Campus Beit Midrash Initiative (CMBI)
sponsored by the Lorsch Family
In 2013, one of our incredible Beit Midrash students, Scott Lorsch from American University, informed us us that he would be starting a Beit Midrash program modeled after our program at his home campus. Thanks to his initiative, and the help of the AU Hillel, the AU Hillel Beit Midrash was born.
Scott’s vision for local learning programs based on our long-standing Beit Midrash model sparked a new vision for the RRG Beit Midrash. We decided to invest more resources into leadership training for our students, and we started to actively encourage our students to initiate or strengthen Jewish learning and Shabbat programming on their campus with our guidance. In 2016, we launched a new educational venture called the Campus Beit Midrash Initiative (CBMI) sponsored by the Lorsch Family. Currently 16 students from 11 universities have participated in the CBMI initiative, and each one has strengthened Shabbat and Jewish textual learning programing on their home campuses. We look forward to inspiring and training more students to take from their RRG Beit Midrash experience and bring it home to their home campuses. Feel free to contact us here Quotes from our CBMI Fellows “I saw the incredible impact that the RRG Beit Midrash had on me and the other students during my semester abroad, and I realized that no such initiative existed at my home university. I decided that I wanted to share that excitement we all felt for learning and building Jewish community by creating a sustainable equivalent at Penn.” --Rebecca Silver, University of Pennsylvania “The RRG Beit Midrash Program gave me the opportunity to delve into the complexities of Jewish texts and grapple with their contemporary implications, and I want to bring that opportunity to my Hillel community.”--Ben Ginsberg, University of California, Davis “Having been lucky enough to spend four months participating in the RRG Beit Midrash, the CBMI has been a meaningful way to for me to share the profound insights I learned about my Judaism while in Israel.” --Ari Shapiro, Georgetown University |