Tag Archives: Camp Ramah

[Student Profile] Emly Oren

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Emly Oren left Israel with her family at the age of four, but in many ways Israel never left her family. At school in Orange County, Emly was the only Israeli student; but her family continued to speak Hebrew at home, and they only watched Israeli television programs. The Orens would travel to Israel every summer to visit all of their relatives, and they would sometimes stop by other locations en route to their main destination.

As a child, Emly drew no distinction between being Jewish and being Israeli. Her traditional, secular family would remain at home together on Friday evenings for Kiddush and Shabbat dinner; and every year they would attend services at Chabad for the High Holy Days, but Emly felt no connection to that environment because it didn’t reflect the rhythm or culture of her family life. When Emly somehow decided to have a bat mitzvah, she chose to hold services at a local public library… and of course, her bat mitzvah party theme was ‘Israel’.

This was a pivotal point in Emly’s childhood, as she soon joined USY, and was exposed to other young Jews for the first time. She came to realize that Continue reading →

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[Alumni Guest Post] My Pardes Experience by Eric Brief

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Eric Brief (Yr. 2008-09)
sent us the following reflection of his year at Pardes
to post on These&Those!

Check out his blog to see his beautiful art
and weekly divrei Torah!
Eric Brief - Self Portrait

Eric Brief – Self Portrait

If I remember anything about my experience at Pardes it is that I got more than I could have ever imagined. I’m not exactly sure why I decided to go as I look back to when I booked my ticket to Israel just two weeks before Rosh Hashanah in 2008. I had just finished college a few months earlier and right before I went to the Burning Man Festival in Nevada I chose that Pardes was the plan for the next year.

I was a pretty skeptical when I arrived. I had a hard time believing that all these people were uprooting their normal lives to come to Israel and actually study Torah – you know – for real. I kind of felt like a spy – like I didn’t truly belong there. A product of Upper West Side NYC Jewish day school, early on in life I secretly decided that nobody truly cared about learning outside of school – except the future rabbis. At Pardes I found teachers that were extremely passionate about their work, lives, and Judaism in general. The students seemed to catch on to this and Continue reading →

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Dvar Torah for Shoftim

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This week was my last back at my shul Young People’s Synagogue, which last year, raised around $7,000 to send me to Pardes for a year. Yesterday, I delivered this speech to let them know how their investment turned out.

So, how have you all been? For those who don’t know, from September through the end of May, thanks largely to the generosity of YPS, I was living in Jerusalem studying Torah at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, the world’s only non-denominational co-ed yeshiva and widely considered to be the world’s greatest yeshiva above a Mazda dealership. Then from June 8 through August 12, I worked as the mashgiach at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin.

I’ll sum up my experience at camp with the following anecdote: When I told my Rosh Yeshiva at Pardes, Rabbi Danny Landes, that I got the job, but I was nervous since I had never been a mashgiach before, he asked, “Are you a detail-oriented person?” “Yes,” I said “Are you paranoid?” “I’m Jewish,” I said. “I think you’ll do fine.” He was right, I loved my job.

But your investment was in Pardes, so that’s what I’m going to talk about. Continue reading →

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Meet the Fellows 5773

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Amir Zinkow

Amir Zinkow is from Columbus, OH, via St. Paul, MN, via San Mateo, CA. After graduating from The Ohio State University in the fall of 2010, he flitted off to Uganda with an AJWS Volunteer Summer Program. After two weeks back in the States, he came back to the same time zone as Uganda, to Israel, where he was a participant in Otzma, a 10 week Masa program. In trying to find a way to stay in Israel and get on track to go to rabbinical school, Amir decided to attend Pardes, where he fell in love with studying Talmud and Halakha. He hopes that a second year immersed in study will help him achieve his goal of becoming a Posek who doesn’t necessarily follow halakha.


For his fellows project, Amir will be working with Robby in the fundraising department. So don’t be surprised when he asks you for money. Amir believes in the Pardes ideal and vision, and loves the idea that studying Jewish texts is not exclusive, and can be for anyone. He looks forward to furthering this vision and having the opportunity to learn with a diverse group of people for the second year in a row.


Amir is the Irving Weinstein Memorial Fellow this year!


Derek Kwait

Derek Kwait never spent longer than five consecutive weeks outside of his native Pittsburgh area prior to fulfilling his dream of studying at Pardes last year. After attending one year of film school at Point Park University in 2007-8, he transferred to the University of Pittsburgh in fall 2008. He graduated in 2011 with a degree in writing with a fiction concentration and minors in Film Studies and Jewish Studies– the prestigious Triple Crown of BS. His subsequent life-changing year at Pardes was largely made possible by a generous scholarship from his beloved synagogue, Young People’s Synagogue. He spent the past summer as the mashgiach at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, so if you have any questions about kashrut during the year, he will be happy to direct you to Rav Meir.


For his fellows project, Derek will be ruining any claims Pardes still has for being a non-coercive institution by running the student blog, “These and Those,” which last year, boasted a record average of 200 hits per day (on average, only 198 of these hits were from spammers, plus another one from Derek’s mother looking for his posts). Derek hopes to build on last year’s success by editing the words “Kim Kardashian” and “sex” into every blog post for as long as he is the editor.


While he is very excited for another year of learning at Pardes, Derek is most looking forward to reading your blog posts.

Laura Herman

Laura Herman is originally from Toronto, Ontario. Before coming to Pardes last year, Laura spent three years working at Hillel. One year at the International Center in Washington DC and two years on campus in Toronto. Laura is enthusiastic about diverse Jewish communities and recently discovered her love of text study. She feels that being at Pardes is the perfect place to blend these two passions.

Laura is planning on helping out with Pardes recruitment during the upcoming year and wants as many people as possible to experience the richness of Pardes. She knows first-hand how invigorating it can be to spend a year in Israel and would like to help others have this experience.

When Laura is not learning Gemara at Pardes, you can find her roaming the shuk or at different cafes in Jerusalem. If you ever need to know the best place to get fresh fruits and vegetables, Laura is the person to ask. She’ll only ask that you repay her in mangoes.

Laura is one of the Marla Bennett and Ben Blutstein Scholarship recipients this year!

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Week 39:

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(X-posted from my home blog, Yinzer in Yerushalayim)

So this is it. The end. It’s over. After Shabbat, I’m going to see everyone again in the fall at best, never at worst. Still, this is ultimately what I signed up for, to become a Pardes Alum.

I’m almost positive that from the moment I touch down in Pittsburgh and for the entire rest of my life, I’ll have to really try hard to convince myself that this whole year wasn’t a dream—usually a good dream, sometimes a bad dream, but always a dream nonetheless, certainly when compared to the reality I used to know. I don’t know how long it will take to readjust to reality (i.e. America), but even if I do readjust, I’m not the same person I was when I left, I’m much tanner now. I’m also wiser, know tons more Torah and can’t wait to live and teach it to whomever I can however I can, know much more Hebrew and Aramaic, have a wider circle of friends, can cook more things. I am more independent and more dependent, more optimistic and more jaded than I was ten months ago. I will have to get used to the weekend being Saturday and Sunday, to being able to understand people on the street, to being able to plug my stuff in without an adapter, to knowing exactly what signs are saying, to supermarkets not having sales related to my holidays, to being a minority, to shoving and being shoved not being acceptable means of getting where you need to go (I am so not ready for Wisconsin), to knowing what the hell is going on around me.

Continue reading →

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[Student Profile] Rob Murstein

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Rob Murstein comes from a ‘very liturgical’ family; they attend Shabbat services every Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon until havdalah. Rob’s father is a regular Torah reader at shul, his brother studied chazzanut with their cantor, and Rob himself read Torah at shul for the first time when he was six years old; and then again at age seven when his brother and sister became b’nai mitzvah. The Mursteins also enjoyed their long Pesach seders, reveling in singing Birkat Hamazon.

At age 11, the young man began to study Chumash, Mishnah and Gemara with his rabbi, which whetted his appetite for Jewish learning, and he increasingly grew to wonder about Judaism beyond his affiliation with the other members of his family’s Boca Raton country club. Rob’s five summers at Camp Ramah Darom also gave him exposure to many empowered, inspiring staff members; and sharpened his sense that there was something more to Judaism that he wasn’t finding in his home environment.

Then – not long after Rob’s bar mitzvah – Continue reading →

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[Student Profile] Kara & David “Bookie” Bookbinder

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Although they both hail from Los Angeles, Kara and David only met in college at UC Santa Barbara.

As a child, Kara attended Christian Science church every week with her mother, but she became skeptical about religion as a teenager, and came to identify herself as culturally Jewish. David was raised in the Conservative Jewish movement, attending Hebrew school in the afternoons and Camp Ramah during the summers.

Before they met one another on their first date, their friends “forgot” to tell Kara that David was an aspiring rabbi. The following week, Kara found herself at Hillel for the first time, and then decided to study Hebrew so that she could fully participate in the Jewish prayer service. Kara soon became one of Hillel’s most active students on campus.

In college, David worked for the Conservative Movement through KOACH College Outreach, but he gradually found himself being drawn towards non-denominational Judaism, and eventually to Modern Orthodoxy. After college, David contacted Yeshivat Chovevei Torah to inquire about their rabbinic program, and they encouraged him to spend a year at Pardes before beginning his studies.

The young couple are now very active members of the Pardes community, and of course, both have their favorite courses! Kara greatly enjoys the Pardes “Foundations of Judaism” class, as Rabbi David Levin-Kruss designed the curriculum around the students’ own questions; while Rabbi Elisha Ancselovits’ “Thinking Like a Halakhic Sage” class continues to shape the way David has come to understand halakha, Judaism, and the universe… David says that this class impacts all of his other studies.

At Pardes “we study Jewish texts for themselves,” says David with a smile, “it’s not a denominational approach to Jewish study - we’re learning from all of our classmates’ diverse perspectives!”

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