonna have our Family Math and Literacy Nights. We’ll have a night that focuses all on literacy, and it’s inviting families and students to take part in different types of literacy activities and games. Same thing with math, where they might come in and learn some techniques and play some games related to, for example, fact fluency. And then for both nights we provide the materials on the subjects for the families to take home, and do it with their kids.

You’ve spoken about the importance of forming relationships with students and their families as a classroom teacher. As principal, what steps will you continue to take to build meaningful connections with students?

I try to be purposeful in my interactions with the kids no matter what the circumstances are. To let them know I understand their situation, their perspective, their thoughts. And it’s not just when students come down to the office. I make a point to try to see them in the hallways, visit classrooms, and when I see them out someplace, say hello to them. So they’re not just seeing me as someone who’s in the office. They’re seeing me as a person in their school, congratulating them on accomplishments they’ve made. My former principal — now my advisor, Dr. Paul Johnson — did something where he had Student of the Month. As a kid, you thought it was a huge deal. They would set up one cafeteria table away from everybody else, and they put down little paper placemats and a little carnation on the table, and you got to eat lunch with him. When I was a kid, I thought this was so wonderful, so this year I tried to do that with students, where a couple months out of the year we would have what we called “fancy lunch.” That’s one of the other reasons that I’ve really liked the switching of roles. I had really fantastic administrators as a teacher, but also as a student myself, and the impact they had on me, helping me see all the things I can achieve — I wanted to do that for my kids.

Heritage, Oberlin’s kosher-certified kitchen that operates under Rabbi Shlomo’s oversight, was closed for four of the eight days
of Passover in 2022. This year, due to the timing of the holiday, it will be closed for six. In the two days leading up to Passover, about 100 meals and sides were prepared at Heritage and packaged for distribution at DeCafé for the days that Heritage will be closed. These meals can be purchased with a meal swipe, functioning like any other cold meal at DeCafé.

“The food from DeCafé comes out of Heritage, so we really ensure that it’s to an incredibly high standard of kosher so that anybody would feel comfortable eating it,” Rabbi Shlomo said.

However, these meals won’t be available to those without kosher-for-Passover dietary restrictions.

“We’re keeping that stuff in a cooler that is not available to the general public,” Director of Re- tail for AVI Foodsystems Sarirose Hyldahl said. “Last year I know we ran into some issues with people buying stuff that looked good or different, and then the people that [were] needing it [didn’t] have any options. We’re solving that problem by doing it that way. It’s worked really well for
Ramadan so far, so I’m hopeful, and I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be good for Passover.”

To supplement the grab-and-go food available at DeCafé and meals available at Heritage, kosher-for-Passover snacks, including matzah and jello, are available in DeCafé for purchase with Flex Points, Obie Dollars, or credit card. This year, Oberlin Hillel will be providing supplemental packages of kosher-for-Passover food.

These packages include snack items and non-perishable staples sourced through Cleveland Hillel.

“Last year, Hillel actually had a space on campus, Wilder 217,” Miriam Cory, an Oberlin Hillel student board member, said. “It was a pretty big meeting room, and I think maybe it was meant for all of the Jewish student orgs. So, we had a fridge in there and we could keep [KFP] snacks in there and it was really great, especially last year when Heritage Kosher Kitchen was still figuring
out how they worked.”

This year, Hillel is located in Wilder 328, which functions as a storage and meeting room for Jewish student organizations.

Until 2020, the Kosher Halal Co-op was run out of Talcott Hall in the space that Heritage currently operates out of. This
year, College fourth-year Elliot Diaz will be reviving the Kosher Halal Co-op informally out of his Village Housing Unit.

“I am not a rabbi, but I was Kosher Halal coordinator [my first year], so I learned all the rules of how to keep kosher and halal,” Diaz said.

In order to make the kitchen kosher, Diaz poured boiling water over the sink, cleaned the kitchen, and covered the cabinets and table with aluminum foil. The Kosher Halal Co-op retained its utensils when it closed, and Diaz will be using those utensils throughout the week. Though Diaz does not have an in-person mashgiach, he consults Rabba Amalia Haas via text whenever
he is unsure of how to maintain the kosher status of his kitchen.

“Hillel Rabbi Megan [Doherty] was involved [in Kosher Halal Co-op previously], and as part of the people who were trained by her, we would be able to ask her questions — we had her phone number, … and there are all these minutiae that we were able to clarify with a rabbi, which is really important because some of the stuff is just complicated,” Diaz said. “There are edge cases, like
any legal system.”

Diaz will provide gluten-free kosher-for-Passover meals for 12 students and host an Iftar for 10 additional students who are celebrating Ramadan.

“Last year, I ate cold bris- ket and matzah [from the Hillel fridge] for many days, which is not good for a holiday that’s
supposed to be communal,” Diaz said. “I have a Village [Housing Unit] as a senior, so I’m kind of in this unique position to host and coordinate it.”

“It starts with an approach the City Council has taken related to a five-point strategy,” City Manager Rob Hillard said. “In other words, we’re approaching our process with consideration of city services, environmental sustainability, social equity, community development, and neighborhood enrichment. So we’ve developed a social equity working group that’s been tasked by the City Council to pull together strategies and raise the level of consciousness of this particular issue.”

The meeting included roundtable discussions on equity — defined as the fair and just treatment of all individuals, regardless of race, age, sex, and other demographic factors — and the experiences attendees have had living in Oberlin. City Council Member Elizabeth Meadows, who is a member of the City’s Social Equity Working Group, attended the meeting to share her experiences.

“The thing about social equity is it’s like trying to look at our community, the way we operate with one another, the way the businesses operate with the citizens and so on.” Meadows said. “It’s just looking for those little cracks and kinks that need to be filled in and looking for things that need to be corrected. It’s not a matter of being able to put a Band-Aid on something. It’s a matter of being able to educate people as to what is inequity.”

The Center for Community Solutions focuses on health, social, and economic issues. They operate as a consulate and provide research services to develop advocacy agendas. Their three areas of expertise lie in applied research, nonpartisan public policy and advocacy, and communications, and the company has worked within Cleveland and Northeast Ohio for over 100 years. After researching racial disparities in Lorain County, the City of Oberlin began working with the CCS to target Oberlin’s directly.

“We were hoping to hear directly from residents of Oberlin and ask them some probing questions about equity in this community,” Chief Operating Officer of Community Solutions Emily Campbell said. “I was so pleased to hear so many people willing to share their personal experiences with equity and their impressions of the community. And one of the great things about the conversation tonight is that we had some people who’ve lived in Oberlin for only a few months and some who have lived here their whole lives, so we really got a great variety of perspectives on how they experience the community.”

A report conducted in 2021 by the Center for Community Solutions stated that Lorain County was 85 percent white, 10 percent Hispanic/Latino, 9 percent Black, and 1 percent Asian. They also found consistent racial disparities in education, life expectancy, and other aspects of quality of life. For example, Black workers were disproportionately represented in lower-wage occupations. Education was also emphasized, as educational attainment for Black and Hispanic/Latino residents was lower than for white students.

“I think this lack of equity is because we are not, as a country, making sure that our populace is well educated,” Meadows said. “I think that one of the reasons we have such conflict and animosity in our country is because people don’t really know how our country came to be.”

While the 2021 report showed Oberlin being more diverse than more rural parts of Lorain County, the County overall charts Black people at a life expectancy of nearly five years less than the white life expectancy. The Center for Community Solutions has conducted research in education, justice, economics, and health outside of Lorain County as well and hopes to integrate Oberlin into the larger conversations on solutions for these disparities nationwide.

“I will say that issues of social equity and racial equity, as well as issues of equity among people of all ages and people from the LGBTQ+ community, are conversations that are happening across this country,” Campbell said. “So it’s not a surprise to be asked by a place like Oberlin to participate in this kind of work.”

Tuesday’s meeting is part of an ongoing equity survey to be conducted over the next few months. These surveys will be combined with comprehensive data and research directed toward understanding equity and discrimination within Oberlin. This research will be presented to the City Council in June, and both the City and the Center for Community Solutions hope to gain as much awareness and participation as possible from members of the community of Oberlin.

“Raising awareness is really important to our community organization. From there, we wanna put in action steps,” Hillard said. “We don’t want to develop a report that sits on a shelf and doesn’t raise awareness. We want to do the things we discuss in the report.”

“We had great interactions with the community,” Adam Tahan, district manager of Kalamazoo Vapor, said. “It’s not that it was a bad experience, there just wasn’t enough traffic.”

The difficulties Kalamazoo experienced are not unprecedented. Small businesses in Oberlin’s downtown notoriously face competition, especially with the increasing prevalence of major restaurant chains. In the past several years, eight local eateries — including Catrina’s Tacos y Margaritas, Dave’s Cosmic Subs, Black River Cafe, (which recently reopened as a wine bar), Agave Burrito Bar and Tequileria, and Oberlin Kitchen — were forced to shut their doors partially because of the pressures imposed by the pandemic. Executive Director for the Oberlin Business Partnership Janet Haar offered her guidance for any small business looking to open a storefront in Oberlin, aggregated from 10 years of experience connecting local organizations with resources in times of financial strain.

“Here’s what I always tell businesses, especially ones coming into a small, rural, college town: Do your market research first,” Haar said. “That’s going to tell you that there are some fairly lengthy downtimes when you have to depend mostly on the people who live in the community, not the people who come here to go to school.”

According to Tahan, Kalamazoo conducted market research prior to expanding the business into a new town. “We study demographics and then research, like, ‘Are there other shops in town?’” Tahan said. “We just kind of try and figure out what would make sense for opening a location.”

Based on the research it conducted, the company had reason to believe its Oberlin location would get off the ground.

“There’s not a vape shop in Oberlin — and in the surrounding areas, there’s no vape shop,” Tahan said. “We sell devices to help people quit smoking; [Doobie’s Smoke Shop] is selling different products.”

Kalamazoo’s tenure on West College Street was short-lived, despite indicators that there was a lack of supply elsewhere for the service they provided.

“You should not be undercapitalized,” Haar said. “You have to have some money in the bank to support your basic business operations for at least six months or more during the inevitable slow times when you could be operating in the red.”

However, more crucially than the financial safety net that gives bigger businesses a better fighting chance, Haar hammered home the importance of good-faith engagement as a stakeholder in the Oberlin community.

“In a small town like Oberlin, you have to join the community,” Haar said. “Which means you can’t spend all of your time working in the business — you have to also work on it. You’ve got to help people get to know you by passing out your business cards, you’ve gotta have a flyer … you’ve gotta do all of those kinds of things so people get to know you. So if you come in, you’re undercapitalized — meaning you don’t have enough money to take care of you during those slow times — and you don’t get out in the community cause, you’re probably not going to succeed.”

Haar expressed her belief in the need for an economic development program in Oberlin that would guide property owners in choosing businesses best equipped to survive and thrive on their properties. Programs currently underway, such as Downtown Strategies, plan to revitalize Oberlin’s downtown, carry Haar’s hopes for a future of facilitated collaboration between merchants and the owners of the buildings they operate out of. However, no economic development department unique to Oberlin currently exists, and small business owners are often faced with an uphill battle.

“We’re not really sure why there wasn’t enough business,” Tahan said. “There wasn’t enough traffic in the store. Other [Kalamazoo] stores do a lot more business, and we’re trying to be financially responsible.”

Two doors down from Kalamazoo’s now-empty storefront, Doobie’s Smoke Shop has flourished since its opening in 2020, providing an example of a successful smoke and vape shop that, despite Tahan’s insistence otherwise, serves a very similar clientele as Kalamazoo. Doobie’s success can be attributed partially to resources the business has at its disposal operating under the same ownership as the Arb at Tappan Square. The Arb had only opened about a year prior, but its popularity among residents built a loyal customer base and cemented the restaurant’s foundation, with Doobies taking residence in the lower floor at the time. Brittany Campbell, manager of Doobie’s Smoke Shop, recalls how Doobie’s managed to attract customers even when it operated out of the basement of the Arb.

“When I was downstairs, everybody would come in and wait for their sandwiches or whatever and [ask], ‘Oh, what’s going on downstairs?’” Campbell said. “It was an ‘if you know, you know kind of thing.”

Kalamazoo carried vaping equipment that Doobie’s didn’t, and in contrast to Doobie’s, it marketed itself toward individuals interested in switching from cigarettes to nicotine vapes. However, when customers enter Doobie’s and express a desire to quit smoking, Campbell said they are pointed in the direction of products that can help them meet their goal.

“We have hemp cigarettes, and I have turned a lot of students on to hemp cigarettes,” Campbell said. “They’ve gone from cigarettes to vaping to hemp cigarettes, and they come back and they’re not smoking nicotine anymore. [It] makes me really happy. Anytime somebody comes in and they’re kind of waffling on, ‘I’m trying to quit,’ I mention the hemp cigarettes and sometimes they bite.”

In addition to factors including familiarity and simple convenience, there is something intangible about Doobie’s business model that keeps customers coming back.

“I just kind of try and connect with everybody that comes in,” Campbell said. “Most of you guys are far away from home, and everybody’s struggling, and I just try and make it a personal moment with everybody that comes in if I can.”