Hillel Hayom Fall 2024
Reflections
Rabbi Danielle Stillman
What are we putting down this year?
We didn’t know quite what to expect this year. Last year we were surprised when 70 new students, some Jewish and some not, all curious about Shabbat and hungry for a homecooked meal, came through the door for orientation Shabbat dinner on Friday night. This year, I wondered if the politics of the war might keep people away from a Jewish space.
Good thing we cooked a lot of food just in case! On Friday, September 6, 60 students and their first-year dean showed up to learn about and celebrate Shabbat. The Jewish students were there to see what Jewish life was like at Middlebury, and they brought their new friends. The students who had never experienced Shabbat before were enthusiastic and respectful, and everyone was impressed by the returning students coming back early to welcome everyone to Middlebury Hillel and the Jewish tradition of Shabbat. Each returning student took a smaller group and led them through an exercise we do here every Friday evening—introduce yourself and answer a question about your week. In this case: “What are you putting down for Shabbat/this weekend so you can rest?”
It’s a question I am asking myself too, as we enter into this New Year. What do I want to put down from the past year so I can rest a little more this coming year, feel a little more ease and presence? We have all been carrying so much. Of course, we won’t let it all go—our prayers and advocacy to bring the hostages home (please G-d, may they be home by the time this piece goes to press), our desire to stop the killing of all the innocent humans caught in this terrible war and cycles of violence, our concern about rising antisemitism in the U.S.
Regarding unrest on college campuses, I have been listening closely to Yehuda Kurtzer of the Hartman Institute speak of the “productive discomfort” that he posits should be part of any liberal arts education. “Unproductive discomfort” must be addressed, but “productive discomfort” can be embraced (Yehuda Kurtzer, Identity/Crisis podcast, January 16, 2024). Students can tolerate and learn from this kind of discomfort exactly because of the vibrant, connected Jewish community that was evident at that Shabbat dinner during orientation.
I also feel optimistic because students don’t confine their Jewish connections to campus. The two articles we are sharing in this issue of Hillel Hayom are both written by students who reached out to me to pitch stories about the Jewish experiences they had on their study abroad programs this past spring. You can read about Noah’s time spent with the remarkable Jewish community of Cameroon and Ruby’s exploration of Jewish history and her own Jewish identity in central Europe. Their deep connection to Jewish tradition and identity shines through every word.
My hope for this year of 5785, and this academic year of 2024–25, is that we can make room for the stories of all the Jewish students who are creating welcoming communities based on Jewish ritual and traditions, who are seeking ways to deepen their connection with one another and with their Jewish identities, and who are reaching out to their peers across faith backgrounds and sometimes across political difference to connect to them, too. Even in the midst of wondering what to expect, I can’t wait to see what we will all create.
May the year of 5785 bring good news and may we all make room to let some hope into these tightest of spaces. Shana Tova u’Metukah. May we find moments of goodness and sweetness in the year to come.
Finding a Jewish Home in the Unlikeliest of Places
Noah Miller ‘25.5
Last spring, I had the privilege of spending five months living in Cameroon on a Middlebury study abroad program. Although I was there with the principal goal of improving my fluency in French, I was surprised by how profound my stay was on a personal level.
Apart from the predictable experiences and personal growth that came out of my time abroad—the French immersion, for instance, was a resounding success—I left Cameroon having encountered some unforeseen adventures. Among them, I was recruited and trained to model in a Cameroonian fashion runway show, I experienced my first ever Sunday Mass at a Pentecostal church (an entertaining, roller coaster of a story for another article), and I contracted malaria—accompanied with a 105-degree fever—halfway through month four of my stay. Yet by far the most meaningful experience I had was meeting and becoming very close to a local Cameroonian Jewish community. The Beth Yeshourun Cameroonian Jewish Community took me in as part of their family during my stay and taught me a lot about Judaism, my own identity, and what it means to be Jewish.
First, some context. You might be stuck on the idea of Jews in Cameroon. How did they end up there, of all places? I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit skeptical as well.
Almost by happenstance, Rabbi Danielle and I first saw mention of this community during a meeting late last November when we were searching for a local Chabad or Israeli embassy in Yaoundé where I could go for Pesach Seder. The original impetus of our conversation was the question “What strategies are there to navigate the experience of being in a place without other Jews?”—a question that felt particularly critical in the weeks following October 7 as I was preparing to leave for a place with seemingly no Jews.
The article we stumbled across was published in 2010 by an American nonprofit organization called Kulanu that “supports isolated, emerging, and returning Jewish communities around the globe.” Further exploration led us to a couple of other articles on the same topic and similar websites from the early 2010s, but not much of anything else. Isolated, indeed. We also found an official community website that appeared to feature the same people but carried no working links and assuredly had not been updated for at least the past eight to 10 years.
I left that meeting with a newfound buzz and an apprehensive but hopeful feeling in my gut, but with no plan of action, and then proceeded to forget about the subject until I arrived in Yaoundé two months later.
Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, is a vibrant, sprawling metropolis of a city, carved seemingly haphazardly into the hilly landscape of the central African jungle. The city is full of movement and chaos and feels in many ways to be about as far away from life in Middlebury as one could conceivably get. The roads are pocked with potholes, lined with jostling street vendors selling tubers of fermented cassava, miscellaneous auto parts, and fresh mangoes, with moto-taxi drivers swerving between yellow Toyota taxis from the ’90s stuffed with six, seven, or even eight passengers, each paying less than a dollar to commute across the city.
After a couple of weeks spent getting acclimated to the pace of life in Yaoundé, I went back to that same outdated website and managed to get my hands on an email address linked to the Jewish community in Cameroon. I sent an email introducing myself as an American student who had recently arrived in Cameroon and stated that I would love to meet everyone. I got a response the next day from a man named Serge Etele. Serge Etele, as I would come to find out, is the rabbi of the community and an extraordinary man. We made plans to meet for lunch at la Maison du Café, one of the few truly Western spots in the city. In very un-Cameroonian fashion, he arrived 30 minutes early to our meeting, and we chatted for a half hour before he requested that we change locations and then proceeded to take me into an empty ramshackle dive bar and cabaret called le Bunker, where we spent the rest of the afternoon getting to know each other in an aptly “less stuffy” environment.
Over the course of our first conversation, I got an introduction to the community and to the inspiring story of the rabbi, who initially developed his Jewish practice exclusively from online resources before receiving a scholarship to study at rabbinical school in Israel and visiting several synagogues in the U.S. Funny enough, he said he had never planned to go into the rabbinate and told me that he used to play guitar at that very cabaret while he was a university student studying in a much more typical field.
He told me that the community—which is French speaking—has about 100–150 members in total, that there is a huge untapped interest in Judaism in Cameroon, and that prior to COVID, they had three active synagogues: one in Yaoundé, where we were located; one in Douala, Cameroon’s port city and a major economic hub; and one in Sa’a, a small village in the center region where the rabbi and his family are from. Today, the synagogue in Sa’a is the only one that remains, due to the financial impact of the pandemic. In the past, they would get many visitors from all over the world: French, Belgians, Americans, and Israelis; and they would host tourists, ambassadors, journalists, and businesspeople for Shabbat at the synagogue in Yaoundé or up in the village.
After that first meeting, the rabbi invited me back to le Bunker to meet three other members of the community. He led us in a bracha together over our beers and then we proceeded to spend six hours debating theology until the place closed down and we had to leave for the night. The three community members and I became fast friends, and I left with an invitation to come up to Sa’a to spend Shabbat and Purim at the synagogue.
Candidly, I received mixed reactions to this proposal. Back in the States, my parents were on board, but the Middlebury program director and my host family in Cameroon were not too keen on entertaining the idea of me traveling multiple hours into the jungle by myself alongside some man I had met over the Internet just weeks prior. When they eventually did come around, I was hit with a slew of liability forms and specific security instructions; I was to share my location at all times, keep my door deadbolted at all times, and only travel during daylight hours in vetted taxis.
I left that Friday straight from classes into a taxi that chauffeured me to the north end of the city, toward la Gare Routière d’Olembé, a zoo of African minibuses, incessant vendors, and local travelers carrying huge suitcases and bunches of plantains. There I spotted the rabbi, who led me through a maze of moving obstacles to a ticket counter, where we purchased $2 bus tickets to Sa’a and then tried to push our way back out of the terminal. I was the only white person for miles around (evidently they don’t see many foreigners in this part of town), and thus prime prey for the vendors. To get them to stop bothering me, Rabbi Etele told them I was visiting from Israel and only spoke Hebrew.
After two hours of the most cramped and sweaty minibus ride I’ve ever experienced, with people squeezed shoulder to shoulder and hanging out the open door, we reached a clearing in the rainforest and a vista of civilization.
The rabbi called the bus to stop, led me out, and flagged a moto-taxi (sorry, Middlebury…), which sped us up and down a steep dirt road to the synagogue, where we were greeted by all three generations of the Etele family and summoned inside to start Shabbat preparations.
After months of being away from Jewish spaces, walking into Kabbalat Shabbat—in Cameroon, of all places—was one of the most euphoric moments of my entire time abroad. Many of the tunes were familiar, everyone was incredibly welcoming, the challah—cooked on an open fire—was among the best I had ever tasted (sorry, Mom), and above everything else, I felt a wave of spiritual calm and familiarity wash over me, as though I was truly at home. Away from the commotion of the city, the atmosphere was tranquil, the air was clean, the company was truly wonderful, and I was surrounded by community in the unlikeliest of places.
One of the rabbi’s comments that night really stuck with me. After welcoming and introducing me to the congregation, he turned to the 20 other people in the room and said:
“Your being Jewish is a blessing unlike any other in the world. Anywhere in the world that life will take you, you have a family there waiting for you. I experienced it during my visit to the U.S., Noah is experiencing it now, and someday, b’ezrat Hashem (with the help of G-d), you will get to experience it too.”
In the three months that followed, I had countless wonderful experiences and adventures alongside my new Cameroonian Jewish family. In Sa’a, Purim featured a dramatic French/Hebrew reading of the Megillah along with a motorbike excursion deep into the rainforest to visit a cacao plantation and the synagogue’s mikvah; on Pesach we ate homemade matzah and sat for a five-hour Seder in the dark without electricity; Shabbat Kiddushim (the prayers usually made over wine) were made with whiskey (“spicy beer,” as coined by a seven-year-old boy in the congregation) and palm wine in lieu of Manischewitz (no such thing as kosher wine in Cameroon); after Havdalah (the brief ritual that ends Shabbat), Sundays were spent playing Frisbee and soccer with the kids and going on excursions in the village.
Back in Yaoundé, we developed a tradition of going to le Bunker and then on excursions to find the best poisson braisé, a Cameroonian-style grilled whole fish—and a happily kosher meal—in town, found exclusively at night on the side of the road and eaten with bare hands alongside fermented cassava and fried plantains. Additionally, I got invited to multiple community members’ houses in Yaoundé and had the pleasure of introducing many of them to my host family and study abroad friends as well.
Taken together, these experiences and the conversations they prompted expanded my perspective of Judaism and what it means to be Jewish in a way I don’t believe I could’ve experienced in any other context.
On a purely fundamental level, the Cameroonian Jewish community faces the opposite existential challenge of most American Jewish communities. American Jewish spaces are flushed with seemingly endless resources and yet struggle with retention and maintaining interest.
Contrarily, in Cameroon, a much more religiously tolerant and open society, new interest in Judaism is higher than ever, yet a lack of resources is the community’s limiting factor, preventing prospective members from accessing Jewish spaces and education.
I learned from Rabbi Etele during my time in Cameroon that this burgeoning interest in Judaism is not unique to one specific country but is taking place all over sub-Saharan Africa. You’ve likely heard of the Jewish community in Ethiopia, and potentially that of Uganda, but how about Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Gabon, or Zimbabwe? Africa very well could be the epicenter of the next wave of contemporary Judaism if this trend continues.
These communities additionally often attract the most intellectual people of their respective locales, who stumble across Judaism as a result of their “asking too many questions” about religion (which leads them to the Kabbalah or the Tanakh). For these members and prospective converts, Judaism provides a niche for their curiosity and a place where they’ll be embraced for asking questions.
Coming from this context, the Cameroonian Jewish community strives to be extremely outward facing in nature, unlike many American Jewish communities, which was a refreshing and very new perspective for me, and one I believe we have a lot to learn from. “If Catholics can build Catholic schools that enroll students of other religions, why aren’t there Jewish schools open to non-Jews? If France can build cultural centers in Yaoundé and other major cities around the world, why can’t we team up with the Israeli Embassy to build an Israeli culture and Hebrew language center in Cameroon?” asked the Rabbi once over beers at le Bunker. My conversations with them were always phenomenal food for thought and reinforced my pride in my own Jewish identity.
Thinking back to that meeting almost a year ago with Rabbi Danielle, I am thrilled and proud to report that my time abroad not only exceeded all expectations but reinvigorated my Jewish identity on a profound level. In a time when there is so much division in our Jewish communities, finding a Jewish home in such an unforeseen place was the biggest blessing I could have ever asked for and an experience I truly hope we can continue to encourage as we look towards the future of our global Jewish community.
Exploring Central European History and Myself
Ruby Taylor ’25
I spent this past spring in Prague studying central European Jewish history. The experience was meaningful, illuminative, and ultimately hopeful. My study cohort of 15 or so American students spent most of our time within the city, but we also traveled to Vienna, Budapest, Krakow, Auschwitz, Terezin—important locations of Jewish life and death. At each new city we were met with remarkable lectures (in Krakow, we learned about post-Holocaust pogroms; in Budapest we heard about changes in the Jewish community after the Soviet Union), educational tours (we visited more Jewish quarters than countries!), and other varied and deeply evocative experiences.
Before discussing more fully my experience abroad, it feels necessary to lay out the bare facts of my own Jewish identity, as this of course influenced my lens and interpretation of the various opportunities and learnings offered by my program. I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, around the block from all four of my grandparents. Afternoons spent with each set of grandparents consuming chocolates and cookies and so many stories were the best of my childhood.
I did not go to Hebrew school and can’t read a lick of the language, but I grew up utterly proud of my Jewishness, declaring matzo ball soup my favorite food and Passover my favorite holiday. As a child, I lay awake at night retelling myself the story of my maternal grandfather escaping Nazi-occupied Vienna, one hand clutching his father and the other a child-sized violin, to corroborate their story that the two of them were off to attend my five-year-old grandpa’s violin lesson, and not to leave their home forever. With as much childlike intentness I envisioned my paternal grandfather sneaking pickles from the barrels outside the deli at the end of his New York City block. Jewishness was the common denominator that tied us all together. A sensitive and unusually nostalgic child, I considered my identity as a Jew among my most coveted. As I grew older, my focus on family stories morphed into interest in the greater context in which these tales existed. This evolution led me eventually to the Jewish history program in Prague.
Despite having heard and thought about the Holocaust my whole life, abroad I felt the reality of the genocide and its aftermath in ways that shocked me again and again.
Our first Friday in Prague, my cohort (nearly all Jewish American students) attended Shabbat services at one of the two active synagogues in the city. We made up nearly half of the attendees. Half! I was dumbfounded. Where was everybody? And then it hit my chest with a weight and eventually my head: everybody was gone. Two-thirds of Prague’s Jewish community had been murdered in the Holocaust. During the Soviet regime, most survivors kept their Jewishness secret for safety. In other words, this was everybody.
In March, my cohort made its way to Krakow, where we visited the Galicia Jewish Museum. In the main room of the small museum was a photography exhibit displaying recent images of Galicia and remnants of the Jewish life that made up more than 10 percent of the population before the Holocaust. Images of doorframes with outlines indicating where mezuzahs had once been fixed, or of the bones of a synagogue, now overgrown with a tree sprouting straight through its once roof, or of mossed-over headstones, beautifully carved with Hebrew and images of birds and goats and local flora, set into a hillside, neglected and nearly forgotten. The absence and loss in these images and the rest in the exhibit again shifted my understanding of the Holocaust from simply a murderous horror to a murderous horror that, well, had lasting effect. It seems impossibly foolish, but in all my previous Holocaust education and thinking, we had focused more on the tragedy of lives lost during the 1940s and not so much on the vast emptiness of post-liberation Jewish Europe. At the Galicia Museum, it was clear: extermination of individuals and communities also means termination of those cultural and ancestral lines. Perhaps I was foolish in overlooking this fact of genocide. Perhaps it was too much to bear.
I carried the weight of the museum epiphany through the afternoon until sunset, when we sat down at the JCC of Krakow for Shabbat services. This evening was almost as unforgettable as the morning’s museum. While 90 percent of Poland’s Jews (10 percent of the country’s population pre-Shoah) were murdered in the Holocaust, the community center was rich and thriving. The large room was packed with song and festivity. The dinner was attended by Jews and non-Jews alike. Over dinner we discussed and performed Jewish cultural preservation through food and song and conversation. In addition to functioning as a center for things Jewish, the JCC provides significant aid to Ukrainian refugees of the area—a mission undertaken, I imagine, as a corrective, with the memory of those who did and didn’t provide aid during the Holocaust in mind, and a determination to land on the right side of history today.
My experiences in central Europe left me with an urgency to speak and listen and remember. To refuse to let experiences of loss and displacement be forgotten or overlooked. To remember the great struggles and injustices of the past.
To remember the joys of everyday lives, too. This urgent direction does not only apply to the memory of Europe’s murdered Jews, but to all people, across time, who experience violence on political and racial bases. As a descendent of a people so violently erased, it feels my duty to remember the lives and deaths of my own recent ancestors, but also to actively oppose the brutality against and displacement of others, no matter the source. I left my Prague program as hungry for Jewish history as when I arrived. I’ve since begun a senior thesis on Jewish American immigrant memoir. I hope my studies won’t stop there. I’m enormously grateful for my experiences in Europe, and I’m confident that these months in Prague and beyond will inform my navigation of Jewish worlds past and present for many years to come.