Senior Devereux “Dev” Eulloqui has been involved with Hillel 818 since he was a freshman at CSUN, having searched for a Jewish community he could join. Dev told us that, “When I was a freshman here [at CSUN], I had no sense of Jewish community back at home. I heard the San Fernando Valley has a pretty well-established Jewish community, so I did some research and searched around the school and I found Hillel 818. I started to come to events like Shabbat and Hillel made me feel well-connected and right at home.”

Emily Anschultz found a part of her she didn’t even know she was missing when she started coming to Hillel 818. She said, “ I come from Santa Clarita where there’s not really a lot of Jewish people so being in an area where there are a lot of Jews who have similar family stories and similar backgrounds, it’s just nice and refreshing. Until you’re involved in a Jewish community you don’t really understand what you’re missing.”

Fourth year CSUN Marketing student Tiffany Brown has always loved the close knit Jewish community in the San Fernando Valley. She says, “I feel like my favorite part [about being Jewish in the Valley] is that everyone knows each other. The amount of people who I’ve talked to in my life who say ‘oh I did this, I was a part of that, I’ve been to this temple’ and they’ll say ‘Wait do you know this person?” and I’m like “I know them!’. I just think it’s really fun that there’s this really rich community in the Valley.”

It’s her connection to people in the Jewish community of the Valley that brought her into Hillel 818.