Seminary girls and yeshiva bachurim not provided with meals!

DefyGravity

Fri, Oct 06 2006, 4:44 pm

My seminary set us up with meals and a place to stay (if we wanted them to). Personally, I always found my own place to stay, b/c I didn't want to deal with gross food and lousy accomodations.

It was definitely hard to find a place to stay for Sukkos and Pesach (Pesach especially).

mimsy7420

Tue, Oct 10 2006, 1:38 pm

It was annoying but all part of the "experience" of seminary and of living on your own. We could always eat at our Rabbi's if we couldn't find a place/didn't want to be set up by the school or just wanted to stay in. It does teach bit of independence, because you have to be flexible and outgoing, you have to meet new people, and just plain fend for yourself. By the latter part of the year we got fed up of running all over Israel and just made a cholent and stayed in for shabbos and hung out with friends all shabbos. Those were some of my best shabboses.

↑ chavamom

Tue, Oct 10 2006, 2:20 pm

chen wrote:

this was in fact the tradition in Eastern european yeshivos. It was called "kummen tzu kest", and the bochurim were assigned to families on a weekly basis.

Is that the same thing as 'ess tag'?

ceo

Wed, Oct 11 2006, 9:11 pm

I do want to say that there are seminaries that try to accomodate the families that often have girls. For instance, in my seminary, the families that often had girls for seudos- the ones almost always say "yes"-- those families get first dibs for Thursday night chesed girls. Also, for girls who stayed for pesach, the seminary had us help out by some of these families after r'chodesh nissan. In addition, my seminary did try to show hakaras hatov to the frequent hosts in other ways: tickets to production, invitations to chagigos and yemei iyun, and small gifts at the end of the year.

once, I was talking to a wife whose husband was learning in a certain yeshiva for americans. She told me that it was part of their financial arrangement with the yeshiva to have bochurim over XX number of times per month. Meaning, extra $$ was added on to the stipend. So this is another way it can work.

Last fall, there were a number of articles in the Readers' Forum of the HaModia about this topic. People were complaining about this. R'Greenwald, from Me'ohr Bais Yakov said two things, which I will paraphrase:

--The learning experience that seminary girls gain from spending shabbosim in people's home is just as important as the learning that happens in the classroom.

--If a family does not want/cannot afford to have guests, then they need to say so. If you're called and asked to host two girls for shabbos, it's not the seminary's problem if you don't have the backbone to say no! Just say, "This week is not good." Or, "It's not really so easy for us to have guests at this point in our life. Please take me off your list."

I agree that going to different families for shabbos was one of the highlights of my seminary experience. I became close with about three of the families that I was set up with through the school, and continued going to them for years. (I lived in e'y single for a few years) Two of those families even made sheva brachos for me! my husband and I continued going for shabbos after our marriage. Much of my strengthening in avoda, my descision to stay in e"y, my descion to marry someone in kollel, etc, I attribute ot the positive hashpah that these families had on me.

pinktichel

Thu, Oct 12 2006, 9:08 am

When it was an off Shabbos in sem (once a month), the principal used to come in on Wed. and ask each girl individually if she had a place to go and with whom she was going. On Thursday, she would check again with those who said they were unsure. We all felt very comfortable asking her to find us somewhere if we didn't have anywhere to go. I thought it was a fabulous system.

↑ chen

Thu, Oct 12 2006, 11:02 am

pinktichel wrote:

It was. The problem is that not all yeshivos and sems are so organized and accommodating. Plenty of them simply throw the kids to the wolves, so to speak. For some students, having to beg people for a place for shabbos is unbearably humiliating, to say nothing of going very much against the upbringing of those people who were taught that it's unspeakbaly rude to invite yourself to someone's house.

chocolate moose

Thu, Oct 12 2006, 3:38 pm

I hated having to arrange my own shabbosim when I was in college...and then again as a newly married.

on a student's budget, I couldn't afford to eat in the cafeteria's shabbs program.