Rabbi Yonah Schiller makes Forward’s ’50’ list of most influential
By JOSH AXELROD, Exclusive to the CCJN
Some weeks ago, Rabbi Yonah Schiller, executive director at Tulane Hillel, received a mysterious email from a colleague wishing him congratulations. He had to wait until Shabbat was over to follow up.
Rabbi Schiller in familiar surroundings at the Goldie and Morris Mintz Center for Jewish Life. (Photo by Alan Smason)
After the holiday ended, Schiller was given some clarification. He had been chosen as one of The Forward’s 50 most influential American Jews of the year.
“It’s funny, I had no idea that this was going to be happening,” Schiller said in an interview with the CCJN.
The Forward, formerly the Jewish Daily Forward, is a Jewish-American monthly magazine centered in New York with a circulation of over 27,000 people. Originally published in Yiddish, it still publishes a Yiddish edition titled Forvets, which is also known as Yiddish Forward. The Forward maintains and updates English and Yiddish websites. Each year they select 50 American Jews to highlight in categories like community, culture, politics and sports.
This year’s article of profiles was titled “Forward 50: Finding Inspiration in the Year of Trump.” The profile on Schiller was sub-titled “The Hillel Leader Who Puts Students in the Driver’s Seat.”
Schiller was chosen largely due to his transformative work with student leadership at Tulane. Upon arriving at Hillel in 2008, the executive director began the Tulane Jewish Leaders program, giving students the opportunity to create their own programs related to Jewish identity and funding their proposals through a microgrant pool.
“Tulane Jewish Leaders is all about enabling and activating students around their interests and passions and bring them into reality,” Schiller said.
He was tasked with finding ways to engage students in Jewish life and combat low attendance. Since then Hillel has gone on to host the Nice Jewish Boy pageant, an architectural competition for succah design and the Green Wave Community Market.
“We responded by dissolving the existing student leadership board and sought students who would have never been involved with organized Jewish life,” Schiller wrote, in a 2013 op-ed for the Huffington Post. “And we gave them the keys to the car.”
Since Schiller’s tenure began, Hillel’s budget has doubled and attendance at weekly Shabbat dinners has tripled.
Tulane Hillel now reaches 90 percent of the Tulane Jewish population and 30 percent of the total student body through their programs and events. There are over 300 Jewish student leaders in the program.
“The proudest moments for me are always watching students take on the mantle of determining, dictating, and defining what Jewish life should be for them,” Schiller said. “When I see that happen through the hundreds of events that I’ve witnessed, there’s nothing more amazing and prideful than that.
Schiller is also the founder of the Jewish Design Initiative as well as the recipient of the 2013 Mortar Board Excellence in Teaching Award and the Helen A. Mervis Jewish Community Professional Award from the Jewish Endowment Foundation of Louisiana.
Schiller is also considered the driving force in the $3 million dollar campaign that built the Goldie and Morris Mintz Center for Jewish Life in 2011. The two-story building houses Tulane Hillel’s offices and the kosher Rimon Restaurant run by chef Daniel Esses, but, in an unusual partnership, is used by Tulane as an academic building for many different and diverse courses.
The award-winner feels grateful to his team at Tulane Hillel, especially chief operating and programming Officer Liza Sherman and her program team.
“I think that success comes in the form of having great partners and a lot of luck and I feel like I’ve had both,” Schiller said. “And I think most importantly, if anything, for me, it underscores the fact that we have a lot to do. I see this more as a beginning than anything else.”
(Editor’s note: This is the first of two articles on Tulane University leaders. A story on Jewish Studies Department head Michael Cohen will follow.)
