All Campuses

By Yoni Levinson, president of the Orthodox Community at Penn

On a cold February Shabbat in 2005, Orthodox community leaders from six university campuses gathered together at NYU.  They had a vision: an organization through with Orthodox students across the country could meet, interact and unite.  And thus, the Orthodox Campus Coalition was born.

I attended the OCC’s kickoff shabbaton at Columbia University in the fall of 2006.  The stated purpose of the shabbaton was to tackle the Issues.  We had discussion groups about working in nondenominational Hillel communities, developing friendships with non-Jews, and approaches to academic Torah study.  We also reviewed the results of a Brandeis survey which asked Orthodox students questions relating to their experiences in college.  I left that shabbaton thinking that it was a good start, but needed a follow up.

College communities, unfortunately, have two characteristics which made it especially difficult to get the OCC off the ground.  Firstly, they are transient.  Each semester, and certainly each new year, brings new members and new leadership.  There is often little communal memory, and an initiative that is championed by one board or president might easily be dropped or forgotten by the next.  Secondly, presidents, gabbais, and board members are generally busy enough keeping their own communities running; inter-communal programming is low on the agenda.

And so, save an attempt to launch a website, the OCC remained on the back burner for about a year or so.  Some of its founding members graduated.  But the vision was still alive for many people, and I was one of them.

Gabe Marans - president of Shalhevet, the Orthodox community at NYU - was another.  This past fall, he sent out an email to as many community leaders as possible calling to organize a second OCC shabbaton, this time at NYU.  He and I quickly began talking about our ideas for the shabbaton and for the OCC in general. 

We wanted it to be a little different – more focused on how to build and strengthen communities and less focused on the academic/religious challenges that face the individual.  We wanted small groups from as many places as possible.  To that effect, Gabe and I both started calling up presidents and board members from other schools to ask them what they thought about the OCC.

Hours of phone conversations later, it became clear that although each community had its own distinct personality, the community leaders generally had similar goals: create cultures of Torah learning and religious growth, provide social outlets and activities, and encourage unity instead of hashkafic fragmentation.  We therefore set aside Friday night to let people “compare notes” on issues and possibly suggest solutions to each others’ problems.

The second aspect of the shabbaton was to think about ways in which we could promote events and activities between communities.  Some felt that intercampus initiatives should be a crucial part of the OCC, while others felt that they were somewhat unrealistic.  We scheduled a Shabbat afternoon brainstorming session to see what kind of ideas we could come up with.

Gabe and I also enlisted the advice and support of Rabbi Dave Falsenthal of the OU, someone who has had extensive experience with campus leadership.  I met Rabbi Dave when he came to visit the University of Pennsylvania in the fall, and I could tell that he really understood the potential which lay in bringing these communities together.  Rabbi Dave attended the shabbaton, as did Rabbi Ilan Haber – the head of the OU’s JLIC program – as well as NYU’s Rabbi Yehuda Sarna, who agreed to lead a discussion after davening on Shabbat morning.

The shabbaton was a success.  More than anything else, we opened our eyes to our brothers and sisters whose college experiences were so similar to our own.  The conversations that began over dinner stretched late into the night.  By the end of Shabbat, we may not have solved all our problems, but we had bonded together, and we had a direction.

Since that Shabbat, we have been doing a lot of thinking about how to perpetuate that feeling of camaraderie and asking ourselves where to go next.  The new and improved OCC website is nearly ready for action.  In the month of February, the Orthodox Community at Penn (OCP) and Yavneh, the Orthodox community at Columbia University, organized a joint ski trip between the two communities.  Other ideas that have been suggested include an intercampus Sephardic shabbaton and an intercampus fundraiser to purchase a motorcycle for Magen David Adom. 

I think that building up and developing the OCC is important for a number of reasons.  One is to show the Orthodox community at large that college campuses do not have to be places of isolation and distance from Torah and Judaism.  Rather, they can be places of learning and teaching – places where young committed Jews can grow in ways they might not elsewhere.  Just as a parent sending a child to a yeshiva in Israel knows that the child will be part of a whole culture of yeshivas, so too a university parent will know that his or her child is part of a very exciting and enriching network.

However, the OCC excites me, personally, for another reason.  Campus communities exhibit many of the same characteristics as their “real,” permanent counterparts.  I see them as preludes to the Jewish communities that will shape the future, and their members as the Jewish leaders of tomorrow.  But campus communities are unique in that their melting pot nature forces their members to think critically about their identities as observant Jews.  Personal decisions have to be made by individuals, and collective decisions have to be made by leaders.  Sometimes, there are no clear cut answers – and it is those decisions can become the most empowering.

I believe the OCC will continue to grow and prosper.  I hope that college communities can evolve from organizations of necessity into a powerful unified force within American Orthodoxy.

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