A nearly 40,000-square-foot Hillel center has opened on Yale Avenue in College Park, giving University of Maryland’s Jewish students — a population estimated at more than 6,000 — room to pray, eat kosher meals, study and simply hang out that their old building couldn’t provide. The Ben and Esther Rosenbloom Maryland Hillel Center opened to students in August 2026 and held a formal ribbon-cutting on Oct. 18, drawing more than 200 attendees to the two-story facility.
The $27 million project, funded largely through donations according to The Diamondback, replaces a building that simply ran out of room. As Washington Jewish Week reports, Rabbi Ari Israel previously said the former Maryland Hillel building could not accommodate the 600 to 700 students who showed up for Friday night programming — a crowding problem the new Yale Avenue site, sitting between the university’s Fraternity Row and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, was designed to solve. The Diamondback’s reporting notes the project’s price nearly doubled from its original $15 million estimate due to pandemic-related delays, tariffs, supply-chain issues and inflation, leaving roughly $7 million in debt even after the surge in donations.
A Return to Hillel’s Original Home
The location is not new to Maryland Hillel — it’s a homecoming. According to Street Car Suburbs News, Hillel acquired the Yale Avenue site in 1948 and remained there until 1981, before spending the next 45 years at the Mowatt Lane building the organization has now outgrown. Maryland Hillel broke ground on the new building in fall 2024, and the project was funded in part by gifts from the Morningstar Foundation and the Meyerhoff and Rosenbloom families, per Washington Jewish Week.
The old Mowatt Lane site was vacated at the end of June 2026 and now sits empty, the same outlet reports. The new center’s location, closer to campus classrooms, off-campus apartments and Greek life, also puts it nearer to Fraternity Row, downtown College Park and the university’s STEM buildings — a shorter walk than from the old site, per the publication’s reporting.
Room to Grow for One of the Nation’s Largest Jewish Campus Communities
Jewish students made up about 19% of the University of Maryland’s undergraduate population in 2024, or roughly 6,500 students, the student paper’s reporting shows. Hillel International describes the new building as doubling Maryland Hillel’s previous space and dramatically expanding its ability to serve one of the largest Jewish campus communities in the country — an organization that has been part of campus life since 1938. The nearly 40,000-square-foot center ranks among the largest Hillel facilities in the country, according to Washington Jewish Week.
Inside, the two-story building includes a cafe, an outdoor terrace and a kosher dining hall equipped with a pizza oven and a frozen yogurt machine, along with seven study rooms, a beit midrash, a library, a lounge, a game room, a stage and three multipurpose rooms. Hillel International notes the largest of those multipurpose rooms can hold nearly 500 people. The scale of the upgrade from the old building has drawn differing characterizations: Street Car Suburbs News describes the new center as more than twice the size of the 16,000-square-foot Mowatt Lane building, while The Diamondback described it as almost three times larger than the space Hillel had outgrown.
Nearly 700 Students Turned Out for the First Shabbat
The new space has already been put to the test. Close to 700 students packed the building for Maryland Hillel’s first Shabbat of the fall semester, according to the student paper, and more than 200 people turned out for October’s ribbon-cutting, per Street Car Suburbs News. Maryland Hillel offers the only kosher meal plan on the University of Maryland campus, and the center is built to be the central hub for Jewish life on campus, hosting Shabbat dinners, holiday celebrations, social events, leadership meetings and Israel programming starting this fall, according to Maryland Hillel’s own description of the facility.
Student voices captured by Washington Jewish Week describe a shift in how the building functions socially, not just religiously. Sarah Besser, who joined Maryland Hillel on her first day on campus in 2023, said the new building has given the organization a revamp, with more students treating it as a hangout space rather than just a place for services. She described the center as serving religious students through kosher meals and prayer while also engaging less religious and culturally Jewish students who might not otherwise walk through Hillel’s doors.
Jamie Berger, who visits the center at least every other day, said the new building has space for every type of Jew and encourages new people to come. Mia Mikowski, a senior and student member of Maryland Hillel’s board of directors who transferred to the University of Maryland in fall 2024, is among the students now active in a building that hosts kosher meals, worship, holiday celebrations and events for more than 20 student groups, according to Street Car Suburbs News.
