September 14, 2004

Go West Young Couple:
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan and Wife Sharona to Take Over JLIC Program at UCLA to Build on Work of Predecessors, Rabbi Uri and Julie Goldstein

As the new collegiate academic year gets underway, two planes are taking off, one from New York bound for Los Angeles and one from Los Angeles bound for New York. The westbound flight is carrying Rabbi Aryeh and Sharona Kaplan, the newly hired Torah Educator couple for the Orthodox Union’s Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC) program at UCLA. Heading east are their predecessors, Rabbi Uri and Julie Goldstein, returning home after three years in the sun.

The Kaplans are coming to a Westwood campus in which Orthodox life is flourishing for the first time. The Goldsteins have bequeathed that situation to their friends the Kaplans, with the challenge to build on what they have created and to take it to a new and even higher level.

The Fall Quarter at UCLA begins on September 27, just after Yom Kippur.

JLIC is a program of the Orthodox Union, operated in coordination with Hillel and Torah Mitzion, which serves to encourage, help and enhance the observance, commitment and education of Orthodox students on campus, while at the same time opening up Torah knowledge to the general Jewish student community. JLIC is found on seven campuses, with only UCLA on the west coast. (Brandeis, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, Cornell, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale are the others. Two additional campuses will be announced shortly.)

JLIC provides a setting in which Orthodox students can be comfortable in an atmosphere on secular campuses far different from what they experienced in their pre-college yeshiva educations. Through the easy availability of Torah study; daily, Shabbat and holiday synagogue services; kosher food; together with counseling and interaction with their peers, Orthodox students find a haven at JLIC in which their yeshiva experiences are transferred to the campus – while at the same time they are participating in the academic life of their college.

When the Goldsteins came to UCLA as Torah Educators at the beginning of the 2001 academic year, there was “zero Orthodox life at UCLA,” according to Rabbi Goldstein. Now he says with pride, “There is a vibrant and vital entity and a culture in which Orthodoxy and Torah study are a prominent feature of Jewish life at UCLA.” Non-Orthodox Jews as well have come to share in the daily morning minyan; the Sabbath program complete with three meals and Shabbat singing and study; and the Beit Medrash, the study hall filled with a wide selection of Jewish texts in Hebrew and English purchased by the Goldsteins and located in the Yitzchak Rabin Hillel Center for Jewish Life at UCLA, where JLIC is based.

“The Goldsteins started literally from nothing and built up a wonderful program,” declared Rabbi Steven Weil of Beth Jacob Congregation in Beverly Hills, the largest Orthodox synagogue in Los Angeles. “They gave of themselves, opened the doors to their home, and dealt with the emotional, educational and spiritual needs of the students, both Orthodox and non-Orthodox. The program made the difference for many students. The Goldsteins were true educators. It was a privilege to have them in our community.”

The Goldsteins, who became parents twice while at UCLA, are returning to New York to be closer to their families. Uri is the newly appointed Assistant Rabbi at the prestigious Park East Synagogue in Manhattan, while Julie will be a teacher and counselor at an academically elite yeshiva high school in New Jersey.

Now, it is the Kaplans’ turn at UCLA. It is not by chance that they are the successor couple there. In the Orthodox Jewish world, it seems, everyone knows one another, and the Goldsteins recommended the Kaplans for the job.

Aryeh Kaplan (no relation to the great, departed Jewish rabbi and scholar of the same name) and his wife of three-and-a-half-years are from Teaneck, NJ, where they met when they were participating in the OU’s National Conference of Synagogue Youth (NCSY) local chapter. After graduating from the Torah Academy of Bergen County (NJ) and following two years at Yeshiva Har Tzion in Israel, Aryeh has spent the last five years in a joint program at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary of Yeshiva University, from which he will receive his undergraduate degree and rabbinical ordination at the end of the 2005 academic year. His position at UCLA, in fact, is part of his YU rabbinical internship.

Sharona Kaplan attended Bruria High School in New Jersey, the Michlalah College for Women in Israel for a year-and-a-half, then earned a BA in 2000 from Stern College of YU in Judaic Studies and a Master of Social Work from the Wurzweiler School at YU two years later. The couple is expecting its first child in November.

As students, both Kaplans expressed interest in building Jewish communities, which led Aryeh to apply to LINK – the Los Angeles Intercommunity Kollel – based at Rabbi Asher Brander’s Westwood Kehilla, an OU-member congregation. Uri Goldstein knew Aryeh at YU; Julie and Sharona were roommates after college. When the Goldsteins learned that the Kaplans were interested in coming to Los Angeles they contacted Rabbi Menachem Schrader, the Israel-based founder of JLIC, and recommended them.

“When Rabbi Schrader contacted us we were really flattered,” declared Aryeh, adding that he had studied with Rabbi Schrader’s son both at YU and in kollel (a community learning center) in Teaneck. It didn’t hurt that Sharona’s sister, Adena Frazer, together with her husband Aharon, are the JLIC couple at Brandeis.

Perhaps it was inevitable, therefore, that the Kaplans would wind up at UCLA. They visited the campus, observed the Goldsteins at work, participated in what they called “a phenomenal” Shabbat program, and received advice from the Goldsteins -- who lived in Westwood proper -- to reside on campus to make it easier for students to visit them. As a result, they have an apartment on “Fraternity Row,” near Bayley Avenue, from which they will walk daily across campus interacting with the study body at large, while at the same time tending to the needs of their segment of that population.

Seeing their role as salespeople as well as teachers and counselors, the Kaplans plan on making the rounds of Orthodox synagogues in the Los Angeles area “to get the word out about what exists at UCLA in terms of the kosher opportunities, the learning opportunities and the Shabbat opportunities,” declared Aryeh. “We want families of prospective UCLA students to know that they don’t have to leave Los Angeles to have rich Orthodox life as part of their college education.”

The Kaplans will be an integral part of that rich Orthodox life.

“The Kaplans are optimistic, persistent, bright and full of life,” declared the Westwood Kehilla and LINK’s Rabbi Brander. “They are highly gifted and people like being around them. They are living models of what they teach.”

Rabbi Brander noted that the Kaplans are “officially in a partnership between JLIC and the local community kollel – LINK. Rabbi Kaplan is going to be learning in the morning with us, and the kollel will help with the minyan at UCLA and engage in cooperative programming with JLIC. The Kaplans will be able to leverage off existing communal programs rather than just leapfrogging into a community by themselves.”

In creating their programming and developing their distinctive approach, the Kaplans in addition will draw on their NCSY background, both as teenage members and then as advisors; in a very real sense, one OU program helped to prepare them for success in another. “Our vision of community structure was inspired by NCSY,” Sharona declared, adding that NCSY programming, particularly in enhancing Shabbat, will be reflected in what they do at JLIC.

The Kaplans also intend to work closely with the OU’s West Coast and NCSY Regions, based at the OU’s headquarters on West Pico Blvd. “We want to speak at OU synagogues, we want to speak at NCSY, we want to get to know the community,” said Aryeh.

Much of the core of JLIC leadership under the Goldsteins has graduated, but according to Rabbi Goldstein, a new group of Los Angeles students who spent a year in Israel following high school and who “will change the face of the community” are entering UCLA in the fall. “Working with this new core of students will enable the Kaplans to make JLIC their own program,” he said. “Julie and I encourage the Kaplans to build on the foundations we have laid and to work with the energy of the new and returning students to take the program to the next level. The UCLA Orthodox community has grown, but it has great capacity for even further expansion. The Kaplans are the right couple to make this happen.”

Rabbi Aryeh and Sharona Kaplan

The Orthodox Union, now in its second century of service to the Jewish community of North America and beyond, is a world leader in community and synagogue services, adult education, youth work through NCSY, political action through the IPA, and advocacy for persons with disabilities through Yachad and Our Way. Its kosher supervision label, the , is the world’s most recognized kosher symbol and can be found on over 275,000 products manufactured in 68 countries around the globe.

www.ou.org

Comments? Requests? Questions?

Orthodox Union Department of Communications and Marketing David Olivestone Director Stephen Steiner Director of Public Relations Main Office: 11 Broadway, New York, NY 10004 Phone: 212.613.8318 Fax: 212-613-0763 E-mail: steiners@ou.org  |  media@ou.org

OUPR Archives Recent statements to the press: 2003  |  2002  |  2001  |  2000  |  1999  |  1998