By SHERI SHEFA, Staff Reporter
Thursday, 10 December 2009
TORONTO — Jewish student group leaders, rabbis and Orthodox Jewish students held a panel discussion last week to let concerned community members know that there are many opportunities available for Orthodox Jewish students on secular campuses.
Toronto’s JLIC director Rabbi Aaron Greenberg, left, and Hillel of Greater Toronto executive director Zac Kaye were two of six panelists talking last week about Orthodox Jewish students attending secular universities.
The Orthodox Union’s Heshe and Harriet Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC), a North American program that helps Orthodox students balance their Jewish upbringing with living in a secular world, in conjunction with Hillel of Greater Toronto, invited parents and university-bound students to Bnei Akiva’s Yeshivat Or Chaim for a lecture titled “Observant Jewish Life on the Secular College Campus.”By SHERI SHEFA, Staff Reporter
Thursday, 10 December 2009
TORONTO — Jewish student group leaders, rabbis and Orthodox Jewish students held a panel discussion last week to let concerned community members know that there are many opportunities available for Orthodox Jewish students on secular campuses.
Toronto’s JLIC director Rabbi Aaron Greenberg, left, and Hillel of Greater Toronto executive director Zac Kaye were two of six panelists talking last week about Orthodox Jewish students attending secular universities.
The Orthodox Union’s Heshe and Harriet Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC), a North American program that helps Orthodox students balance their Jewish upbringing with living in a secular world, in conjunction with Hillel of Greater Toronto, invited parents and university-bound students to Bnei Akiva’s Yeshivat Or Chaim for a lecture titled “Observant Jewish Life on the Secular College Campus.”
As a York University graduate, Toronto’s JLIC program director Rabbi Aaron Greenberg – who, with his wife Miriam, organizes weekly lectures, daily services, and peer-to-peer learning opportunities at York University and the University of Toronto – said he “has a pretty good handle on what life is like on campus.”
He said he most often gets questions from parents about what life will be like there for kids who have grown up in the Jewish day school system.
“What we try to do at the JLIC and Hillel is provide them with a safe environment – safe in terms of a religious perspective, a Jewish perspective, and safe in terms of having a safe place to be with friends.”
For example, he said that earlier that day, there were three minyanim at the York campus – one for Shacharit, one for Minchah and one for Ma’ariv.
But Rabbi Scot Berman, headmaster of Toronto’s Bnei Akiva Schools, said that both parents and students need to evaluate some of the “dangers” that await Jewish students on secular campuses.
“I don’t want to present this as the outside world being the boogeyman. There are many wonderful things that campus life has to offer our students.”
But, Rabbi Berman added, if he could convince all his students to continue their Jewish education by going to Jewish post-secondary institutions, he would.
“Realistically speaking, that is not going to be the choice for many of our students, and they will be going to campuses… [where] there are real dangers that our kids are exposed to for the first time intellectually as things come out at them.”
He said many parents and students are concerned about how “general knowledge will come into conflict for the first time and challenge for the first time some of their core beliefs.
“When someone, for 13 or 14 years, is in a cocoon, a warm and comforting cocoon, that we support and recommend and promote all through their day school years, they finally break out into a much broader community and there are those dangers,” Rabbi Berman said.
“There is the need to continue to be very, very vigilant in taking advantage of all the services that exist today that never existed before.”
He said that if students stop studying and socializing with “like-minded people, we can begin to lessen our commitment [to Judaism] before we even realize it.”
Rabbi Josh Ross, JLIC’s associate director, said that he doesn’t believe that students pull away from their Jewish upbringing or do poorly in school because of a secular education or environment, but because universities lack the kind of structure that students grew accustomed to in the Jewish school system.
But Zac Kaye, Hillel of Greater Toronto’s executive director, said that the changes on campus over the past few years help to provide Orthodox students with the sense of structure and community they grew up with.
Kaye said that there are about 18,000 Jewish students in Toronto-area universities, and about 95 per cent of those students are commuters and live at home.
“Our goal, from the very beginning, when we set up Hillel, was that we would try to reach out to different denominational groups on campus. One thing that Hillel realized… was that Hillel alone couldn’t do the job that it said it could do in the previous 30 or 40 years of its existence – that it be all things to all people – and [realized] that we would have to seek partnerships.”
Kaye said that with the emphasis on engaging Jews who were at risk for assimilating, Orthodox students on campus “were being left behind… we didn’t really have to worry about them.”
Hillel did what it could to create programming aimed at Orthodox students, but, “what we were hearing from the students is that they were looking more for the educational component,” Kaye added.
He said that the partnership between Hillel and JLIC makes that kind of programming possible, and it’s “something really very special and it is something the Orthodox community should really value.”
Micha Gasner, a first-year York student who studied at Eitz Chaim Day School, Ulpanat Orot Girls School and then for a year in Israel after she graduated from high school, said that she was nervous about what a secular institution would have in store for her.
“I was a little shocked in the beginning to have 500 people in a chemistry lesson, instead of 10 really good friends in my Chumash class or in my chemistry class, where my teacher knows me and I know him and I can ask him questions and for extra help,” Gasner said.
She said that she had to make an effort to incorporate Jewish learning experiences into her day between classes.
“Part of my schedule on Monday is that… I have a shiur for parshah and that is part of my schedule. I go from my chemistry class and I go to the shiur and there are always like, 10 or 12 girls there. Today I was able to go to a Minchah, and it’s nice that there is a minyan and I can go to a Minchah when I want to,” Gasner said.
David Elmaleh, an Or Chaim graduate and currently an Osgoode Hall law school student at York, said Jewish life on campus has evolved over the last five years.
He said that when he first arrived on campus, there were a lot of religious Jews, but they weren’t “organized and mobilized.”
“We now have an infrastructure in place that encourages us to attend certain events.”
He said that while he appreciated the efforts made by Hillel to create programming to attract the frum community on campus, its partnership with JLIC gives them many more options and opportunities to stay involved.
“Before, a lot of the classes had to be more general and broad because there was such a wide array of students, whereas now we have beginner classes, we have advanced classes… so really, you can find a shiur, a class, that works for you and fits in with your needs,” Elmaleh said.
He added that he is grateful for the opportunity to forge a relationship with a rabbi and have access to someone who can respond to his halachic and religious questions and concerns, but he’s also grateful for more opportunities for shidduchim.
“I know it may not be on the parents’ minds, but from the student perspective, there are a lot of opportunities to meet people at the different events… Because of the JLIC and the central role they play in bringing students of similar backgrounds together, it really enhances the social aspect of university life, which is also very important.”
Elmaleh spoke briefly about the issue of anti-Semitism on campus and said that although there may be incidents of anti-Semitism on secular campuses, “there is a tremendous support system in place.
“We have people to talk to, who tell us what to do and who to confront. I know at Hillel there is a system in place if you want to file a complaint with the university, they help us go through it.”
Kaye, responding to concerns about anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiments both from students and faculty, said that he believes Jewish day schools should do more to prepare students for the challenges they will face on campus.