The Center for the Jewish Future’s Aaron and Blanche Schreiber Torah Tours program dispatched close to 300 Yeshiva University students to 60 Jewish communities throughout North America this past Simchat Torah. For over four decades, Torah Tours has sent teams consisting of about 4 to 8 YC and Stern students to enhance the holiday experience of participating communities. With destinations like Quebec and Boynton Beach, this year’s program empowered students to lead prayer services, give lectures, run youth and young adult programming, and generally contribute to a festive, Torah-oriented atmosphere throughout the holiday.
For the past eight years, Torah Tours has been run by Aliza Abrams, director of the CJF’s Department of Jewish Service Learning. Abrams, a Stern graduate, fondly recalls her Torah Tour trips to Boston and San Francisco in her junior and senior years at Stern: “I am still friends with the people I went on Torah Tours with and am still in touch with some of the community members that brought in our group.”
After graduating Stern, Abrams served as a presidential fellow at the CJF, which is when she was first charged with spearheading the Torah Tours program. Because she had such a positive experience as a student, she has since expanded the program to include CJF’s “Jewish Life Coast to Coast,” a winter-break initiative, which, in Abrams’s words, is “basically ten days of Torah tours.”
In the weeks leading up to Sukkot and Shavuot, the two holidays for which Torah Tours provides programming, Abrams describes her office as “a locker room at half time of a football game.” Inundated with applications and requests from YU students, Abrams and her colleagues have to sort through the applications to best match up teams and communities. “A lot of thought and sensitivity goes into it,” she says.
Continues Abrams, “We look at the communities who signed up and the people who have applied and we see where everybody fits best and where their talents will best be used. Some years we had nights where we had to stay at the office till 1:00.” Laughing, Abrams points out that “we have since figured out a system where we don’t have to stay up so late.”
Occasionally, there will be a team that lacks chemistry or doesn’t completely click with the host community, but, as Abrams points out, “this is usually not the norm.”
Despite the many hours it takes to put the teams together and the complaints that are sometimes received from students disappointed with their placement (most students consider communities in the tri-state area less exotic and desirable than communities outside of it), Abrams says that the positive feedback from both the communities and the students makes it all worth it and motivates her to keep running the program.
“I get e-mails from communities saying that ‘we’ve never had dancing like we had this holiday’ or ‘your students made our holiday.’ There also are students who will say ‘we’re already planning to go back.’” According to Abrams, a team this year connected so well with its host community that team members are planning to make their own travel arrangements to go back for winter break.
Though Abrams has received requests to sends groups for Shabbosim, she explains that she doesn’t have the staff right now to quite so drastically expand the program.
SCW student Sarah Robinson went to Congregation Beth Israel in Malden, Massachusetts for Torah Tours this year. Comments Sarah, “I’ve done Torah Tours three times because it is the most meaningful way I can spend Chag.”
