By Ilana Williams

Jewish students gathered at the MEOR house, rushing to grab their nametags before catching up with each other.

Everyone huddled in their friend groups underneath the white tent as directors of MEOR Maryland prepared for the guest speaker. 

Wednesday’s event was focused on a question: “What is the purpose of life?” 

Maimonides, a Jewish leadership fellowship, tries to answer this question and others in weekly two-hour events on campus. Interested students apply and enroll for a semester of Jewish learning. MEOR Maryland holds the leadership program to create an experience for students to build relationships and learn Jewish values. 

Students in the program have had different experiences with Judaism. 

“Everyone is coming from a different place,” Executive Director Rabbi Ari Koretzky said. “For some people, this is their first meaningful encounter with any Jewish learning and that’s really special.”

MEOR Maryland has held the Maimonides program for 17 years. Named after a Jewish scholar, it was founded at the University of Michigan in 2001 and slowly expanded to other campuses. Maryland was one of the first universities to adopt the program. 

With Maimonides, MEOR Maryland hopes to teach students a more sophisticated approach for interacting with Judaism. 

“It brings me closer to Jewish learning in a fun way,” said Morgan Donohoe, a junior mechanical engineering major. 

Donohoe said as people get older, they start to understand Jewish learning because conversations are more philosophical and more of a discussion. 

“Those are often so much better for your soul and better connect you to Jewish learning,” Donohoe said. 

Every semester, the structure of the program is similar, but MEOR shifts the content depending on the group of students. 

After in-person events returned this semester, students had the chance to go to a Jewish wedding in Baltimore and spend the weekend in Silver Spring’s Kemp Mill neighborhood to celebrate Shabbat. 

Dani Weinstein, a sophomore psychology major, said she found out about Maimonides through friends who had done it in previous years. Weinstein said she feels more like a cultural Jew but wanted to give the program a shot.

“I learned that a lot of my beliefs that I held for (this program) that I didn’t think were related to Judaism actually are,” Weinstein said. “A lot of these values I was raised with are Jewish values, I’ve realized that.” 

Educational Director Rabbi Zalman Goldstein became the educational director of MEOR seven years ago. The rabbi is in charge of designing the program, recruiting guest speakers, curriculum development and off-campus events. 

Goldstein said he hopes the students look forward to the events planned for the upcoming weeks. 

“The world’s always changing,” Goldstein said. “So we just got to change with it. It’s interesting (that one) thing that works one semester doesn’t necessarily work the next semester.”   

Maimonides has a mix of different activities for students to find a Jewish connection, but it’s also about building friendships. 

“The big thing for me is the community that it creates,” said Josh Schulman, a sophomore letters and sciences student. “It creates a smaller community, especially in a big school like Maryland. A lot of people are looking for that smaller community and those friends.” 

Koretzky said students get a $300 stipend at the end of the semester, but the point of Maimonides is to secure students’ commitments to Jewish learning.

“Maybe they start coming for the money, but they end up doing it for the experience and that’s certainly what we hope,” Koretzky said.

Featured photo: Executive Director Rabbi Ari Koretzky speaks to dozens of Maimonides fellows at Wednesday’s meetup. Photo by Minnie Stephenson.