At Riverdale Jewish Center, Muslim student finds a haven for prayer

By N. Clark Judd

Dinar Enggar Puspita had never been inside a synagogue until she came to Riverdale in August; now she prays at Riverdale Jewish Center every Wednesday.

Ms. Puspita isn’t Jewish — she’s a Muslim exchange student from Indonesia spending the year living in Riverdale and studying at the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy, MS/HS 141. Her religion requires her to pray five times daily facing Mecca, the holy city in Saudi Arabia, but unlike her school back home, RKA offers no space for prayer.

The separation of church and state is one of the new and different things Ms. Puspita, 17, has had to adjust to about the school and community — including contact with Jews as a reality rather than an abstract idea.

“Dinar asked, ‘Well, where do I go to pray in school?’” said her host mother, Naomi Erickson, “and the question kind of took the principal [Lori O’Mara] by surprise.”

So Ms. Erickson approached the Riverdale Jewish Center, just across the street, and its rabbi, Jonathan Rosenblatt, offered Ms. Puspita a space to pray.

“We’re just helping to welcome somebody’s child from overseas,” said Rabbi Rosenblatt on Nov. 12. “I only hope when my children travel halfway around the world they will be as scrupulous in their prayers as Dinar is in hers.”

She’s got a standing invitation to join the synagogue for Sabbath services, Rabbi Rosenblatt added.

Of course, the 17-year-old from Semarang, a city centrally located on the island of Java, couldn’t do all of her praying in a synagogue and Riverdale has no mosques, but after visiting three or four places in the area, she was able to settle on a Yonkers mosque to attend during the holy month of Ramadan.

Ms. Puspita is in Riverdale thanks to the Youth Exchange and Study program, an organization dedicated to sending students to the United States from significant Islamic nations, and vice-versa. She’s one of almost 400 students who will visit the United States this year through the YES program, Ms. Erickson explained.

A cluster of those students live near Riverdale. Another Indonesian girl, Dyah Prita Drajati, 17, who calls herself simply Prita, is staying with a family on the Upper West Side and attending 11th grade at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School. There are students from Turkey and Egypt in Connecticut and Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., respectively.

“A lot [is] different, but I enjoy it,” Ms. Puspita said, sitting in Ms. Erickson’s apartment at Skyview on Arlington Avenue. “I mean, I can learn from the differences, right?”

When asked for an example on that fall afternoon, one quickly sprang to mind. In Indonesia, she said, “There are only two seasons: dry and rainy.”

It’s her first time abroad, and she says her time at RKA might be as much an education for her classmates as it is for her. Many of them don’t know where Indonesia is on the map, she says.

That’s not the only difference between school in Riverdale and school in Indonesia, where Ms. Puspita takes 16 subjects overall and goes to class six days a week.

“My friends, they hug each other,” Ms. Puspita said. “And in Indonesia [that’s] kind of weird.”

Fast friends

Ms. Drajati, attending Fieldston, added that it was tough being the only one to fast during Ramadan. For a month, Muslims do not eat or drink from sunrise to sunset, but in Indonesia, even people who don’t fast don’t eat in front of people observing the holiday, she said.

But Ms. Drajati has also found some similarities between Riverdale and Surabaya, her home city on the island of Java.

She discovered that Hebrew and Arabic share the same word for the tradition of giving alms to the poor.

A dancer in Indonesia, Ms. Puspita dances here, too — taking jazz and hip-hop classes in Harlem.

“I found that my friends, they have similarities with my friends in Indonesia,” Ms. Puspita added. “We’re like five people there … that are always together.”

Seeing the sights

She’s able to stay in touch with her parents thanks to Yahoo! Messenger, and goes on group outings with the other students in the area. They’ve so far been to Amish country in western New York and the Museum of the American Indian; on Election Day, Ms. Puspita was perhaps the most impartial polling-place observer present in Elmhurst, Queens for the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

Ms. Erickson and other host parents say the experience is rewarding, and isn’t that much different from raising their own children.

“[I] felt very strongly and passionately that a nice Jewish Upper West Side family ought to be exactly the family to host a YES student,” Carson Gleberman, who is hosting Ms. Drajati, said.

Ms. Drajati is getting full exposure to her host siblings’ Jewish upbringing. Before she came to New York, she said, she knew next to nothing about Jewish culture.

“My house sister just had her bat mitzvah, and it was amazing,” she said over mushroom pizza on Riverdale Avenue.

As with Jewish kosher laws, Muslim law forbids eating pork. Ms. Gleberman doesn’t keep kosher, so removing the meat from her family’s diet to accommodate Ms. Drajati was a switch.

Ms. Drajati is also keeping a book full of slang she jots down as she learns new terms — everything from “munchkins,” the brand of doughnut holes sold at Dunkin Donuts, to the word “whimsical” and the expression “getting on my nerves.”

She said some of the 89 students she knows of in nearby states, farther away in suburban towns, are not all receiving as warm a welcome as she is at Fieldston School and on the Upper West Side. In perhaps another similarity between normal high school life and the life of an exchange student, finding a place to fit in at a new school is proving hard for some of Ms. Drajati’s colleagues, she said.

Ms. Erickson is the coordinator for the YES “cluster” — the grouping of students — around Riverdale, responsible for putting together their collective activities. A veteran host mother, she says differences in diet, habit and religion between her guests and her family are not as dramatic as the similarities.

On Thanksgiving, Ms. Puspita will have a chance to put that to the test, as about 25 of Ms. Erickson’s relatives descend on Riverdale. Ms. Erickson is confident. “A teenager is a teenager,” she said, “no matter where they come from.”