MEET HUC-J IR’S STUDENTS
2009
ISSUE 72 | 25
New York, Bregman and fellow rabbinical
student Rebecca Cottle Epstein, N ’09 (see
page 30), began a green campaign to make
their HUC-JIR community more eco-con-
scious and championed environmentally
friendly practices. “Now, after practica and
sermon discussions, when we are graciously
provided with apples, they are from a local,
sustainable, New York fruit farm that is a
supporter of farm-to-table nutrition educa-
tion for urban children,” she says.
Soon afterward, Bregman and several
other HUC-JIR students went to Mexico on
an American Jewish World Service rabbinical
student mission to help an impoverished
Mayan community develop self-sustaining
practices. During their ten days in
Muchacuxcha in the Yucatan, the students
worked with the indigenous NGO Hombre
Siembre La Terre (Mankind on Earth), lived
with the Mexican families, and learned their
stories. “We carried dirt, shoveled
chickichi-
tas
,
the Mayan word for pebbles, and
unearthed huge boulders in order to create a
walkable, nature-reserve trail through a beau-
tiful forest. We worked alongside members
of the village to help build this base for a sus-
tainable tourist economy.”
This summer she took part in the IAF
(
Industrial Area Foundation) training to be-
come a community organizer. She then
traveled to Rwanda to do some work with
Agahozo-Shalom Youth village, and forayed
into the capital of Kigali to help get a micro
loan for sex-traffickers trying to turn their
lives around and build a new economy for
themselves. Then she headed off to Uganda
for two weeks of traveling from village to vil-
lage, teaching with an organization called
Teach and Travel, and spent
Shabbat
with the
Abayudayan Jewish community. From there,
she went to Rome for a Catholic-Jewish lead-
ership conference. Back in the U.S.,
Bregman worked as the Rabbinic Intern for
Jewish Community Action, a community
organizing organization in Minneapolis,
MN.
All of these experiences have filtered
back into Bregman’s class work, her intern-
ships, and her rabbinical future. On her
blog, Bregman declares, “we have to be brave
enough to cross the barrier of discomfort for
the sake of the greater good. I am more
afraid of silence and that nothing will
change.” Thus, Bregman continues to put
herself in uncomfortable situations in the
hopes of change. Telling her story is the key,
as she explains: “I cannot allow those places
to remain in darkness, and I can be noisy. We
must constantly be expanding our universe
of concerns, even just a little bit at a time.”
As she summed up her mission in her
senior sermon, “May the
tzarim
,
troubles of
our lives, pursue after each one of us so that
we can be angry! May that anger pour out
against all the injustices great and small and
then push us out the door into the world.”
For more about Bregman’s studies, work, and travels,
please go her blog, “A Rabbinical Career Training
Journal” at
/
H A L ONG THE APPA L A C H I A N TRA I L
Hannah Goldstein (center), N ’12, and rabbinical students from HUC-JIR, JTS, Yeshiva University, and Hebrew College clearing a nature reserve
trail during their American Jewish World Service mission to the Yucatan, Mexico.
