Rosalie Fain and her granddaughter, Paige Roberts, laugh as they look for the kitchen in the artist’s renderings of the proposed Hillel Center on the URI campus.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

SOUTH KINGSTOWN

Recognizing the importance of Jews to the history of scholarship, University of Rhode Island President Robert L. Carothers helped welcome a gift of $1 million to build a permanent home for Hillel at URI’s Kingston campus.

Speaking at a ceremony at the Alumni Center yesterday afternoon to about 100 people, including Jewish leaders from around the state, Carothers said that Jewish traditions thousands of years old would be carried forward through the Norman M. Fain Hillel Center.

Named after a 1936 graduate of URI who headed the Apex department stores and Teknor Apex and enjoyed philanthropy, the Hillel Center will serve as a “pluralistic, welcoming and inclusive environment” for Jewish life on campus, said Barbara Sokoloff, president of the URI Hillel Board.

Jonathan Fain spoke for the Norman and Rosalie Fain Family Foundation. The foundation’s gift of $1 million will launch a $4-million capital campaign to build and maintain the center named after his father, who died in 2003.

“Our father would have been delighted” to see the gathering, Jonathan Fain said, recalling that an endowment fund from his parents 26 years ago helped get the Hillel Foundation going on the URI campus.

The organization, which has not yet had a permanent home, was operating from a basement room of Christopher House when Jessica Wolchok arrived at URI. Wolchok, now a junior and president of the URI Hillel student board, said people had to sit on boxes then. Now the group meets in part of a sorority house.

Mentioning Sabbath dinners, “freezing all night in a tent” during an American Cancer Society Relay for Life, a spring break work trip to help rebuild New Orleans and a chocolate version of the Passover Seder, Wolchok said that Hillel gave her leadership opportunities and connected her to her Jewish heritage.

“Much of my success in college is attributable to my involvement in Hillel,” Wolchok said, thanking the Fain family and presenting a bouquet of flowers to Rosalie Fain.

The new center will occupy the site of the former Alpha Epsilon Pi fraternity house at 6 Fraternity Circle, just off Route 138. The dormitory section of the boarded-up building will be demolished for new construction, and the rest of the building will be renovated. The center is projected to open in 2010.

Amy Olson, executive director of URI Hillel, said that when her sister was attending URI in the early 1970s, her mother schlepped everything from Cranston to Kingston to make potato latkes for Hanukkah. “Somehow the oil seeped into my veins,” she told the gathering before quoting an Israeli folk song that she said could be translated into English as “the chain continues.”

Each student who attends Hillel “will add their own unique links to the chain,” she said.

One student from Hillel, who graduated last year, she said, is now writing speeches for Israel’s foreign minister.

She told the group: “We will make sure that Mr. Fain’s name” will be associated with a place where “righteousness and generosity are transmitted and carried on.”

dnaylor@projo.com