Allentown, PA – Amid Blooming Jewish Population, Muhlenberg College Opens Kosher Kitchen

Allentown, PA – Jonathan Landau is sick of eating Jewish airplane meals.

Growing up in New Jersey, the 20-year-old never had to worry about finding food that would fulfill his faith’s requirements. Then he came to Muhlenberg College, where despite a growing Jewish population that’s pushed the Allentown school into a national spotlight, he still had to sometimes eat prepackaged meals to keep kosher.

For the tall junior with a black Muhlenberg yarmulke, the sight of sizzling brisket at the college’s newest eatery must have seemed like Rosh Hashanah come early.

Monday was the second day of operation for “The Noshery,” Muhlenberg College’s new kosher restaurant aimed at students with religious diet restrictions. And by the rate at which the matzo ball soup was selling out in the college’s Seegers Union, it’s looking to do a booming business.

“It was a little of a shock for me, having been immersed in a Jewish lifestyle — I didn’t realize how hard it would be,” Landau said. “Now, I don’t have to pay extra, it’s not like I’m in a separate dining area.”

Conceived nearly two years ago, the dining room features two kitchens and separates the handling of meat and dairy, the religious equivalent of oil and water in Jewish orthodoxy. On Monday, “Noshery South” served up brisket, matzo ball soup, potatoes and fruit salad; “Noshery North” offered quinoa, a type of grain, and cookies.

This is only a soft launch, kitchen organizers hastened to say: Options will expand within the week, and the Noshery will open to the general public in the spring.

But for Hebrew lecturer Abby Wiener, who for years had to stick to water while her colleagues dined at department luncheons, it’s a great start. Indeed, it’s better than some yeshivas, several attendees said.

“I can actually eat where I work,” Wiener said. “I have children and grandchildren in the area — they’re chafing to get over here.”

It’s almost an oddity: A small liberal arts college of just more than 2,200 students in Allentown with a kosher kitchen that puts rabbinical schools to shame. But that’s the mystery of Muhlenberg, a Lutheran college that has become anything but.

Take a hundred students these days, and only seven will be Lutheran. But thirty-four will be Jewish, members of a tight-knit campus community that flared to life in the mid-’90s and hasn’t stopped growing since. Jewish students now number more than 750, accounting for more than a third of the student body and fueling a thriving chapter of Hillel, a national Jewish student association.

When high schoolers ask national Hillel spokesman Jeff Rubin for recommendations in the mid-Atlantic, he now tells them to look at Muhlenberg. And he gives plenty of credit for that to Patti Mittleman, the director of the college’s Hillel organization.

“It’s really been a meteoric rise,” he said. “It’s a real beacon.”

But while the new kosher kitchen is just the latest in a string of improvements directed at Jewish students — Muhlenberg is also expanding its Hillel complex, adding more room for Friday dinners — it’s an even bigger boon to the West End’s Jewish community, which has never had a reliable kosher eatery.

Based in the West End, Congregation Sons of Israel Rabbi David Wilensky takes calls all the time from visitors: Do you have a kosher restaurant in town?

The answer was always a slightly embarrassed “no.” Now, with the Noshery opening to the public in the spring, he can finally say yes. And to hear the excited chatter of Sons of Israel members attending a tour of the facilities Monday, he’ll be getting a lot of dinner invitations there.

“It really just raises the energy of the community,” he said. “I think it’s just a palpable feeling that Judaism is here in Allentown.”