Life as an OU-JLIC Rabbinic Couple

OU-JLIC rabbinic couples such as Rabbi David and Ariel Pardo of Brandeis provide important and necessary amenities for the modern Orthodox students on campus.

It’s a regular Friday morning for Rabbi David and Ariel Pardo and their two young daughters, Haviva, a toddler and Tiferet, an infant. Like many young parents, by 8:00 a.m. their day is already in full swing. However, unlike most young parents their age, their task, in addition to raising a family, is to shepherd several hundred Jewish students at Brandeis University through one of the most spiritually trying times of their lives.

As the Orthodox Union’s Seif Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus couple at the Waltham, Mass., campus, the Pardos are the lifeblood of a program launched in 2001 by Rabbi Menachem Schrader.pardo

Nowhere is the work OU-JLIC does more vital than on the campus of the nationally ranked university named after Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Roughly half of Brandeis’s 4,500 students are Jewish, including several hundred who are Orthodox.

In a scene that plays out similarly on top university campuses with OU-JLIC couples across North America, Rabbi Pardo returns from helping make the Orthodox minyan around 8:30 and begins scheduling the day’s activities. Ariel and Rabbi Pardo have a quick breakfast before Ariel takes Haviva to Brandeis’ staff day care and she runs to a class in the academic study of Talmud, a topic she’s not exactly familiar with, as she much prefers Tanach.

“I take the class so that students see me as someone they can learn with,” she explained.

The Pardos’ work at Brandeis offers a snapshot of how the entire OU-JLIC program works, based heavily on the selection of a couple that is compatible with the student body at a campus and will be able to appreciate and understand its needs.

How the Pardos became an OU-JLIC couple is a story in itself. Each grew up in a traditional Jewish home and Ariel’s family gradually became more Orthodox over the years. Rabbi Pardo became halachically observant on his own through the Jewish Student Union of North Hollywood Hills and National Conference of Synagogue Youth, two programs of the Orthodox Union. His relationship to Orthodox Judaism was further cemented by his friendship with Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, half of the OU-JLIC educator couple of UCLA, where Rabbi Pardo went for his undergraduate degree.

The Pardos met on Rabbi Pardo’s first day as a student at UCLA, which was also Rabbi Kaplan’s first day as a OU-JLIC educator. The setting was an Intro to Communications class at UCLA. Despite both being heavily involved in UCLA’s OU-JLIC, the two only began dating years later. Like many students, Rabbi Pardo’s college experience put him at a crossroads. He had already earned a prestigious internship with Merryl Lynch and was destined for a lucrative career in finance. But he experienced what he described as “a quarter-life crisis.” He enjoyed finance, but what he really loved was learning and teaching Torah. The thought of getting ordained seemed foreign to him. “I can’t be a rabbi,” he recalled thinking. “Rabbis are only the sons of other rabbis.”

Following Rabbi Kaplan’s advice, Rabbi Pardo left the finance world and decided to attend Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, where he earned Semicha. He reconnected with Ariel and the two began dating and married in 2010 with Rabbi Kaplan performing the ceremony. They spent the next two years in Yeshiva University’s Gruss Kollel in Israel. Afterward, they settled happily in Toronto to work at a young adult Jewish education program. However, when they heard that the OU-JLIC program was expanding to new college campuses, they applied.

As part of the selection process, couples are sent to different college campuses to allow the college students to determine whether the couple is a good fit. The Pardos described their stay at Brandeis as a “really good first date.” The Pardos moved to the campus weeks later and, in their words, parked themselves in the kosher cafeteria for two weeks to meet students. The approach worked and the Pardos soon found an eager coterie of students who surrounded them.

“The first year of college was extremely hard, since it was the first year I was away from home,” said Brandeis student Moshe Yaghoubian. “I felt that the Pardos were people who I could talk to not just as religious figures, but also as wise friends who would serve the role of a bastion for me to rely on when I was confronted with so much pressure — both religiously, socially, and academically. Besides my parents, they have been the only other people who I am most comfortable holding deep life conversations with.” Their home became a hub of student activity. Each Shabbat meal the Pardos invite four students on the condition that each student brings someone who hasn’t yet been to the Pardo household. Additionally, each student must bring one story, one song or a d’var Torah.

Operating at 22 campus settings across the country, OU-JLIC places a young couple, frequently with children, on college premises where, together with the Hillel staff, they work as spiritual guides, friends and mentors to Jewish college students as they negotiate the perilous spiritual time known as the college years. “Modern Orthodox kids were going to secular university and for all intents and purposes they were being abandoned,” explained Rabbi Joshua Ross, deputy director of OU-JLIC. The flagship college program of the Orthodox Union, OU-JLIC was largely the work of Rabbi Menachem Schrader, who created the program when he was a teacher at Yeshivat HaMivtar in Israel in 1982. He found himself watching students, frequently in the midst of their college years, arrive in turmoil.“It became clear that we were getting students from secular universities with significant Jewish populations that had no religious leadership,” he said. “Hillel wasn’t Orthodox and Chabad was different. There was no conventional Torah presentation of traditional ideology and practice on campus to the students. Many of the students come from a year or two in Israel where they had rabbis around them every moment and their lives are directed. Then they come to campus and suddenly their religious lives fall apart.”

At Brandeis, as on many other campuses, both Rabbi Pardo and Ariel give shiurim during the week and maintain several chavrutas; Ariel gives a special shiur devoted to rebutting biblical criticism. They say that their proudest achievement on campus is the nightly Kollel that they help organize which has more than a dozen students learning by themselves in the beit midrash, or religious study hall, every night. Rabbi Pardo that when Orthodox alumni return to Brandeis, they’re flabbergasted at the continuing quality of Orthodox Jewish life there.

“The Pardos are the full package — thoughtful, dedicated and passionate,” explained Rabbi Ilan Haber, national director of OU-JLIC. He noted that the key to the program’s success has always been the high caliber of the couples who are drawn to participate, often at some sacrifice in the formative years of their marriage and family, for the sake of helping others by creating a comfortable haven for Orthodox observance and values.“[The Pardos] are down-to-earth while at the same time serve as great religious role models for students. Brandeis students tend to be highly self-motivated and intelligent and I believe that the Pardos, with their substance and personal charm, are ideally suited to work with this population.”

Some of the shifts in the culture of Brandeis since the Pardos arrived have been subtle. “The longer I’m here, the more questions I get,” Rabbi Pardo said. “People always had the same number of questions, but now they’re seeking the answers.”Eight students feature the Pardo children in their Facebook profile photos. Recently, Rabbi Pardo followed in the example of Rabbi Kaplan when a Brandeis student asked him to officiate at his wedding.“Here was this kid who passed through every Orthodox institution and he didn’t find someone to share his life with,” Rabbi Pardo said. “But that’s where OU-JLIC comes in.” ■
Rabbi David and Ariel Pardo