Hillel is sending last year’s college graduates back to school. In what is being billed as the start of a “Jewish American Peace Corps,” Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, has dispatched 22 recent graduates to campuses around the country to revitalize local Hillels and reach out to unaffiliated students as only peers can.
The Jewish Campus Service Corps, as it is called, “represents a new approach toward reaching Jewish students,” said Michael Steinhardt, a New York business executive who established a $500,000 fund to launch the program.
The fund comes in the form of a challenge grant, and Hillel hopes other benefactors will sign up and allow the program to expand to more campuses.
The initial group of 22 students are known as Steinhardt Fellows.
Participants “will bring the vitality of their campus experience to their efforts,” Steinhardt explained.
Their target audience consists of Jewish students who have not been reached until now. Corps members, who were brought together for an initial training session at a recent Hillel leaders assembly, are mandated to design programs to attract students who had never before found a reason to step into a campus Hillel.
“We want to listen to these students; their needs may be different than the ones who are comfortable, pro-active Jews,” said Richard Joel, international director of Hillel.
Joel said he sees the fellows, who will work under the campus Hillel directors, as complements to Hillel, rather than as competitors.
Hillel caters “to the people who want services, people who come through the door,” said Joel. The follows program is “an attempt to get to (students) where they are.”
At Yale University, for example, the Steinhardt Fellow, Jesse Lunin-Pack, has initiated a program where challah is placed in every dining hall on Friday night, according to Saul Zipkin, a sophomore at the college.
Zipkin said that Lunin-Pack has also created a weekly “Seinfeld” study break, during which Jewish students can watch the popular television series together.
“It’s a low commitment way to meet other Jews. I think it’s been successful,” said Zipkin.
“We want to create different points of access, to create more and different ways to get involved,” Joel said.
Davida Finger, a recent graduate of Tufts University, is a Steinhardt Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania this year. She said she was attracted to the job because it would allow her to “help students celebrate their Judaism.
“I say `celebrate,'” she said, “because there are so many ways to be Jewish. Many people come with preconceptions of Judaism. I want to open them up.”
Robby Grossman, a recent graduate of the University of Virginia, is a Steinhardt Fellow at George Washington University for the year. He said his college experience was typical of many Jewish students today.
“From day one, I was looking for some sort of Jewish community that I could enter into,” Grossman said. He went to Hillel and “quickly got turned off” in part because it was too focused on religion.
He turned instead to other activities on campus.
He got involved in Hillel only late in his college career, when he organized a Purim party after realizing that Hillel did not have one. The party was such a success that he was drafted to become his campus’ Hillel president.
Jewish students used to join Hillels because they were not accepted elsewhere on campus, Grossman said. But on today’s campuses, where Jews can participate in all activities, Hillel often does not offer enough of a draw, he said.
And that is where his new job fits in, he said. “I’m looking to start an a cappella singing group (and) a theater group” at the George Washington University Hillel.
“If we put on a show by 50 students and it’s seen by 500, that’s an amazing success,” he said.
His goal, he said, is to find out what the students are interested in and provide it for them in a Jewish setting.
As an another example, he said, “if I find there are a lot of students interested because we’re five blocks from Capitol Hill, then I’ll jump in. I’ll contact the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or friends now working on the Hill, and I’ll use them” to arrange tours.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
