Making It Easier to Be Orthodox on Campus

c. 2003 Religion News Service

Rabbi Yehuda Seif, 25, and his wife, Orit, 23, arrived at the University of Pennsylvania last August to start something, though not the graduate program one might expect from people their age.

Instead, the Seifs were there to begin their stint as a "Jewish Learning Initiative" couple.

The 3-year-old JLI program places young married couples on secular college or university campuses to act as teachers and counselors to Orthodox Jews who struggle with questions on everything from Jewish law to schoolwork to the challenges of living a religious life in secular surroundings.

JLI has a presence on six U.S. campuses: Yale, Brooklyn College, Brandeis, UCLA, Cornell and Penn, with new campuses being added every year.

The program explicitly does not try to compete with other major Jewish campus initiatives, most notably Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.

On most of the JLI campuses, the couple has office space in the Hillel facility, and the couple often shares Shabbat meals and other holiday celebrations with the larger Jewish community.

And JLI works in conjunction with other Jewish organizations including the Orthodox Union, which sponsors the program, and Torah MiTzion, which is a Zionistic Torah study group.

Because there has been such cooperation, organizers say that the program is just now ready to emerge nationally.

"The reception was very cautious" when JLI first approached campuses during the organization's formation, said Naomi Berman, who was involved in planning the program's launch and serves with her husband as a JLI scholar at Brandeis University, which was one of the two inaugural JLI campuses.

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