How the High Holidays at Hillel Helped Me Find My Jewish Voice
Jada Monroe is a third-year student at the University of Georgia and a member of the Hillel International Student Cabinet.
When I was a first-year college student, I celebrated Rosh Hashanah and fasted on Yom Kippur for the very first time. Growing up, I was deeply connected to my Black identity and community, but my Jewish involvement was limited. I never went to Jewish summer camp, synagogue services, or Hebrew school. So when I became a student at the University of Georgia, I decided college would be my chance to figure out what being Jewish meant to me.
Once on campus, I searched for ways to get involved in Jewish life and found Hillel at UGA. I didn’t know what Hillel was, but it seemed like a good place to start. During move-in week, I went to a welcome breakfast and met Mara, the Hillel assistant director. She helped me feel welcome, and I’ve been involved with Hillel ever since.
As I began to explore Judaism during my first few weeks at college, the Hillel staff and other Jewish students became my teachers. They explained prayers and traditions and answered my many questions, sometimes with more questions, which I quickly learned was part of the Jewish experience. Their support gave me the confidence to participate in High Holiday programming, which felt like a milestone moment.
But at Rosh Hashanah services, there was a lot I didn’t know. The prayers were unfamiliar. I didn’t always know when to stand, what to sing, or what was coming next. At times, I felt anxious and far behind my new friends.
But as I sat with that discomfort, I realized I was eager to learn — I wanted to be a sponge and soak up all the knowledge and new experiences available to me. When I mispronounced a word or got lost during the service, there was always someone to help me along. While much was foreign, I knew there was space for me to grow and to belong.
Ten days later, on Yom Kippur, I felt that sense of community even more deeply. After hours of services and fasting, I was struggling. Then I looked around and realized everyone else was feeling weak and hungry too. At break fast, as we smeared cream cheese on bagels and topped them with lox, I felt nourished in more ways than one. I had found my people.
For someone who had arrived on campus without Jewish friends or many Jewish experiences, that feeling was powerful. While I entered the High Holidays with uncertainty, by the end of Yom Kippur, I had discovered a Jewish community that gave me room to explore my roots and to be my full self.
A year later, as I celebrated Rosh Hashanah, the traditions I observed as a first-year student had begun to feel like my own. Instead of wondering what to do next in a service, I was thinking about what I wanted to carry with me into the new year. I reflected on how I wanted to challenge myself, the kind of Jewish life I wanted to build, and how I wanted to show up for the communities that had shown up for me. I promised to challenge myself, and to keep saying yes to experiences that were unfamiliar and sometimes a little scary. And over the year that followed, that is exactly what I did.
I joined Jewish learning fellowships, served on UGA Hillel’s Jewish Life Board, helped create multicultural Shabbat experiences, and looked for ways to build bridges between my Black and Jewish communities. Eventually, that journey led me to the Hillel International Student Cabinet, where this fall, I stepped up alongside 19 other students from around the world as advisors to Hillel International and ambassadors for the Hillel movement.
Now, as I begin my third year at college, I’m preparing to mark the High Holidays again. This time, I’m getting ready to study abroad at Oxford, where I’ll once again walk into an unfamiliar place and seek Jewish community, though with a lot more Jewish knowledge and pride. Wherever I go, I know I’ll keep building upon a Jewish experience that feels like mine, where I have the space to continue learning about Judaism and grow as a person in the meanwhile.
And I’ll always remember that this journey started with the High Holidays at Hillel. Forever transforming my involvement in Jewish life, those days were a time in which I was able to self-reflect, learn, and think about the possibilities that awaited me.