The Oregon Hillel Foundation had been celebrating “a lot of firsts” leading up to Sukkot. Then someone swiped its sukkah.
“We had just opened up this building barely a week before that,” Lenny Steinberg, executive director of the nonprofit, which works with students at the University of Oregon and Oregon State University, told JNS.
“This sukkah was newly donated to us,” he said, referring to the structure for the Sukkot holiday, which was at the Hillel’s new home in Corvallis, Ore. “It’s the first time ever our Jewish students at Oregon State have had a space that they can call their own for roughly the last 10 years.”
“The feeling that our new home could be desecrated so quickly—really unsettling and really sad,” Steinberg told JNS.
The sukkah was still there on Monday evening, when there was an event inside of it. At some point between then and when the theft was discovered on Tuesday morning, the sukkah was taken.
“It was picked pretty clean,” Steinberg said. “They took the structure itself. They took the side walls. They took the schach,” the bamboo or foliage that forms the sukkah roof.
“They took every bit of decor. They took the lights. They took our extension cords,” he told JNS. “Everything literally under the sukkah was taken.”
Lt. Benjamin Harvey of the Corvallis Police Department told JNS that the stolen sukkah is worth about $1,500.
It is “too early to know” if the theft was a hate crime, since the sukkah was behind the building and the thief or thieves might not have seen that it was a Jewish building, according to Harvey.
The stolen materials are “like a temporary tent made out of metal poles, and if you understood the culture, I think it would be obvious what it is,” he told JNS. “But for others, who might not understand the culture, they might not know what that was.”
Steinberg told JNS that his “first gut reaction” and that of his colleagues was that the incident was an antisemitic hate crime.
“That feeling is still certainly there,” he said. But given the “decent” homeless population in the area, he thinks the sukkah might have been pilfered for “those purposes.”
“If we’re not able to find the culprit, we may never actually know whether this was antisemitic or common theft,” he said.
Oregon has not been immune to the rise of Jew-hatred nationwide since Oct. 7, according to Steinberg.
“The University of Oregon is generally known as a pretty politically charged campus. Oregon State, a little less so,” he told JNS. “That doesn’t mean we haven’t had our fair share of issues on both campuses.”
In April, the Hillel planned to host a former Miss Israel at the University of Oregon. “We weren’t even able to have our event take place, because protesters came down, occupied our space, made several threatening remarks to students and shut us down,” Steinberg said.
A friend who regularly wears a kippah has been “spat on, followed home.”
“We definitely are feeling it here,” he told JNS. “The Jewish communities in both Eugene and, specifically, Corvallis, are very, very small. You’re probably talking about 1,000 or less Jewish people in the town of Corvallis, and in Eugene, probably around 4,000.”
Steinberg is “grateful” that “things are not at the extreme levels” that they are at other U.S. campuses. He also has “really great relationships” with administrations of both public universities.
The Hillel has set up a fundraising page to replace the sukkah and had fundraised more than $7,500 from 83 people at press time. (Its goal had been $2,500.)
Steinberg told JNS that he has “cried tears of joy” over the past 48 hours from the support the Hillel received from the community. That included local rabbis, students and other community members, who built a new sukkah for the Hillel on Tuesday evening.
“Not only are we now able to really ensure that we can afford the same sukkah, but updated security, better programming is what those extra dollars are going to go to,” he said.
“Just seeing how the community came together in this really upsetting moment, it’s hard to express how grateful and thankful I am,” he said.
