Searching for Myself at Jerusalem’s Hippie Yeshiva

I didn’t fit in among the scruffy rock musicians and young women in shawls and drapey skirts, but my Shavuot visit changed me

By Ruchama King Feuerman for Tablet Magazine

I was finishing up my first year of college at Bar-Ilan University when an old classmate invited me to spend Shavuot with her at the Diaspora Yeshiva on Mount Zion.

What’s she doing there, of all places? I wondered, surprised to learn that she’d become a full-time student at the yeshiva.

Lots of my friends from high school had signed on for a year of rigorous Torah study at one of the Jerusalem seminaries that were starting to become de rigueur for frum girls after graduation. I was all set to go myself, especially as my little detour at Bar-Ilan was winding down; it was the end of the semester, and my yeshiva beckoned. But my intended yeshiva was what I considered “normal”: It attracted girls of the same age with a fairly strong background in Jewish studies—girls from middle-class, religious homes. We were coming to enrich and to build upon the Judaism we had already encountered in our earlier years. We weren’t looking to be transformed.

This Diaspora Yeshiva, known to outsiders as the hippie yeshiva, was altogether different. It carried a countercultural cachet, an air of the illicit. The men’s division had a band with scruffy-bearded newly religious musicians singing Hebrew lyrics set to wild rock music, way before this became accepted everywhere. The women students—whether teenagers or in their thirties—dressed in scraps of hippie-like cast offs, shawls, and long drapey skirts. The students, most of whom came with little knowledge of Judaism, and even less Torah observance, seemed bent on totally remaking their lives. Many marriages happened between the men’s and women’s divisions, and those couples lived in near poverty in Mount Zion’s caves. Sure, the students at the Diaspora Yeshiva made great music, but was that reason enough for my old classmate to have joined up there?

You never knew who might show up at the Diaspora Yeshiva. My friend told me how Tony Curtis popped in one day with his agent, and so did the drummer for Led Zeppelin—a lost soul if ever there was one; sometimes it was people who were less famous but no less unexpected, like the woman who’d just emerged from many years at an ashram, or a Hasid from Williamsburg, or a Harvard-educated scientist. But one type of person rarely ventured there: suburban Modern Orthodox girls like me.

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