Chabad at USC bought an abandoned mansion in 2003. It just opened with the campus's first kosher restaurant.

Chabad at USC has opened its new home: a restored Victorian mansion of 12,000 square feet on Fraternity Row, with the campus's first kosher restaurant on the roof, Lubavitch.com reported on Sept. 1, 2026.

About 400 alumni, parents, donors and students came to the opening on a Sunday night as Chai Elul began, the birthday of the Baal Shem Tov and the Alter Rebbe. USC President Beong-Soo Kim, Board of Trustees Chair Suzanne Nora Johnson and Varun Soni, the dean of religious life and Chabad's main campus partner since 2008, all spoke. Alumni Shelly and Dr. Moshe Bernard Baseri put up the mezuzah on the front door. Two nights earlier, 400 students had come for Shabbos dinner, and the overflow sat in the front hall.

Rabbi Dov and Runya Wagner founded Chabad at USC in 1999, according to the Daily Trojan, the student paper. They started in a one-bedroom apartment on Vermont Avenue with weekly dinners for about five students. In 2003, Chabad bought an abandoned Victorian house on Severance Street, Lubavitch.com reported (the Daily Trojan gives the year as 2002). The paper describes the house as more than 135 years old.

About fifteen years ago, the Wagners planned to raise $1 million and add roughly 1,000 square feet to a dining room that could no longer hold the Friday night crowd. The Daily Trojan reported that ground was broken in 2012. The house's historic status meant the front rooms had to keep their original size and shape, and the pandemic slowed the work further. The project grew to about $10 million, and usable space more than doubled, from about 5,500 to about 12,000 square feet. Runya Wagner said they had expected a small addition and that Hashem had something larger in mind.

Inside, Jerusalem stone lines the entrance and a sanctuary wall. Some of the custom chandeliers carry the words Chabad and University of Southern California, and others carry the Shema. Upstairs are apartments where students live year-round.

The new restaurant, called The Rooftop, serves shawarma, schnitzel, wraps and burgers on weeknights under a canopy of twenty-foot bamboo poles, which will also serve as schach for the sukkah. Students on a campus meal plan can use their meal swipes there. With help from senior administrators, it came together days before classes started.

Chabad estimates USC has about 2,000 Jewish undergraduates and 1,800 graduate students, and Lubavitch.com reported that none of them could get a kosher dinner on campus before now. In 2018, a food service trade publication reported that USC Village Dining Hall would serve kosher meals from a local butcher three evenings a week. We could not find whether that program was still running.

Student co-president Noah Razak, a senior, said the house was one reason he chose USC. It was still a construction site when it was promised to him at Admitted Students Weekend. Co-president Ava Schwartz, who has lived in the house for three years, arrived with Jewish values but no religious practice and is now fully observant. The Daily Trojan reported that Chabad at USC reaches 2,500 to 3,000 students a year, with 250 to 350 at a typical Shabbos dinner.

"We're bursting at the seams from this new space," Rabbi Wagner said.

How we reported this: based on Lubavitch.com's Sept. 1, 2026 report and on Daily Trojan coverage of Chabad at USC, including its report on the opening and an earlier piece marking the group's tenth year. The two outlets differ on whether the house was bought in 2002 or 2003. We could not find which agency certifies The Rooftop, or whether the kosher dinner program USC began in 2018 ended. Campus communities can reach us at [email protected].