Hillel Stories

My Hillel Journey

Stories from Hillel Professionals: The Blessing of Working at Hillel

Author

Rabbi Rob Gleisser

Date

July 31, 2026

This piece was originally part of a storytelling session at ����vlogl’s New Professionals Institute. There, four Hillel professionals from across the country told their stories about what brought them to Hillel and how it impacts their lives.

My name is Rabbi Rob Gleisser, and I am the senior Jewish educator at Penn State Hillel. I became a rabbi because someone at Hillel believed I could be one before I believed it myself.

When I was a student at Ohio State, our then Senior Jewish Educator Rabbi Ben Berger treated me like a Jewish leader from day one. He never told me I should become a rabbi. He simply treated me like someone who already had something to offer. That kind of belief changed me.

Around the same time, I was learning about engagement and community from then OSU Hillel Assistant Director Susannah Sagan. Seeing the power of those relationships and the ripple effects they could have — that’s what brought me to Hillel.  

I’ve always believed the most powerful force for change in the world  is an individual  with a deep sense of who they are and the confidence to embrace it. That’s what Jewish education is about for me.

I want every student to be able to say, proudly, “I’m a Jewish person moving through the world.” I want to empower them to ask “What does that mean for me?”, “What does it mean to encounter the world with my own unique Jewish perspective?” That’s the beginning of a lifelong conversation, and it’s what I hope to explore with them.

A few years ago, I was teaching a class about metaphors for God. One metaphor was a cloud — a phenomenon that you can see, but can’t touch. Something you can walk through, but still have space around you. And as part of the class, we went outside to look for clouds.

There weren’t any.

But there was a full moon.

We stood there looking up, and something shifted. We weren’t just looking at the moon anymore. We were Jewish people standing together in time and in space all beneath the same sky, and somehow that ordinary moment became sacred. Because of the community we had built in that classroom, and because of the people in that community, moongazing became a way to remind ourselves of our Jewishness.

Weeks later, students started texting each other pictures of the moon. Not because anyone asked them to. Just because every time they saw it, they remembered that night and each other, and their connection to their Jewish identities

Even now, when I look at the moon, I don’t just see the moon. I think about the student who sent the first picture and the ones who were brave enough to respond with care and kindness and pictures of their own. 

And that’s the blessing of this work. 

Relationship-building and Jewish education aren’t separate things. They’re the same thing.

If I had to sum up my work in one thought , it’s this: we have the opportunity each day to tell students how much we care about them, and a student who feels cared for and loved is capable of bringing care and love into the world. Our work is to love our students, and their work is to change the world. 

There are no shortcuts. It takes time. But it’s the most joyful and meaningful work I know.

My advice to all of you is simple: to achieve great impact, impact great people. Show love to the student in front of you, and the ripple will travel farther than you’ll ever see.

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Hillel Stories

My Hillel Journey

Stories from Hillel Professionals: You are the Person Your Students Need

Author

Sofie Ramirez Soto

Date

July 31, 2026

This piece was originally part of a storytelling session at ����vlogl’s New Professionals Institute. There, four Hillel professionals from across the country told their stories about what brought them to Hillel and how it impacts their lives.

My name is Sofie Ramirez Soto and I am the director of Jewish life at Washington and Lee University.��

I went to Hillel the first time as a student because a friend dragged me there.

And honestly, the free ice cream was an easy sell.

That friend, who is also a Jewish Person of Color or JOC like me, introduced me to the Hillel director at Hofstra Hillel. We had a great conversation, and I kept coming back.

I had been involved in BBYO in high school and led Shabbat services there. It was a really important routine for me, so once I was comfortable in Hillel,  I went every week. 

When I graduated, I traveled, worked a few odd jobs, and eventually decided I wanted to build a career in nonprofit work. Then ����vlogl started emailing me about the Springboard Fellowship. I applied, got matched with NYU, and suddenly I was back in a vibrant and welcoming Hillel community.

Then, a few months later, the attacks of October 7th happened.

In the fog of trying to help my students navigate an impossible moment, I remember thinking that I needed to keep my own pain and emotions separate in order to best support my students.

I learned very quickly that compartmentalizing my own grief isn’t necessarily what support looks like. My students were turning to me for space and comfort — there was an Israeli student who needed a place to cry, an Israeli American student grieving friendships she’d lost because of her identity. I needed to be present with them. And the person they needed… was me. As my full self. That year taught me that I didn’t need to hide my own fear or grief to support my students.

That lesson stayed with me as we navigated a challenging campus climate, as I trained our engagement interns to be a support system for their peers, and I prepared for my current role at Washington and Lee. 

If I could offer one piece of advice to you, it’s this:

You were hired because of who you are.

You’ll learn new skills. You’ll grow in ways you can’t imagine.

But don’t walk into this work thinking you have to become someone else to do it well.

The person your students need is you.

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Hillel Stories

My Hillel Journey

Stories from Hillel Professionals: We Do the Work Together

Author

Aaron Kaufman

Date

July 31, 2026

This piece was originally part of a storytelling session at ����vlogl’s New Professionals Institute. There, four Hillel professionals from across the country told their stories about what brought them to Hillel and how it impacts their lives.

My name is Aaron Kaufman and I’m ����vlogl’s campus support director for organizational transformation. 

I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t come to Hillel because I felt a deep calling to work for the Jewish people.

I came because it was right after 9/11, the economy was in a recession, and I needed a job.

I’d just finished a master’s in social work and realized I didn’t want to be a social worker. But I loved higher education, I really loved working with college students, and I’d had good experiences at Hillel in college… including meeting my wife there. I figured this was a way to give something back.

So I took a job as the director at Eastern Michigan Hillel, with absolutely no experience in running a nonprofit.��

It took me about two years to figure out what  I was doing… That was 25 years ago.

Since then, I’ve worked at three campus Hillels, from Eastern Michigan to Cornell to Penn State, and now ����vlogl. Looking back, the throughline for me was never budgets, buildings, or organizational charts.

It was helping people discover what they’re capable of.

One of my favorite memories from working on campus was when I was the executive director at Penn State Hillel, when a previous student came back to visit.

He was running a restaurant in Dallas where he managed a large, complex team. He shared with me that as he navigated leadership and staffing challenges, he always leaned on the lessons he learned as a student leader at Hillel. 

His work is a completely different field from the Jewish nonprofit world, but the model for leadership he learned at Hillel was the core of what guided him.

And there’s the heart of it for me — a student who discovered his own capacity for leadership through his connection to Hillel, and then took that out into the world. 

Today, my role at ����vlogl looks different, but the theme of supporting leaders feels the same.

Not long ago, I met with a Springboard fellow who was frustrated because her Hillel couldn’t afford tents for football tailgates, and her team was struggling to build a system to keep track of the students they met on campus.

I told her I’d help find the money for a few weeks of tailgating if she’d build the engagement tracking system. She did.

What she really needed wasn’t equipment. She needed someone to believe she could solve the problem, and give her the nudge to move forward.

That’s what I’ve come to believe leadership is.

Whether you’re working with a first-year student, a Springboard fellow, or a veteran executive director, leadership is creating the conditions for someone else to discover what they’re capable of.

So if I could leave you with one piece of advice, it’s this:

Find yourself a mentor.

There’s a teaching in Pirkei Avot that says, “Make for yourself a teacher and acquire for yourself a friend.”

I’ve had mentors at every stage of my career who helped me recognize my own capabilities, and I’ve tried to be that person for others.

Because no matter how long you’ve been doing this work, none of us gets there alone.

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Hillel Stories

My Hillel Journey

Stories from Hillel Professionals: Lean into the Joy

Author

Yaffa Muhlbaum

Date

July 31, 2026

This piece was originally part of a storytelling session at ����vlogl’s New Professionals Institute. There, four Hillel professionals from across the country told their stories about what brought them to Hillel and how it impacts their lives.

My name is Yaffa Muhlbaum and I am the director of Oberlin Hillel.��

My earliest memory of Hillel is from when I was nine years old.

My sister is nine years older than I am, and when she was at The Ohio State University, she sang in the Jewish a cappella group, the Meshuganotes. Once a month, my parents would drive our family an hour and a half from Cincinnati to Columbus for their Shabbat concert, then drive us home again that night.

I remember feeling completely delighted. Everyone at Hillel was so excited that our whole family had come. That was my introduction to Hillel: a place of Jewish joy and delight.

So when I started looking at colleges, having a strong Hillel wasn’t negotiable. Columbia-Barnard Hillel became my home. 

Our engagement associate, Jaimie Krass, who’s now the CEO of Keshet, taught me that this work isn’t about putting on the persona of authority. It’s about bringing your whole humanity into your relationships with students and being a genuine partner in their Jewish journey.

Jaimie eventually asked me to become an engagement intern, and gave me the opportunity to connect with students who hadn’t yet found a home at Hillel.

That experience stayed with me: if someone doesn’t feel like they belong yet, our job is to build a place where they do.

I started at Oberlin just a few months before October 7th. It was a small, progressive campus, and I was largely on my own.

That year only strengthened my commitment to this work.

I went back to school for a master’s in Jewish nonprofit management because I realized this is the community I want to spend my life building.

More recently, my student board president asked me to connect him with a Hillel group chat for student songleaders.

It didn’t exist. We didn’t have that space of belonging for him… Yet. So we built one.

Our students helped design what became the Hillel Songleaders Summit, from the programming to inviting Dan Nichols to perform. ����vlog half the participants had years of experience leading Jewish music. The other half had never led a service before.

Watching them become one community was one of the best weekends of my career.

If I could offer one piece of advice to new professionals, it’s this: lean into the joy of this work.

You get to walk alongside students as they build a Jewish identity that’s truly their own, often for the first time, rooted in choice instead of obligation.

That’s an incredible privilege.

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