CHICAGO \u2014\u00a0Every\u00a0Friday\u00a0morning for a month, rebbetzin\u00a0Ariel Pardo has been meeting with three female Jewish students at\u00a0Brandeis\u00a0University\u00a0for deep conversations that wind their way from Jewish ritual to intimacy.<\/p>\n
\u201cAri is always so open and she makes us feel so comfortable,\u201d said Mollie Goldfarb, 19, a first-year student. \u201cShe gives off that warm, inviting presence everyone can be around. It\u2019s never just her teaching us, but us learning and discussing together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pardo and her husband, Rabbi David Pardo, are the Brandeis campus representatives of the\u00a0Heshe and Harriet Seif\u00a0Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus (JLIC), a program\u00a0that places young, married Orthodox male and female educator\u00a0couples on college campuses to foster and cultivate Orthodox Jewish life. The couples host everything from one-on-one learning and group classes to Shabbat and holiday meals.<\/p>\n
A unique partnership between the Orthodox Union and the Jewish campus group Hillel, OU-JLIC currently has 60 educators on 22 campuses across\u00a0North America. These\u00a0modern Orthodox educators\u00a0serve primarily\u00a0Orthodox students,\u00a0and the average educator couple serves for about four to five years.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re working with a population that is very intelligent,\u201d said Sharona Kaplan, the OU-JLIC educator at UCLA along with her husband, Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. \u201cOur job is to help\u00a0their relationship with Judaism mature, to help them find value and relevance \u2013 and ultimately own their Judaism.\u201d<\/p>\n
When OU-JLIC was launched in 2000, the OU envisioned a program that included female educators as professional counterparts of their rabbi husbands \u2013 not in some secondary role.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe OU-JLIC women educators have leadership roles equal to their husbands,\u201d\u00a0said Gideon Black,\u00a0director of professional recruitment and leadership development for the program and once a OU-JLIC educator at New York University.\u00a0\u201cMany of our female OU-JLIC educators have graduate degrees in Bible or advanced Talmudic studies, and they\u2019ve all done significant Jewish learning in\u00a0Israel\u00a0and the States. Our female educators are leaders on campus in a way you cannot really match in the synagogue world or within traditional Orthodoxy.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shoshana Charnoff, right, the OU-JLIC female Torah educator at Queens College in New York, learns with a student. (Courtesy of the OU)<\/div>\n
Traditionally,\u00a0rebbetzin\u00a0was a title applied to any rabbi\u2019s wife. It implied no special degree or training and delivered no monetary compensation.<\/p>\n
Historian Shuly Rubin Schwartz, author of\u00a0\u201cThe Rabbi\u2019s Wife: The\u00a0Rebbetzin\u00a0in American Jewish Life,\u201d says many\u00a0rebbetzins of old, in fact, were extraordinarily well-educated and indispensable partners for their husbands. They often raised money, spearheaded charitable organizations, taught classes,\u00a0hosted congregants for Shabbat and holidays, and even\u00a0helped their husbands\u00a0write sermons. But their stories largely have been forgotten.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor most of history, women\u2019s work was underappreciated, and the options for women\u2019s work were limited, so even when women performed important work, it wasn\u2019t acknowledged,\u201d Schwartz said.<\/p>\n
But in recent years, OU-JLIC female Torah educators\u00a0have begun breaking that mold.<\/p>\n
OU-JLIC female educators\u00a0are expected to serve with their husbands as equal partners, and they bring to their jobs formal training and expertise. And unlike the rebbetzins of old, they are paid for their work on the same basis as the male educators.<\/p>\n
Pardo, 30, says she didn\u2019t grown up wanting to marry a rabbi.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce I started dating my husband, I realized I\u2019d be a\u00a0rebbetzin, and I became determined to redefine the role,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Today, young Orthodox women expect to be both compensated and recognized.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re 21st-century women and educated professionals leading lives that are at once worldly and traditional,\u201d said Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, a young\u00a0rebbetzin\u00a0on Manhattan\u2019s Upper East Side who writes for Haaretz about her communal role.\u00a0\u201cWe can\u2019t be expected to throw our careers to the side for communal volunteer work, like in days of old. But\u00a0for those of us who want to be seriously involved, as educators and mentors doing pastoral work alongside our husbands, there are so\u00a0few professional opportunities for which we are compensated and recognized.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added, \u201cOur\u00a0community\u00a0desperately\u00a0needs religious women taking leadership roles, and if couples can do that together, as teams, I think that\u2019s the most powerful outreach there is.\u201d<\/p>\n
At UCLA, the Kaplans have been the campus OU-JLIC educators for 13 years \u2013 long enough to watch former students grow up, marry, start families and even become\u00a0JLIC educators themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cI always wanted to work in the Jewish community, but I didn\u2019t think I would be a campus rebbetzin,\u201d said Sharona Kaplan, who has a bachelor\u2019s degree from Yeshiva University\u2019s Stern College for Women and a master\u2019s from Yeshiva\u2019s Wurzweiler School of Social Work. \u201cMy Jewish life was so rich and so fun and so compelling \u2014 and my husband\u2019s was, too \u2014 that we wanted to pay it forward by trying to replicate what we were gifted through experiential Jewish living for students at UCLA.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Sharona and Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, the longtime OU-JLIC campus educators at UCLA, at the UCLA Hillel with their family on the occasion of their daughter\u2019s bat mitzvah, December 2016. (Irene Ho)<\/div>\n
When they started at UCLA in 2004, they were given free reign and told to serve the community in a holistic way. They began running learning programs with students, including a jointly taught class on Jewish philosophy and law, and hosting large Shabbat meals. Thanks to Hillel, which either caters the meals or pays for them, Kaplan does not have to do much cooking.<\/p>\n
Like all OU-JLIC educators, the Kaplans started their tenure living on campus, but after five years they outgrew their space on fraternity row and moved to a house nearby. The couple is now expecting their sixth child.<\/p>\n
Aryeh Kaplan says he\u2019s lucky to have Sharona working in partnership with him.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou are not a solo practitioner, and having that person by my side also be my wife is an exceptional thing,\u201d he said. \u201cThere is this inherent trust with each other because you work together on so many realms. Our communication, our trust, our assurance that we are there for each other is very special.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Kaplans also helped place three more OU-JLIC couples in\u00a0Los Angeles who serve five area commuter colleges with large Jewish student populations.<\/p>\n
The Pardos both attended UCLA and were so inspired by the Kaplans, they decided to become OU-JLIC educators, too. Being representatives of Orthodox living on the liberal campus of Brandeis comes with its challenges, Ariel Pardo says.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy husband and I walk a very fine line,\u201d\u00a0Pardo said. \u201cBut we are really modeling a life for how to interact in a marriage and how to have a family. When you have a couple that stand for Torah and there is wrong and right, that is tremendously important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black says the success of the JLIC educators has led to new leadership opportunities for Orthodox women: A growing number of Orthodox congregations are seeking to hire not just a rabbi but a rabbi along with his educator wife.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t set out to advance the role of women\u2019s leadership in the Orthodox community, but that\u2019s what is happening,\u201d said Sharona Kaplan, who is\u00a0on OU-JLIC\u2019s senior management team and one of\u00a0two female educators in the six-person OU-JLIC Executive Leadership cohort. \u201cWe are thrilled with this positive development.\u201d<\/p>\n
Read the story on JTA<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CHICAGO \u2014\u00a0Every\u00a0Friday\u00a0morning for a month, rebbetzin\u00a0Ariel Pardo has been meeting with three female Jewish students at\u00a0Brandeis\u00a0University\u00a0for deep conversations that wind their way from Jewish ritual to intimacy. \u201cAri is always so open and she makes us feel so comfortable,\u201d said Mollie Goldfarb, 19, a first-year student. \u201cShe gives off that warm, inviting presence everyone<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133402,"featured_media":57162,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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