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After a group of students, staff, and board members ceremoniously smashed sledgehammers against the side of the gutted former fraternity house, Rutgers Hillel's new building is one step closer to becoming a reality.

On the morning of Nov. 6, demolition commenced at the site of a former fraternity house where the new 37,000-square-foot center for Jewish life will be built.

"We hope that having this building will help us grow, continue to reach out to other student groups, and most importantly to reach out to Jewish students to participate in Jewish life on campus," Hilary Neher, a senior and president of the Rutgers Hillel student board, told the enthusiastic crowd.

Plans for the new building, which is projected to cost a total of $15 million when completed, began between five and six years ago, said Andrew Getraer, executive director of Rutgers Hillel.

The building is designed by Kann Partners of Baltimore and the developer is Danco of Morganville. The building includes "green" environmental features and is intended to have a "homey" atmosphere as students requested, Getraer said.

The four-story building will house a 400-seat dining hall, a kosher cafe, four separate prayer spaces, an Israel resource center, multipurpose rooms, a student lounge, and offices for student leadership and staff.

"The building will serve Jewish students, Rutgers students, and hopefully the broader community," Getraer said.

After several years of scouting for a location, Hillel found and purchased the site two years ago and has since been in the fundraising and design stages.

"We've outgrown it in the best possible way," Neher said about the current building on College Avenue.

According to Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, Rutgers has about 5,000 undergraduate Jewish students and more than 1,000 Jewish graduate students on campus.

The new building, situated so that it will be one of the first buildings visitors see when entering the campus from Route 18, is said to be part of the University's plans to beautify the College Avenue campus.

"We see this as the first project as part of the redesign of the College Avenue campus and the entire university," Getraer said.

While the project is financed completely through private donations and has not received any funds from the university or the state, Rutgers President Richard McCormick, who was in attendance at the ceremony, said that the university is supportive of the construction of Hillel's new building and that it "will be important for Rutgers in continuing to attract great students to Rutgers University."

Eric Kaplan, a junior, said that Hillel's current building is "completely inadequate" and that the demolition signified that the progress was being made on the new building.

"It makes me much more optimistic that I'll see the building completed," he said.

For Sam Master, a senior, the day was a "bittersweet" one, in that he was at once glad that construction was about to begin, yet sad that he would graduate before the building is completed.

"It's very exciting; it is the next step for the building that they have been talking about for a long time," he said.