Miami, FL – Former Miami Beach Hotel Now a Center of Jewish Learning

Miami, FL – Gone is Miami Beach’s old Howard Johnson restaurant — later an IHOP — known for its fried clams and and frozen pudding ice cream. In its place: a cafeteria for Orthodox Jewish students that serves up hummus and challah between Torah study sessions.

About 300 men and women gathered Sunday afternoon to dedicate the new home of Rohr Talmudic University, a 34-year-old yeshiva for students from middle school through graduate study that recently moved from a scattered South Beach campus to the heart of Miami Beach’s Orthodox Jewish community.

The address, 4000 Alton Rd., is best known as the former location of the Howard Johnson hotel. More recently, it was Biscaya hotel and, before that, Bayview hotel.

”Yeshiva is the definition of a community,” said Rabbi Yitzchak Zweig, the university’s president, to a room of men and boys wearing traditional black suits and hats. “If anybody asked me seven years ago if we could assemble four acres in the middle of Miami Beach, it would be unthinkable.”

Since December, about 120 students have studied at the new building, where king-size beds have given way to twin beds — three to a dorm room. The musty elevator lobby is a now a bright hall honoring donors, and the former front desk area is a parking lot.

`MUCH NICER’

”It’s much nicer,” said Reuven Glucksman, a fifth-year graduate student who is on campus more than a dozen hours a day studying the Talmud, the extensive written body of interpretation and commentary on Jewish law and ethics.

”Here we feel like we are a part of the community,” said the 24-year-old.

Nearby on 41st Street are a handful of Jewish businesses and kosher restaurants. Glucksman lives on the old campus at 1975 Alton Rd. but attends classes in the new location, where he plans to move when housing becomes available for him and his wife.

Three of seven former hotel floors have been fully renovated.

Plans are under way to build town houses and apartments for as many as 60 graduate-student families and a 23,000-square-foot study facility, but the shaky economy has made it difficult to obtain financing, school leaders said.

300 STUDENTS

When the project is complete, the university will be able to enroll up to 300 students, and the campus will be four times the size of its South Beach location. That campus, still partially in use, is made up of three small buildings at Alton Road and Michigan Avenue.

At a time when strife in the Middle East and anti-Semitic crimes have repeatedly made headlines, leaders Sunday stressed the importance of Jewish education.

”What these students are learning is not for their own satisfaction,” said Rabbi Yochanan Zweig, the school’s founder. “Greatness in learning begins with the vision that you are going to do something larger for your own community.”