Volunteering's Become a New Twist on Spring Break in Southern Florida

Hillel CEO Wayne Firestone is among those who believe that Jewish service-learning projects, like the one Hillel is running in downtown Miami during spring break, are the key to engaging young Jews. (Photo by Marisa Matluck/JTA)

Jacob Berkman
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

MIAMI

Spending spring break away is a tradition of sorts for college students, but rather than partying, 57 Hillel members from seven campuses headed to Miami last week to volunteer at a youth center in the downtrodden Overtown district.

Instead of sunning on the beach or getting soused in bars, they spent a week engaged in community-service projects, working with underprivileged communities.

The Overtown Youth Center, built by former Miami Heat star Alonzo Mourning, is downtown in one of the city's worst neighborhoods. The 20-block area -- founded as a segregated, black neighborhood because of Jim Crow laws -- was once the center of black culture in Miami. Now, it's overridden with drugs and has the highest rate of violent crimes rate in the southern Florida city.

Each morning last week, the Hillel students worked in the sun building benches and tables for an outdoor classroom for nearby Dunbar Elementary School. In the afternoons, they tutored students at the youth center. Later, they reflected on the work they were doing and the experience of learning up close about what it means to be poor in the United States. (Admittedly, they did have a bit of free time at nights and on Shabbat.)

It was all part of Hillel's Alternative Spring Break program, which this year will involve 1,300 college students from around the world spending their vacations engaged in Jewish service-learning projects.

Such programs have been attracting philanthropic support from funders who see them as a potentially effective way of building Jewish identity among high school and college students.

It's a trend that drew some stiff criticism from Jack Wertheimer, a professor and former provost at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Writing in Commentary, he criticized the idea of focusing attention and resources on creating service projects aimed at helping non-Jews. He took aim at the multimillion-dollar Repair the World, a nonprofit that aims to help create a movement around projects like Alternative Spring Break.

Repair the World shot back that Wertheimer was dead wrong -- that, in fact, the organization is spending millions to help build Jewish identity and assist Jews in need, as well as non-Jews.

As for Hillel, the campus organization is working with several Jewish groups -- ones that you'd expect, including the American Jewish World Service, Jewish Funds for Justice and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee -- to send some students overseas and others to New Orleans.

But in Miami, Hillel was working with a very untraditional partner -- City Year, a non-Jewish nonprofit. The two organizations are teaming up to send a total of 140 students to some of the country's worst neighborhoods, including those in Los Angeles and New York.

Hillel believes that its partnership with City Year, which it piloted last year in Tampa, Fla., is the first large-scale partnership between a Jewish and non-Jewish outlet to create a Jewish service-learning project. The term describes the combination of volunteering with Jewish learning about why and how community service can be understood as an extension of Jewish values.

Depending on the subsidies each school can raise, the program is a fairly inexpensive way to enjoy what the students say is a meaningful experience. For instance, the students who came to Miami from the University of Virginia each paid about $200 to participate, according to the school's Hillel director, Jake Rubin.

Most of them had never spent extended time in such an urban environment. And for many, it was their first serious introduction to Jewish learning and engagement with Jewish culture.

Ziev Beresh, a freshman at Michigan State University, said growing up in New Paltz, N.Y., he really didn't practice much Jewish ritual aside from lighting Chanukah candles. He said that while he is active with the campus Hillel, it is only a small part of his life -- a part he sees primarily as a way to meet people. He has his Jewish circles and his non-Jewish circles.

Beresh, the son of an Israeli mother, said he chose to participate to do something meaningful with his free time. During his stint, he tutored two kids, a fourth-grader who wants to be a doctor and a third-grader who wants to be a football player.

"I expected them to be sad or upset," he said, "but they were fun and are great kids."

Judging from student reactions, the issue was not the religious or ethnic identity of those being helped. And that pertains to a bigger challenge -- of instilling service as a Jewish value to be lived, rather than just experienced for several days.