Campus Experience Leads Woman to Orthodox Judaism

Two chance encounters. Two spontaneous, unexpected events – a young woman’s decision to attend a festive Shabbat dinner at the The Ohio State University Chabad House; a young man’s reflection on a provocative conversation at an Orthodox summer camp – set in motion a series of transformative changes in two Jewish adults.

The Shabbat dinner propelled Yiskah Fantl to pursue Orthodox Judaism, and the conversation nudged Kostia Feldman to become an observant Jew. In each case, the experiences led to life changes, propulsively lifting Fantl and Feldman from the routines of college life to spiritual journeys that culminated in commitments to Orthodox Judaism.

The transformative paths that Fantl and Feldman traveled en route to commitments to Orthodoxy are unique and distinctive. But they also fit into a larger narrative, reflecting the decisions of a growing number of Jews, who have emigrated to Orthodox Judaism from other denominations.

The number of Orthodox Jews living in Cleveland climbed by 2,200 from 1996 to 2011, according to the Jewish Federation of Cleveland’s 2011 Greater Cleveland Jewish Population Study. The Federation survey showed that the percentage of Orthodox Jews increased from 14 percent in 1996 to 18 percent in 2011, while the proportions of individuals identifying with Reform and Conservative Judaism dropped slightly over this period. Some of the increase may be because individuals from various denominations emigrated to Orthodoxy.

Rabbi Binyamin Blau of Green Road Synagogue, an Orthodox shul in Beachwood, said that he has noticed an uptick in the number of young people who have chosen an Orthodox lifestyle. “There’s a general tendency for exploration when you are younger, before you get set in your ways,” he said.

The journeys to Orthodoxy young adults like Fantl and Feldman traverse take on broader significance in light of the growing efforts of Orthodox religious groups to reach out to non-Orthodox young Jews, in what Jack Wertheimer called an “outreach revolution” in a frequently-discussed article in the April issue of Commentary Magazine. The earnest, person-focused persuasion is afoot in Cleveland, where groups like Aish HaTorah, the Jewish Learning Connection and the Jewish Family Experience sponsor a variety of instructional and outreach activities to develop and nurture interest in Jewish traditions and theology.

To be sure, young adults who grow up in Conservative, Reform or Reconstructionist households also can become more religious over time, and some do. Several Cleveland rabbis underscored this point.

What makes the journey to Orthodoxy distinctive is that individuals make a dramatically greater jump from where they came, traveling to Orthodoxy from comparatively less observant backgrounds.

The journey to observant Judaism is a fascinating phenomenon, one frequently misunderstood. The paths individuals like Fantl and Feldman traverse can be best appreciated by glimpsing their religious changes through their eyes, as they experienced them.

Before Fantl embarked on a life of Orthodox observance, before she changed her first name from Diana to Yiskah, before she married Hershel Fantl, taking his last name rather than keeping her maiden name, she pursued with single-minded devotion an activity that lifted her spirits and sent her body soaring.

For 16 years, the core of her identity came from the challenges of mastering vaulting, flipping and tumbling through the air, the exquisite but daunting tasks required in the sport of girls’ gymnastics.

“I did it for 16 years. That was my life, that was my passion,” she said.

She was the only Jewish girl on the gymnastics team at Thomas Worthington High School in Worthington, a Columbus suburb. Religion didn’t come into play when she had to train her eyes on the beam so she mounted it acrobatically, or when she needed to concentrate on flipping through the air with such picture-perfect precision that she landed with her feet planted in just the right position on the floor.

However, in high school in 2004, religion came into play. On a weekday during her junior year when she returned to her locker after a morning class, gleefully expecting to glimpse a sign wishing her good luck in an afternoon gymnastic meet, she encountered a very different message.

There, plastered on her dark blue locker, was a thin piece of paper, with a word scrawled in black letters.

“There was the k-word written across my locker,” she recalled.

Perhaps, she said, reflecting on the experience, the anti-Semitic slur led her to become more conscious of her Jewish identity. During her junior and senior years, she began praying a little more frequently.

She decided, “I’m just going to have a relationship with God, so I did. I would schmooze with God and say, ‘Hey, how you doing?’ – just talk and pray different things.”

But religion was not a central concern when she entered OSU in 2005. When her cousin, also an OSU student, invited her to a dinner at Chabad House in her sophomore year, she said she was intrigued, but was not sure what to expect. “I didn’t even know what Chabad was,” she said. “I didn’t know what the organization was.”

It was weird at first, she recalled: the rabbi who announced, with a goofy but sincere smile, that it was so great when a Jewish girl marries a Jewish guy.

But she said she soon found herself entranced by the conviviality and culinary delights. “The food was phenomenal,” she related, sounding breathless in her recall of the delicacies that graced the dining tables at Chabad. “There were salads and there was gefilte fish and there was challah and there was chicken soup. It was so good,” she exclaimed. “I was like, ‘this is great.’ I started going more, even without my cousin. I started meeting Jewish kids. I almost felt like the pressure was off. I’m not going to be made fun of for being Jewish. It was great. I loved this.”

There was something else. Her parents had gotten divorced when she was 4 years old, and she said that some of those years had been tough. She recalled switching back and forth from house to house when she was younger, watching as her mom and dad dated other people.

“The first thing that caught my eye about Orthodox Judaism,” she said, “was Sarah Deitsch (the Chabad rabbi’s wife) serving her kids before services. She served her kids matzah ball soup and gave them kisses,” Fantl said, and the spirit of family captivated her. She said she found the relationship between the rabbi and rabbi’s wife to be beautiful, one that served as a positive role model as she began thinking about family and the future.

“I was definitely thinking ahead to my future,” she recalled. “What drew me in first was definitely the family atmosphere. I wanted the family atmosphere, and the warmth is what drew me in,” she noted.

There was something else, too – something more intellectual – that drew her to Orthodox Judaism, she said. It was the learning, books, and amazing knowledge of Judaism that had been accumulated over more than 5,000 years.

She liked to say there was an intellectual “spark inside a Jewish person, and if you ignite it a little bit you are going to ignite it and you are going to be drawn to it.”

Walking to class on the sprawling OSU campus, a spring in her step as she sauntered, she listened to Jewish history or theology lectures on her iPod, stopping only to jot down a question on Jewish law or theology that she would later ask Rabbi Daniel Olgin, director of OSU’s Aish campus program.

“The Chabad philosophy, she said, “was just so deep and so beautiful. There’s so many different ways that people approach Torah.”

By her senior year, she knew. She would become an observant Jew and spend a year studying Judaism at a seminary in Israel. In 2009, after entering the seminary, she changed her name to her Hebrew birth name, Yiskah, after Sarah, Abraham’s wife in the Bible. She got married, settled in University Heights, and became a teacher at Mosdos Ohr Hatorah school in Cleveland Heights.

She still loves gymnastics and bleeds scarlet and gray. But she says she has transcended parts of her past and is visibly proud of her new identity. “I try to take time every day to thank God for everything we do have. I have a house. I have a beautiful daughter. We’re healthy,” she said, evincing pride in her identity as Yiskah, Orthodox Jew.

This article is the first of two parts. next: Summer camp conversation leads Kostia Feldman to become observant.