OU-JLIC WOMEN STUDY TORAH FOR LIFELONG INSPIRATION BY SHERRY AMSTER
Tzippy Shteingart, Eliora Habshush, Sherry Amster and Sima Shulman share a joyous moment in HaMidrasha.
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Fall 2016 | Reunion Magazine
ommunity can be something very hard to find, especially in a college with over 20,000 students. And yet, a small group of women in Queens College have managed to create a community all their own, with Torah values at its core. OU-JLIC’s HaMidrasha at QC is an immersive on-campus Torah learning program for female students who wish to make Torah learning and Torah living part of their everyday lives. Planning for HaMidrasha at QC started almost the moment OU-JLIC educators, Rabbi Robby and Shoshana Charnoff, got to campus four years ago. With more than 1,000 Orthodox students on
the QC Campus, the Charnoffs had their work cut out for them. Though there are several yeshivot in the area to service men who would like to add Torah learning into their daily schedules, there is no comparable program for women. As a result, the Charnoffs began to notice that the women on campus wanted more and more formal Torah education, despite their busy college workload. By the end of their first year on campus, the Charnoffs were running so many individual chavrutot and small group chaburot for women that they felt as though they had established an “accidental Midrasha.” With that thought in mind, OU-JLIC’s HaMidrasha at QC was launched.
Rabbi Charnoff put together a diverse group of female students to create a vision and structure for what this program would look like. Known as the “Midrasha Team,” the group worked with Rabbi Charnoff to answer some tough questions: As women, what are the most important things for us to be learning at this stage in our lives? What do we need to know now in order to keep learning over the course of a lifetime? How do we infuse our lives with Jewish meaning now, and as we go forward? “As a man, I couldn’t fully answer those questions myself,” says Rabbi Charnoff. “I wanted the female students to have ownership over their own experience.”