college gemara fellowship
We are excited to open applications for our second cohort of the Maharat Collegiate Gemara Fellowship, which will run during the 2024-2025 academic year. This fellowship is intended for women who have significant experience learning gemara in its original language and from the daf. Classes will meet on Zoom on Tuesdays from 7:30-8:45 pm ET from mid-September through the beginning of May, with a break for chagim and winter break. Additionally, all fellows are invited to join the Collegiate Intensive that will take place in Riverdale, NY from January 13-16, 2025, with domestic travel and housing provided by Maharat.
If you have any questions about the application, application process, and/or the College Gemara fellowship, please email rrosenthal@yeshivatmaharat.org.
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Meet the 2023-24 College Gemara Fellows
Bayla Alter is from Skokie, IL. She is a junior at the University of Maryland studying Human Development and Sociology. She aspires to make aliyah and become involved in Jewish Education. Bayla loves learning Torah because everyone can read the same pasuk and gain something different from it.
Maxine Lee Ewaschuk is a Toronto-native studying at the University of Toronto. She loves learning Torah because it is full of insights about the human experience in a tradition that has been lived, refined, and elaborated on for thousands of years. Maxine is majoring in Jewish studies and minoring in history and philosophy. She has enjoyed studying legal history and theory, and is doing research on Orthodox Jewish girls' education and performing arts.
Chaya Juni is a Toronto native and a philosophy and literature student at the University of Toronto, currently on exchange at the University of Edinburgh. She loves both the intellectual satisfaction she gains from Torah study and the sense of connection to generations of Jews who studied and cherished these texts.
Chana Lanter is a junior at Stanford University studying linguistics, philosophy, and religion. She is pursuing an Honors Thesis about how Orthodox women participate in halakhic discourse and is minoring in translation studies. Chana is a residential tutor for Stanford's freshmen humanities dorm as well as the Jewish studies representative on the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity's Undergraduate Council. What she loves about limudei kodesh is that effort equals reward, there is an emphasis on complete understanding before moving on, and that skills improve slowly over time (rather than the quantity over quality ethos common in undergraduate university education).
Cara Lopatin is very uncertain of what she wants to study, so for now she is just taking some courses that interest her but that fulfill general requirements, and it's been a great semester so far! She loves learning lishmah mainly because of the gratification, excitement, challenge, depth, and connection to other learners and teachers, the texts, our history, and God.
Josephine Schizer is a sophomore at Harvard studying neuroscience with a minor in art history. She loves Jewish learning; she has previously served as Shabbat Chair on the Hillel board and gabbai of SCM (the Student Conservative Minyan at Harvard Hillel), spent her gap year in Jerusalem at the Hartman Institute, and is an alum of the Bronfman Fellowship. She is from New York and in her free time loves to read and travel.
Tari Sztokman is from Melbourne Australia! She is in her third year of the Bachelors of Arts and diploma in music at the University of Melbourne. She is majoring in English and musicology. Tari loves learning Torah as a way to engage with our rich, intellectual heritage.
Danelle Tuchman is a junior at Columbia, majoring in Computer Science. She is from Palo Alto, California. She loves learning Gemara because she appreciates the logical processes interwoven with tangential stories. Danelle enjoys decoding the stories to better understand the historical, logical, and spiritual connotations to the laws being discussed.