Chabot offering cross-cultural course with Jewish twist

Before Nazi Germany refugee Frieda Ahelleas died in 1993, the San Leandro resident wrote a will requesting that her money go to various Bay Area colleges. Ahelleas intended the funds to underwrite scholarships for Jewish students at Cal State Hayward, U.C. Berkeley, Stanford and Chabot College.

Unlike the other colleges, Chabot, a public community college in Hayward, has few Jewish students. As a result, it did not have the same needs for the scholarships as the other schools. Mulling over how the donation could best be put to use, the college decided to honor the benefactor's wishes and create a program in the spirit of her bequest. The Alliance for Jewish and Cross-Cultural Studies is the result.

The Alliance is "something more applicable to those who attend Chabot," says Ben Hollander, creator and director of the project, as well as a language arts teacher at the college. He estimates the donation was around $77,000, with accrued interest.

The alliance is, as of yet, only a project, with classes beginning in the fall. But Hollander hopes it to soon be a full program.

The courses planned are those that would interest Jews and non-Jews alike, because, he says, "Chabot is incredibly diverse." A single class at the college might have students representing 15 to 18 language groups. Classes at the community college are open to the general public.

The fall Alliance courses include Humanities 7, which began Tuesday to address visual, literary and musical works of Latin America and the Caribbean as they reflect the contemporary cultural relationships among Jews and other groups in these regions, and a "Literature of the Holocaust" class to commence Monday with Hollander as the teacher.

In the spring, "Architectures of the Spirit" looks at contemporary and historical Judaic, Islamic and Christian architecture, and their relationships to one another. "Women and Spirituality" is a cross-cultural examination of gender and faith, both domestically and internationally, as it reflects established religions and creates new practices of spiritual expression. Chabot is currently seeking a qualified instructor for "Jewish-American Fiction" and "Arab-Jewish Literature," classes also slated for the spring semester.

What makes these classes unusual, Hollander says, is that they are Jewish classes that "address issues that apply to non-Jews as well." There are "not many places in the Bay Area where non-Jews and Jews can address issues that concern them and then implement them in the community as well."

Jews, he says, are intimately connected to many nations in the world and "one of the purposes of the project is to relate that."

The Latin American and Caribbean culture class, he says, could help organizations that assist the remaining Jews in Cuba, as well as forge links with other cultural and ethnic groups in the college community. Hollander also hopes that the alliance will spark the interest of applicants who had not formerly considered Chabot.

"Learning does not only go on in the classroom," he says.