Campus Learning Away From Home
by Tova Stulman
Rabbi Menachem Schrader was teaching at Yeshivat Hamivtar, a yeshiva for post-college students and those who take time off from college to learn, when he noticed a common theme among his students: those who learned on secular campuses were frustrated with what they perceived as a lack of outreach for Orthodox Jewish students.
Colleges often have organizations that offer innumerable resources and programs for Jewish students, but rarely are there programs geared specifically for modern Orthodox young men or women from modern yeshiva day schools. They enter secular college campuses that have fewer resources for Jewish education than their yeshiva high schools.
Not content to merely let the issue rest, Rabbi Schrader decided to do something about it, envisioning a program where a highly educated Orthodox couple would set up shop on campus to offer classes, programming, and friendly ears to both Orthodox students as well as the unaffiliated.
Rabbi Schrader saw that vision come to fruition when he contacted the Orthodox Union and Hillel, who pooled their resources to create the Heshe and Harriet Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, more popularly known as OU-JLIC, in 2000. Eight years later, OU-JLIC programs can be found on a variety of college campuses throughout the United States; the program even came to Canada just weeks ago, with Rabbi Aaron and Miriam Greenberg overseeing programs at York University and the University of Toronto.
The other colleges where OU-JLIC maintains programs include the following campuses: University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, University of Illinois, UCLA, Brooklyn College, Cornell University, Yale University, Princeton University, Brandeis University, University of Massachusetts, Rutgers University, New York University, Johns Hopkins University, and Boston University.
No doubt people will point out seemingly similar presences on college campuses, such as Chabad and Hillel itself.
Simone Geller, hired last year as the OU-JLIC operations and communications associate, said, “Every campus is different and every group on campus serves a different purpose. OU-JLIC, working in partnership with Hillel and Torah MiTzion, presents a positive, sophisticated and welcoming face for Orthodox college students, and also offers Torah knowledge to all Jews on campus.”
Yoni Levinson, a 2008 graduate of Penn from Scarsdale, NY, said, “Down the road, when I look back on my college experience, I will remember two things: my classes and my OU-JLIC mentors.”
Religious college students often feel that maintaining their religious sensitivities and fully engaging the college experience are mutually exclusive. OU-JLIC teaches you that not only can you do both, but that doing so makes you a stronger member of k’lal yisrael. On a OU-JLIC campus, a person who has just come back from two years in yeshiva and a person who has just started keeping Shabbos can point to the same couple and say these are my mentors. “I think that the OU-JLIC educators at Penn influenced me in much more lasting ways than any professor I ever had.”
OU-JLIC couples are often the main draw for many students who participate in the program, providing them with a home away from home. In fact, Rabbi Ilan Haber, now OU-JLIC’s national director, was the first rabbinic representative OU-JLIC sent to a college campus. Along with his wife Leah, the two arrived at Yale University in 2000 and spent two years there, developing programs and guiding students along in their higher Jewish education.
“It was an incredible opportunity,” said Rabbi Haber. “Leah and I were breaking ground by having to establish the legitimacy of a OU-JLIC couple on campus. We had incredible autonomy to be creative in terms of advancing programs and classes, and thankfully, people were quick to respond.” Rabbi Haber and Leah now live in Israel, but Rabbi Haber flies in to the U.S. and Canada frequently to help administer the programs and witness their success.
Every OU-JLIC couple offers a variety of regular ongoing Jewish learning classes and shiurim, often with well-known guest speakers, Friday night onegs, and women’s Rosh Chodesh groups. These activities and shiurim often emerge in response to the particular interests of Jewish students on campus, or are co-coordinated by students, such as the weekly Beit Midrash programs that occur on a number of OU-JLIC campuses. Recent programs and events that various OU-JLIC couples have held include apple-picking outings combined with Rosh Hashana divrei Torah, communal Yom Tov meals, and “S’mores and More in the Sukkah” at the University of Illinois.
Adam Teitcher, a HAFTR graduate and current senior at Penn who plans to go to law school, has been an enthusiastic participant in OU-JLIC programs since he arrived on campus. “OU-JLIC has been invaluable to my college experience,” said Teitcher, who interned for Geller this past summer at the OU’s New York headquarters. “When I started college three years ago, I felt torn between two worlds: on the one hand, I wanted to take advantage of the incredible opportunities that I would have at a great university. On the other, I not only wanted to maintain my level of observance, but I wanted to grow in my observance and dedication to Orthodox Judaism. I didn’t know how I would reconcile the two.
“When I met the OU-JLIC couple on campus, at once I found two great role models who were not only extremely knowledgeable and dedicated to their Judaism, but were enthusiastic as they supported and guided me in my educational endeavors as well. Their dedication to the students creates an amazing sense of community on campus unlike any I have experienced before. While they have been amazing mentors who helped me grow in ways I never thought possible while in college, they’ve been even better friends.”