Ten years is a lifetime in college, but Rabbi Aryeh and Sharona Kaplan aren’t going anywhere. The Kaplans, the longest serving Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC)couple, have been at UCLA for a decade and their achievement is being celebrated at the annual West Coast Awards Banquet on June 18 at the Sephardic Temple.
“Someone once told me that staying at college keeps you sharp — intellectually, socially and physically — and we’re trying to buy into that theory,” laughed Sharona.
The two arrived way back in 2004, when a small social media website called The Facebook was being rolled out to their campus. The two are part of the Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, which was founded in 2001 by Rabbi Menachem Schrader. The program places an Orthodox couple on a secular college campus to help Orthodox students navigate the new phase of their lives. Aryeh had been studying for semicha at Yeshiva University and Sharona had just finished a degree in social work. UCLA had a relatively large Jewish population and the seeds for Orthodox life had already been planted by another JLIC couple. Hillel had just built a new building and the timing couldn’t have been better. The first thing the two did was to institute Shabbat and holiday lunches which allowed them to build a core group of dedicated college students.
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