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MAJOR inspires college students to be ‘growing and learning Jews’

By Leon Cohen
Special to The Chronicle

October 29th, 2009

Reuven Fridmar, Sarah Minkin, and Victoria Rud are all Jewish students attending Milwaukee universities who by their own admission are not particularly religious.

Yet all three found the Milwaukee Alliance for Jewish Reconnection, or MAJOR, participated in its program offerings, and have become enthusiastic fans and promoters of this effort.

Fridmar, almost 22, found it first. Though he comes from the only Jewish family now living in Medford, Wis., he had spent his childhood in Israel, where he had learned some Bible stories; but he had not gone further into Jewish learning.

Friends at Marquette University, where he is majoring in marketing and entrepreneurship, told him about MAJOR and its director, Rabbi Daniel Meister.

“I was a little skeptical,” Fridmar said in a telephone interview on Oct. 19. “I always thought programs like this were geared for very religious people, and I was turned off by that.”

But the friends also were not religious, and they told him that the program was “geared to non-religious people,” Fridmar said. “I figured since they benefited, I could also.”

Since his participation in the fall 2008 session of MAJOR’s Maimonides Jewish Leaders Fellowship, Fridmar has become president of MU’s Jewish Student Union and has been a keen promoter of the MAJOR program. “I’m the type of person that if I find something good and worthwhile, I’ll be the biggest advocate for it,” he said.

In fact, Fridmar helped inspire Minkin, 19, to participate. At the invitation of another Jewish student, Minkin attended one of MAJOR’s deli dinners that Fridmar helped organize at MU.

Minkin grew up in Glendale and had graduated from the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, but “I didn’t have any more” Jewish education after that, she said in a telephone interview Oct. 18.

Nevertheless, “it always interested me,” she said. MAJOR “brought me back into it,” and “it was a great way to do it and meet new people at the same time,” she said.

Minkin participated in a Maimonides Fellowship session this past spring. She is now on the board of the Jewish Student Organization at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is a sophomore majoring in elementary education. She plans to go on a Birthright trip to Israel this winter.

Rud, 19, became interested after her Birthright trip to Israel this past January. Born in Ukraine, she comes from a Russian family that now lives in Grafton and that “never did anything Jewish,” she said in a telephone interview Oct. 19. “It was all new to me,” she said.

A sophomore majoring in international studies at UWM, Rud learned about MAJOR through Hillel Milwaukee. “I decided it would be a great opportunity to learn about it,” she said.

MAJOR is Meister’s brainchild but the Maimonides Jewish Leaders Fellowship is a program that appears on many other college and university campuses in the country, including at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“The structure is the same,” he said during a telephone interview on Oct. 19. It includes 10 classes at which food is served, plus Shabbaton weekend retreats and a trip of some kind, either within or outside a community.

However, “the curriculums are different, modeled after what the instructor feels is best suited for the students and for his type of presentation,” Meister said.

And Meister’s “type of presentation” apparently emphasizes two themes.

First, “the topics I choose [to present] focus on things that are relevant to the students,” he said. “How to deal with roommates and friends, and what Judaism has to say about what to do when you don’t get along. What Judaism has to say about love, dating and marriage.”

Rud particularly liked this approach to the Torah and Jewish learning. “It’s not just ‘Here’s a holy book from history a long time ago,’” she said. “It’s something you can use day-to-day. That’s very nice.”

But second, Meister’s overall goal of this is to help the students “grow their Jewish identity.”

“There are so many Jewish students nowadays who don’t have a positive Jewish identity,” he said. “They’re ashamed of their Judaism or they hide their Judaism; and even if they don’t do that, they don’t know why they should be proud of it.”

“MAJOR believes that Jewish identity grows through Jewish knowledge and education,” Meister said.

Moreover, though Orthodox himself, Meister said he is not necessarily trying to make newly Orthodox Jews. Rather, said Meister, “There are two kinds of Jews: Jews that are trying to grow and learn more, and Jews that aren’t,” and he wants to make more of the first type.

Of the nearly 40 students who have come through MAJOR’s Maimonides Fellowship program to date, many “don’t change what they do, but their outlook on Judaism changes drastically,” he said.

Minkin, for example, was raised in the Reform movement and she still considers herself as belonging there; but she is now “a more observant Reform Jew, aware of what’s around me and being able to value what I have,” she said.

Meister originally comes from New York City. His parents are Israelis who while “not observant at the time,” didn’t want to educate him in public schools and so sent him to the Yeshiva of Flatbush.

He attended other Orthodox schools in the U.S. and in Israel, and became attracted to Orthodox Judaism because “I saw that the people seemed extremely satisfied in life, and I saw that their kids and they were on the same page … that the lessons being taught to the children were being practiced by the adults, too,” he said. “Finally, I realized it was the right thing to do.”

Ordained by Rabbi Ephraim Greenblatt of Memphis, Tenn., Meister decided that he wanted to teach Judaism. After his wife, a native Milwaukeean, found work here, he moved to Milwaukee and pursued a career in business.

But his interest in teaching didn’t wane. In the autumn of 2007, five UWM students who had traveled to Israel decided they wanted more Jewish education, but not through the university’s auspices, said Meister.

According to Meister, these students contacted Rabbi Avi Zaitschek, who was working for Ohr HaTorah Jewish Heritage Center. Meister’s friend, Zaitschek knew that Meister wanted to get back into Jewish education.

The two of them taught the first Maimonides Fellowship program to 20 students in the spring of 2008. With its success, Meister then formed MAJOR, which is being funded by private donations from people in New York and Chicago as well as Milwaukee.

Meister has plans for growing the MAJOR program, including classes for parents, family events and trips to Israel. Most immediately, he has scheduled the famed Orthodox Holocaust survivor, author, broadcaster, and educator Esther Jungreis to appear at UWM’s Zelazo Center on Sunday, Dec. 6, to show and speak about a documentary film about her Holocaust experiences.

College students and their families are invited to a free buffet dinner at 6:30 p.m. The film and Jungreis’ talk will begin at 7:30 p.m., followed by a dessert reception and book signing.

Tickets for the general public are $10 in advance, $15 at the door; admission is free for students with a student ID.

For more information, Meister can be reached by telephone at 414-331-1875, or by email at 1wijew@gmail.com. Moreover, Minkin said that students who would prefer to speak to another student about the program are welcome to contact her by email at sminkin@uwm.edu.

Formerly op-ed editor, Leon Cohen has written for The Chronicle for more than 25 years.