Canada’s largest student Shabbaton in two decades draws hundreds to Ontario amid campus tensions

(thecjn.ca) – Nearly 300 Jewish university students from across Canada gathered the weekend of Jan. 16-18 for a national Hillel conference, marking what organizers call the largest Shabbat-focused leadership retreat for students in nearly 20 years and underscoring a growing demand for connection and coordination on campus.

Students travelled from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec for the multi-day event, held in Markham, Ont. It combined Shabbat programming with sessions on Jewish identity, advocacy, leadership and Israel. The conference has grown significantly since its inception, expanding from a small, largely Ontario-based gathering into a national event with paid speakers and formal programming.

“This one was very different because it [functioned] as a proper conference,” said Gabe Kaplan, co-president of Hillel McMaster, who has attended two prior Hillel Shabbatons, one of which had closer to 70 attendees. Kaplan, who had an administrative role in organizing the event, said the conference was designed to help Jewish student leaders share ideas and build relationships across campuses that often face similar challenges independently.

One session he attended focused on building sustainable alliances beyond the Jewish community, emphasizing the importance of Jewish student leaders being active in broader campus spaces, welcoming non-Jewish peers into Jewish life, and creating pathways for those allies to take on leadership roles themselves.

“If we can connect throughout Canada, with a bunch of campuses and student leaders, then we can each take a piece of it back with us to our campus,” he said.

“It’s not just (McMaster) handling a protest on its own,” Kaplan added. “McMaster is communicating with (University of Toronto). We all kind of build a strategy together.”

Phoebe Starnino, president of Hillel at Queen’s University, said the conference addressed a longstanding gap in Canada’s Jewish campus landscape.

“I think that it was something that we were really lacking in Canada, that we didn’t have an opportunity for all of the (Hillel) students in Canada to come together and to talk about the issues affecting them,” she said.

“Incidents don’t happen in a vacuum,” Starnino said. “When we see issues that happen at UofT, they affect us at Queen’s.”

She said having a national network of Jewish student leaders allows campuses to respond collectively rather than in isolation.

In addition to Jewish student leaders, the gathering included non-Jewish students involved in Hillel programming. Sophie Johnston, equity, diversity and inclusion director at Hillel McMaster, said attending the conference as a non-Jew has shaped how she approaches campus advocacy and relationship-building.

She said she first became involved with Hillel after Oct. 7, encouraged by peers and motivated by what she described as the Jewish community’s openness.

Johnston said conferences like this helped her better understand Jewish student experiences while also connecting her with other campus leaders working on inclusion.

“I’ve been able to meet other people working in EDI bringing more inclusionary spaces to Hillels [and] to their universities,” she said.

She said the weekend helped her move past what she described as a creative block and gave her renewed energy heading into the semester.

One initiative she hopes to pursue involves informal, one-on-one relationship-building.

“One thing that we had been thinking about was like one-on-one coffee chats,” she said, describing an idea that would involve “setting up people who have similar interests, having them go talk to each other.”

Johnston said the initiative is meant to support both inclusion and mentorship, particularly for younger students.

In an email statement from Hillel Ontario’s chief advancement officer Jay Solomon, the Shabbaton was described as an opportunity to highlight different corners of the Jewish student experience. The programming coordinated “break-outs that focus on various micro-communities, including Russian Jews, LGBTQ+ Jews, neurodivergent Jews, Foodie Jews, sporty Jews and advocate Jews,” Solomon explained.

Jonathan Ben Simon, one of the conference’s MCs, said the weekend was also an opportunity to celebrate Jewish life. “On Friday night, everybody was singing and dancing,” he recalls.

“All the Jews and all the people that are here at this convention, we’re the next generation that’s going to be facing the world,” Ben Simon said.

“At its core, unity and community is what Judaism is all about.”