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Micah Gill: Born leader draws inspiration from AIPAC conference

Shalhevet High School graduating senior Micah Gill’s mother is a runner. She swears by it, saying it gives her a runner’s high.
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June 9, 2016

MICAH GILL, 18
HIGH SCHOOL: Shalhevet High School
GAP YEAR: Yeshivat HaKotel, Israel
GOING TO: University of Pennsylvania

Shalhevet High School graduating senior Micah Gill’s mother is a runner. She swears by it, saying it gives her a runner’s high.

Micah enjoys running, too, but a different kind: The school leader gets his kicks from public speaking and, in particular, running weekly town hall meetings at Shalhevet as agenda chair, a position equivalent to student council president. 

“It’s definitely a hard, but very meaningful and very rewarding, task,” he said. 

Micah’s role in student leadership had its perks. This past year, the 18-year-old enjoyed a subsidized trip to the 2016 American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) conference in Washington, D.C. Being around so many like-minded, pro-Israel community members was incredible, he said.

“Being in the room … with almost 20,000 Jews and 20,000 Israel supporters is an experience I don’t think I’ll ever forget. An ambience, a feeling stuck with me for a while,” he said.

“Ted Cruz is not my guy, but at the end of his speech, he said … ‘Am Yisrael chai’ (the People of Israel live), and everyone just erupted. I felt a sense of unity with people I’ve never met; I felt a sense of pride of being a Jew, of being an Israel visitor, an Israel supporter,” said Micah, who plans to vote for Hillary Clinton. “It was an awesome experience for me.”

Agenda chair is one of many ways Micah is involved with the school community. He is captain of the school’s flag football team and — a die-hard Dodgers fan — plays center field on the varsity baseball team. He also has been a member of the school’s Model Congress team all throughout high school, giving his public speaking skills more of a workout.

He helped create a newsletter called Nitzotzei Torah, (Hebrew for “sparks of Torah”), which features student writing about the weekly Torah portions. To date, Shalhevet has released 15 to 20 issues of the publication.

Micah said he loves the collaborative nature of the project. 

“I love energizing and galvanizing people to do projects, especially projects involving Torah. It’s a good way to flex my muscles with writing, with Torah, and it’s good for Shalhevet as a whole,” he said.

Micah, who attends Shalhevet with his twin brother, Jonah, said he loves the Shalhevet community and hopes he was able to contribute a lot to what others there were able to accomplish. 

“Being agenda chair is a prime way to take Shalhevet — to take the school — into my own hands,” he said. “I think I’ve shown ninth-graders it’s OK to get up and make a fool of yourself and make a comment [during town hall], shown 12th-graders who are virtually done with high school that they have a lot to learn from [themselves] and about others. … I love my high school more than anything.”

That said, Micah, who identifies as Modern Orthodox, remains excited about what the future has in store. He will be spending the 2016-17 academic year at Yeshivat HaKotel, an educational institution in Jerusalem, before he begins at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 2017. 

What does he plan to study at Penn? 

“If I’m not mistaken, I’m an undecided liberal arts major — a big emphasis on the ‘undecided.’ ”

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