‘JAM’-packed Campus Outreach

It’s not unusual to see 60 students cramming into an
nonairconditioned duplex on fraternity row on a Saturday night at UCLA — unless
those students happen to be surrounding a havdalah candle singing Hebrew songs.

But so it is on this warm winter Saturday night, as a crowd
of Jewish students gather for sushi and havdalah at the home of Rabbi Benzion
Klatzko. Affectionately referred to by students as “Rabbi K,” with his energy
and youthfulness, Klatzko, 34, could easily pass for a student if it weren’t
for the “Rabbi With Attitude” sign on his front door. Klatzko serves as one of
the on-campus rabbi for JAM, the Jewish Awareness Movement at UCLA, an outreach
organization that aims to help unaffiliated Jews “return to their roots,” as
Klatzko said.

With a population that is approximately 8 percent Jewish,
UCLA houses many different Jewish groups on campus. Some, like the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee and Bruins for Israel, are political, and
others, such as Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, tend to be more
social or religious. 

 Recent years, however, have seen the coming of new
organizations  — those that are taking a more aggressive approach in instilling
Judaism into students.  

“Our role is for people who don’t know enough about Judaism
to be looking, or have had a negative experience growing up,” said Klatzko, who
can often be found casually conversing with students on Bruin Walk.

On this crowded Saturday evening, Klatzko is comfortably
milling around his home on the second floor of the building that he and his
family share with JAM’s other on-campus rabbi, Rabbi Eli Bloom. Mingling with
students, he stops to talk to Sara Monroe, a sophomore who was turned on to the
organization when she was approached by Klatzko while sitting at a table on
campus and has been involved in the organization ever since. How did the rabbi
guess that the blond, blue-eyed Monroe was Jewish?

“He asks everyone,” she replied.

Many students find Klatko’s and JAM’s active, hands-on
approach to Judaism appealing.

“The rabbis are really accessible to talk to about anything
that is going on in your life,” said sophomore Aaron Weinberg.

JAM was established in 1993 as a joint venture between UCLA
Hillel and Westwood Kehilla, the neighborhood Orthodox synagogue, to serve the
needs of Orthodox students on campus. It was funded by a three-year grant from
The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles; when the grant ended in 1996,
current JAM Directors Rabbi Moshe and Bracha Zaret took over the organization
and transformed it into an outreach organization hoping to make students more
religious. JAM is currently one of four of its kind that exist on campuses
throughout the United States.

“We’re focusing on Jews with no background at all. It’s our
expertise and it’s where we saw the greatest need,” Zaret told The Journal.

With a database of 2,000 students, JAM’s events tend to be,
well, jammed. The organization events include a weekly portion learning group
and a service that matches a student with an Orthodox family for Shabbat
dinner.

Its JAM’s most popular programs are its winter and summer
trips to New York and its summer trips to Israel, where participants interact
and experience life within various Orthodox communities. “It breaks
misconceptions that these people are cold and hard and ultra-religious,” Zaret
said. Approximately 600 students have participated in the highly subsidized
trips over the past seven years.

Freshman Haggie Mazler went on the New York trip with some
50 students in December. The students visited the diamond exchange in Midtown
Manhattan — where many Chasidim work — and went to Monsey, N.Y., a religious
suburb in Rockland County.

 “The New York trip was about learning how Orthodox people live
and how they study and how they survive in the real world,” Mazler told The
Journal. “Even if you disagree with what you see, you still learn so much and
you have such an appreciation for Judaism,”  Haggie said.

Some students and educators disagree with what they see as
JAM’s monolithic approach.

Junior Tami Reiss praises JAM’s educational work, but is
critical of the organization’s insularity. “Because Rabbi K doesn’t think the
Conservative and Reform movements work as well at keeping people within the
faith, he doesn’t expose students to them,” she said.

Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, director of Hillel at UCLA said,
“I often feel that there’s a tension between the different approaches of two
teachers. One teacher is saying, ‘come to me, I have all the questions’ and the
other saying ‘come to me, I have all the answers.’ I tend to see Hillel as a
place that says to students, ‘come let’s explore these questions together, but
I can’t promise you that at the end we will find the answer. All I know is that
we will confront the problem with integrity.’ The other approach would
guarantee that there must be an answer, and that we will certainly find it.”

Hillel, which has a global network of more than 500 regional
centers, campus foundations and student organizations, caters to the
approximately 2,500 Jewish students at UCLA.

“At Hillel, we want to give students an opportunity to
experience the rich rhythms of Jewish life, so that they will be able to make
an intelligent decision as to how they want to grow Jewishly and to what extent
they want to be involved,” Seidler-Feller said. He believes that students will
go in a variety of different directions and “we have to legitimate and nurture
the different paths that they choose to take.”

Despite their different philosophies, Hillel and JAM do
occasionally run programs together and their student participants often
overlap. One such example includes a recent joint Hillel-JAM Shabbat dinner.

“JAM is for the student who won’t feel fulfilled unless they
are doing something uniquely Jewish,” Zaret said.

Zaret and other JAM leaders view their approach as
open-minded, noting that students are also exposed to Jews who are leaders in
the secular community in the fields of finance, entertainment and politics.

“Where there are people that are reconnecting to their
Judaism, even though it’s through Conservative, or perhaps Reform, we — in
principle — are delighted to expose students to such people, and in practice we
have done it.” (They recently had entertainment agent David Lonner as a
speaker.)

“We’re looking for people with a passion that have their
foot in both worlds — both the Jewish world and the secular world, whether it
is politics, finance, or entertainment,” Zaret said. “Generally speaking, we
notice that the people that are most passionate about their reconnecting to
Judaism happen to be within the Orthodox community.”

According to Rabbi David Refson, dean of Neve Yerushalayim
College in Jerusalem, compared to other campus outreach organizations around
the country, JAM at UCLA has one of the highest percentage of students becoming
shomer Shabbat.

Ultimately, Zaret hopes that the students will retain some
aspect of what they are exposed to through JAM. “When you’re dealing with
hundreds and hundreds of students over time, the reality is that the majority
doesn’t become Orthodox,” Zaret said. “But, the overwhelming majority develops
a much stronger connection to their Jewish roots, and perhaps it will mean not
intermarrying and perhaps it will mean keeping the Sabbath.” 

To register for JAM’s first spring New
York trip, March 22-30, contact Rabbi Benzion Klatzko at sagewannabe@aol.com
 or at (310)
209-4934. p>