When did you join JHP? How involved were you?
I was hired by JHP in the summer of 1994, and I had just graduated from college. I was looking for a job doing something different and they put an ad in the Harvard Newspaper which I randomly saw and answered. That's how we found each other, and I took the job spending one school year doing it. It was great.
What is one of your favorite JHP memories and why?
I have a lot of very good memories. I, basically, got to be a 5th year senior hanging out whether at the Penn campus, Binghamton or Pitt. One of the things we did during my time with JHP was a winter break trip to Israel. I went on that trip to help keep things organized and it was a great 10 or 12 day trip, just really terrific.
What is your favorite thing about JHP?
For me, JHP knew then and it knows now exactly what it is and isn’t. It was an alternative to what, at the time, more than 25 years ago, was the standard approach to Jewish students on campus. That was a perfectly fine approach and it’s great for what it is, but there was another way to look at this concept of addressing Jewish students on campus. That alternative approach was designed to capture the hundreds of thousands of students on campus who weren’t participating in the standard Jewish activities. JHP isn’t looking to build any buildings on campus and the program is not going to substitute for the other structures that exist, but they are going to capture this very large majority of Jewish students who are on campus and not involved.
Has JHP impacted your celebration of Jewish holidays and Shabbat and how?
I think the principles on which JHP was founded was more of a peer to peer outreach. You didn’t have to be involved in the traditional channels on campus and a lot of that is still true. Local synagogues serve a very important purpose, but there are other ways to still be a part of the Jewish community. Even with a synagogue framework, there is still an opportunity to do outreach. Under the JHP model, you can say: Why don’t you come with me to these services, and we are all going on Friday night so we will all sit together. There can be this community element to Jewish traditions that JHP does so effectively.
How do you think JHP impacted your connection to being Jewish?
There was no obvious way for me to be involved in the Jewish community when I was in college, and that was something I only did when I was at home with my parents. When you’re at school and the holidays come along and you can’t go home because they are in the middle of the week, there has to be some alternative. Involvement with the Jewish community could be fostered by JHP while at school and just solidified the whole component of being Jewish and having a connection to Israel. I really only had that for the one year that I did JHP, but I think for people at Penn and the other campuses they can experience it for the entire 4 years of school.
What was JHP’s impact on your life?
I took the job for JHP mostly because it was based at Penn. At some point during that school year, I met a girl who later became my wife, and I think that JHP deserves an assist on that!
What have you learned from JHP that you will take with you to your job or to the rest of your life?
I’ve learned a lot from Menachem and Ephriam who were really the two spiritual leaders of JHP and primary architects along with the lead students at the time. This was my first job out of school and I never had worked in a meaningful way before other than odd jobs here and there. I never really had a boss or supervisor or someone to report to the way I did at JHP. I just learned how to think things through and really project what you were trying to do and how you are going to get it done. That was very different from school when you get an assignment and just do what a teacher told you. So as a first job that was a great experience for me.
