Students meet their matches at Hillel

Jewish mothers and fathers typically want their college-age Jewish son to meet a nice Jewish girl; for their daughter, a nice Jewish boy. They might often express this sentiment to their college age son or daughter by the ever so delicate nudging to visit his or her campus Hillel.

While this might seem like a slightly worn joke, Hillel is still often viewed as—or even expected to be—a place where young Jewish singles can meet, get married and then together carry on the legacy of the entire Jewish people. The reality is that many young couples do in fact meet in their student Jewish communities and, through Hillel, establish lasting partnerships.

Ten years ago, in her sophomore year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Tamar Sternfeld met her husband, Scott. Sternfeld explained that there was an “instant foundation” for building a relationship. When you meet someone at Hillel, she said, “you don’t have to explain who you are. Whether or not they believe exactly the same, there’s a sense that they get it, that they get you.”

After a trip to Israel with her campus Hillel, Sternfeld and her roommate from the trip decided they would meet at Hillel Shabbat dinners to keep in touch. At the first dinner her friend showed up with Scott.

“At that point he was just an innocent bystander,” she said. Over the next few weeks, though, they connected and then started dating. A year and half later they were married by Rabbi Sue Laikin Shifron, director of Indiana University Hillel, in Tamar’s hometown of Indianapolis. Scott and Tamar have been married for over seven years and have two children. She currently works within the Jewish community of Akron, Ohio.

Avital O’Glasser, who met her husband, Ben, at Hillel when they were students at the University of Chicago, also spoke of Hillel creating a space with a “level of comfort that takes away a certain awkwardness, where you can let your guard down a little.”

In the fall of 2001, Ben and Avital met early in the school year at a Hillel meet-and-greet for new students. Each maintaining their own social circles, their paths did not cross for another couple months.

They started to run into each other on campus. Ben recalled meeting up with Avital in a computer lab, talking for a little, and then politely explaining that he could not chat because he had a paper to work on.

It was at a Shabbat dinner at Hillel, when their respective friends were absent, that they struck up a conversation. Their first date was later after another Shabbat in a dorm on campus.

“If someone was going to Hillel, then they were interested in Jewish life and their identity, which is what I was looking for,” she said.

“There’s a tacit understanding with anyone you meet at Hillel that there’s going to be some involvement with the Jewish community,” agreed Ben.

Tamar Sternfeld said that connections might be more easily established when, say, two people walk into the same Shabbat service on a Friday night. She remembered her future husband strolled into the same Conservative service. “Being at Hillel opens up doors to conversations that might not otherwise happen. It removes some of the nerves that people have when they first meet,” she said.

“I think most Jewish kids whose families are Jewishly involved grow up with their parents haranguing them to marry another Jew,” joked Ben O’Glasser. “At some level, students at Hillel are looking,” he added.

When asked about the prevalence of coupling at Hillel, Raif Melhado, operations manager at Newberger Hillel at the University of Chicago, admitted that while it’s “not happening in droves,” he can think of a number of student couples whose engagements would not come as a huge surprise.

Melhado recalled a discussion with a prospective student who asked a number of questions about the social scene at Newberger and then finally said, “How shall I put this: Are there nice Jewish girls at Hillel?” Melhado added, “It was clear that he was making his choice of school in part based on the idea of maybe meeting his partner.”

Melhado met his wife, Jessica, at Hillel in Urbana-Champaign. They started dating in March 2005 and married in the fall of 2007. They came from different backgrounds—Melhado identifies as Orthodox while Jessica was raised in a committed Reform home—but learned they had a great deal in common. Both, for instance, came from small Jewish communities. Raif was raised in Champaign. Jessica grew up in Decatur and, for a time, in a Newfoundland town where her family constituted the entire Jewish population. Melhado explained that Hillel provided a “unique environment” for their meeting.

Yelena Litvinsky, a senior at the University of Illinois (UIC), met her boyfriend, Dmitry Voloshin, at Levine Hillel in her freshman year during a lunchtime study event. Their conversation continued online, they soon became friends, and then started dating.

Both are invested in their community, said Litvinsky. They share Shabbat dinners and other Hillel events together.
Litvinsky explained that Hillel at UIC provided the space for her and Voloshin to connect. “It’s a place to just relax and just spend time together, and also feel that sense of community,” she said.

Ilan Kreimont, another student at UIC, recalled going to his first Shabbat dinner as a freshman at Levine Hillel. “I thought, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll meet a Jewish girl at one of these Shabbat dinners.” Kreimont, now single, said that students are in part looking for relationships at Hillel, where people may share “similar values.”

Now in his final semester, Kreimont said he’ll continue looking for a “Jewish girl” after his time at UIC. Kreimont added, “I think Hillel involvement bolsters that desire to be with someone Jewish.”

Jordan Roth is staff associate for The Hillels of Illinois.

The Hillels of Illinois, a partner in serving our community, is supported by the Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life.