Community Blog Shared Campus, Shared Purpose, Shared Intern

On most days of the week, Hebrew College hums with the sounds of learning in community. Students gather in the Mascott Beit Midrash with their heads low over the text, faculty pause in the hallway to exchange ideas, and adult learners come and go. Just across the parking lot, Mayyim Hayyim evokes stillness: the murmur of running water in a ritual space designed to welcome anyone who comes seeking renewal, healing, or celebration.

Now, thanks to a generous joint gift from supporters Carol and Steve Targum, these neighboring centers of Jewish creativity will be even more deeply connected. Their donation will allow Mayyim Hayyim to welcome two Hebrew College Rabbinical School interns to learn, teach, and accompany visitors through the ancient-yet-new practice of immersion.

For Carol and Steve, the partnership feels less like the start of something new and more like a continuation. Soon after they moved to Boston two decades ago, they encountered Mayyim Hayyim’s reimagined mikveh, where traditional halakhic immersion intersects with 21st-century creativity and inclusion. The space became woven into the rhythms of their lives. Steve marked his recovery from cancer with an immersion that helped him, as he describes it, “begin again.” Carol wrote and performed a ritual to honor becoming a grandmother, standing waist-deep in the mikveh with her daughter-in-law and newborn grandchild looking on as witnesses.

Around the same time, Hebrew College became another anchor in their family’s Jewish journey. They studied in adult learning programs, built friendships, and joined committees. Steve eventually joined the Hebrew College Board of Trustees, where he now serves as Chair of Governance and helped shepherd the College’s move to a new shared campus operating side by side with other Jewish organizations.

“We’ve always valued the shared campus concept,” they wrote in a letter to the Mayyim Hayyim board. “Both Hebrew College and Mayyim Hayyim are visionary, innovative, and inclusive. Both are building a vibrant Jewish community that meets the needs of the 21st century while honoring ritual and tradition.”

Their new gift reflects that vision twice over: supporting Mayyim Hayyim’s capacity to host and mentor rabbinic interns, and contributing to the Hebrew College Rabbinic Scholarship Fund, which helps ease the financial burden for students pursuing the rabbinate. “It’s hard enough to become a rabbi,” notes Steve. “One of the most important things we can do is minimize the hurdles for those who are ready to take on that work.”

The partnership also offers a model for how to leverage the inherent potential of the shared campus: not just neighboring organizations, but collaborators in shaping the next generation of Jewish leadership. “Becoming a rabbi requires deep Torah learning,” says Steve, “but it also requires understanding how Jewish life actually unfolds, with all of its transitions, emotions, and questions. Serving at the mikveh lets students see how an ancient ritual becomes a source of contemporary meaning.” A rabbinical student may study in the beit midrash in the morning, then guide someone through an immersion of healing or celebration that same afternoon, carrying their insights back and forth across the parking lot.

“In a Jewish world full of creativity and new ideas, collaboration is the heart of the work,” reflects Carol. “We hope this internship sparks even more connections across the campus.”

Hebrew College is deeply grateful to Carol and Steve for nurturing those connections and for helping future rabbis encounter the living waters that have shaped Jewish life for thousands of years, and continue to do so just footsteps from their classrooms.