Yoni Buckman, Akiva Lichtenberg, Benjy Cannon, and Aaron Wallach at the Petersburg Federal Correctional Institution.
Throughout the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the Al Chet prayer is recited 10 times. Lines of the prayer name a sin and as they are sung, the congregation strikes its hearts in unison to show repentance.
For the 38 college students who traveled to nearby prisons and led Yom Kippur services for the inmates, the prayer had special meaning.
“It got so emotional because all of them were crying and sobbing,” said Shana Frankel, a senior social work major at the university’s Shady Grove campus. “You could tell they were remorseful.”
Groups of six to eight students spent Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, in seven prisons: one women’s prison and six men’s prisons, located from this state to Connecticut. They rode and slept in rented RVs, each filled with prayer books and a Torah scroll.
Hillel, a university Jewish student group, worked in conjunction with the Aleph Institute, a Jewish outreach program based in Florida that goes into the prison systems on a regular basis, said Amy Weiss, the Repair the World director of service-learning initiatives at Hillel.
This marks the second year Hillel sent Jewish students to prisons to share the holiest day of the year with Jewish inmates.
“It’s an important and valuable experience to students,” said senior computer engineering major Max Cohen, who led the trip along with junior behavioral and community health major Anna Koozmin. “It’s important to us, and it’s important to the inmates to practice their religion like this because they might not be able to experience it in prison.”
Weiss said this initiative is one of many Hillel programs aimed at promoting community service and social justice.
“The fabric of what Maryland Hillel is all about is to show students that giving back and helping the world to be a better place is a huge part of being Jewish,” Weiss said.
Through this program, Weiss said, Hillel wanted to highlight the Jewish phrase “Everybody’s made in the image of God.”
“I think that this is a population that’s very forgotten about and that these students are going saying, ‘We’re recognizing you as a human being,’” Weiss said.
Although the inmates are at low points in their life, Weiss said, Yom Kippur is about is repentance, and the service gives them a chance to reflect on what has gone wrong.
“Obviously these people have made some decisions that have brought them into the prison system,” Weiss said. “It gives them that opportunity to reflect and to move forward.”
The students led discussions about repenting and forgiving, and many said the experience was nothing like they expected, based on how prison is depicted on TV.
“It was a lot less security than I expected, but then I met the prisoners, and I got more comfortable with them, and we started talking about really meaningful and personal things,” said Jonathan Nulman, a junior accounting and finance major. “It was just a really meaningful experience.”
Weiss said the trip highlighted the community aspect of Judaism.
“Judaism is not a solo religion; it’s a broad community, so we try to bring people into that community in different ways,” Weiss said. “This is an atypical experience for students, and they’re being completely selfless in bringing someone else a Yom Kippur experience.”
