WAYNE
1 11E
E V I S I T ED

Urban university works to
strengthen its enduring ties
to the Jewish community.

SHARON LUCKERMAN
Staff Writer

ollege memories don't fade quickly. George Zeltzer of West
Bloomfield remembers when Wayne State University was still
Wayne University and the only large building on campus was
Old Main — Detroit's old Central High School.
Larry Gormezano of West Bloomfield, a WSU student in the mid-
1960s, recalls Verne's, a beer hall and "great hangout" on
Forest near Woodward, where students who worked and
took night classes gathered after dark.
Roberta and Sruart Pinsky of Farmington Hills, also
WSU students in the mid-1960s, remember when the
Traffic Jam and Snug were two separate places. Students
went to Traffic Jam for beer and greasy food in plastic bas-
kets. The Snug was an adjacent ice cream shop.
Those days, Rabbi Max Kapustin ran the old B'nai B'rith
Hillel Foundation in a creaky house south of Warren
Avenue and students organized the ingenious Oak Park car-
pool that ferried maybe 300 people to and from Wayne.
There also were coffeehouses, like the Raven, and pro-Israel
and anti-Vietnam protests on campus. And when the Tigers
won the pennant in 1968, everybody at WSU forgot their
WSU President
troubles and took to the streets.
Irvin D. Reid
During its heyday for Jewish students, in the 1940s-
1950s, a third of the Wayne enrollment was Jewish; WSU
educated Detroit's first wave of Jewish immigrants and their children.
Chances are the Jewish doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professionals
from Detroit trained before the 1960s received their education at WSU.
But how many of those graduates have recently visited their alma mater?
After the Detroit riots in 1967, Jews and many other white Detroiters left

C

Wayne State's
Old !Wain.