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Hillel Groups Fight AIDS
December 08, 2005Comments (0) | Add | E-mail this to a friend  Hillel students at Emory and Yale universities took the fight against AIDS to the heart of their campuses last week for World AIDS Day. At Yale, students wrapped two prominent campus statues completely in black cloth. At Emory, Hillel covered the Quad with 400 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, one of the largest displays of the Quilt ever in Atlanta.
Sarah Kellner, the Weinberg Tzedek Intern at Hillel's Joseph Slifka Center, organized the Yale event. She explained that creating art was an appropriate way to conduct AIDS education. "Awareness is the most important," she said. "And if you have to find beauty is something that's tragic you do it."
Kellner, who is also a member of AIDS watch and AIDS walk, has been raising AIDS awareness on the Yale campus all year. Her first project was lock-in at the Slifka Center in October. The World AIDS Day project covered two Yale icons with black cloth as "A Day Without Art." Viewers were asked to consider what society loses when 3 million people die of AIDS each year.
At the same time, Kellner also organized "Facing AIDS / Facing Each Other," a photo exhibit in the Slifka Center that illustrates the world AIDS epidemic from Kenya to New Haven. The project is divided between Kenyan AIDS activists and patients, New Haven AIDS patients, and student activists. Each photo is accompanied by a poignant caption detailing the individual's life.
Next semester Kellner will organize a student AIDS leadership conference for high school students.
More than a thousand Emory students, faculty, and staff stopped by the Quad to view 400 panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Hundreds more viewed Quilt panels on display in buildings across campus in the days leading up to World AIDS Day. Haley Rosengarten, a junior from Greenwich, CT, opened the day's event with a moving speech about losing her father to AIDS three years ago.
"I grew up in a town like Emory's environment where people think it can't happen to them," she said. "But it's not just people on the fringes of society like drug addicts. It can happen anywhere."
The tribute included a reading of the names on the quilt by faculty and student leaders, including Student Government Association President Amrit Dhir and John Ford, senior vice president and dean for Campus Life. James Curran, the dean of the Rollins School of Public Health and director of the Center for AIDS research, spoke about the contributions Emory has made to the advancement of HIV/AIDS treatment and the social barriers the
The idea for bringing the Quilt to Emory came from an Emory Hillel student group, the Tritt Social Justice Force. Hillel marshaled this project, because Jewish tradition teaches, "to save one life is to save the entire world," according to Emory Hillel Executive Director Michael Rabkin.
The event was covered by a Atlanta's 11 Alive News, The Emory Wheel and The Atlanta Jewish Times. For more information about the AIDS Quilt project at Emory, visit Emory Hillel's Web site.
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