Andrew Guckes | Staff Writer
For Ariel Nissan, growing up Jewish in North Carolina meant she wasn’t always in spaces filled with other Jews. However, she attended a now-closed Jewish boarding and day school in Greensboro, North Carolina, which gave her the chance to be surrounded by her fellow tribesmen and women and live a thoroughly Jewish life.
So, during her junior year of college at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, when the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Nissan craved the comfort of community more than anything, she had a realization: she needed to work in the Jewish professional world.
“I realized that I really missed the Jewish community and missed working and living in the community and decided to apply for work at Hillel,” she said.
Nissan was accepted to a fellowship that placed her at a Hillel somewhere in the United States, which is how she wound up in her current role as director of student engagement and Katz Innovation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Hillel. She may be new to Philadelphia, but she has taken to it quickly.
“Living in Philly has just been amazing,” she said. “There’s always something to do Jewishly, and I’ve just met the most amazing people here. I’ve made friends really quickly just because of the [nature of the] Jewish community.”
Nissan said that the city’s deep breadth of history and culture has made the transition from the south an easy one. She loves to explore coffee shops and spend time in the Philadelphia Public Library. Living in Bella Vista, she spends a lot of time at Hawthorne Park. Nissan said that the city is big enough to never be boring, but not overwhelming.
When she first arrived, Nissan said the plan was to finish her two-year fellowship at Penn Hillel and then go from there.
“It’s a place that I didn’t realize I would want to stay in, but right now I have no plans of leaving,” she said. “I’m not the type of person who has a 10- or 12-year plan. I take things day by day, and so far Philly has been a really amazing place with great people.”
When people think of Hillel, they may think of undergraduate mixers and classes meant to get 18-year-olds comfortable on campus. While that’s an important role that Hillel plays at campuses around the country, Nissan is excited to be working on something new. She is heading an effort to increase the Penn Hillel’s offerings for graduate students.
“That’s something that a lot of Jewish graduate students at Penn have been seeking,” she said.
While undergraduate outreach often starts with chats over coffee, the postgraduate programs have been aimed a bit differently. The first few events were happy hours, Shabbat gatherings and other holiday gatherings, and the feedback from students who attended has been clear: they want more.
Nissan said that she feels that the work she is doing with postgraduates is important because universities often prioritize their undergraduate population.
“I have friends who are in grad school, and I know that it can be a very isolating time for a lot of people,” she said. “They’re in a new city, at a new school with new people, and there’s really not much built in to support grad students at a lot of campuses, especially Jewishly.”
Philadelphia also has a deep tradition of Sephardic and Mizrahi Judaism, which matters a lot to Nissan, the daughter of two Israelis. She said that in her free time, she can often be found making Israeli dishes or baking Israeli treats. She doesn’t belong to a synagogue, but another of her favorite activities is taking part in a Rosh Chodesh group, marking the beginning of each new month.
“We come together and either journal, make art or just talk about the coming month and what our goals are,” Nissan said.
For Nissan, moving to a city that is so fluently Jewish means a lot considering her lineage and where she is from. Now that she has found a truly Jewish city, she has been able to fully embrace what it means to live a Jewish life.
“In my opinion, Philly has the perfect Jewish community,” she said. “Everybody is just so great and it’s a really awesome community to be a part of.”
