Brandeis has a vibrant religious life and Jewish community, with a number of on-campus Jewish organizations. This year, several students came together to create a new egalitarian, nondenominational community called Kehilat Sha'ar, with the mission of providing a "cohesive Jewish experience," according to member Yaakov Malomet '17.
 Malomet along with Shulamit Ornstein '16, Viktoria Bedo '15, Hannah Kober '16, and Zachary Anziska '16 are among the organizers of the group. Though there are nine students acting as leaders of the movement now, they stress that Kehilat Sha'ar is a grassroots group without a strong leadership hierarchy and anyone who would like to get involved is welcome to do so.
The goal of Kehilat Sha'ar is to provide a "vibrant, independent, egalitarian" place where "religion and community overlap" and everyone is "sharing in the entire experience together," Malomet said. Literally translated from Hebrew, Kehilat Sha'ar means "community gate." The phrase is an excerpt from a psalm in the Bible that says 'open the gates of justice,' The community part is simple: "there are Jewish organizations that fill a lot of religious institutional needs of the community with a prayer service connected to it. However, we wanted to make sure that the two are together ... the idea behind a gate is that there is something behind it. However, the gates are open so that people can enter," Bedo says.
Kehilat Sha'ar is in its early stages and consists of Shabbat events that include prayer services and a dinner afterward. So far the group has held two Shabbat events, the most recent of which was held on Nov. 1.
"Those are the two programs right now, but we are thinking of expanding to Jewish learning events or maybe a weekday prayer service," Malomet explains.
Kehilat Sha'ar is open to anyone on campus. It seeks to provide a religious outlet for people who "have found that the community or services they have gone to have not been something they can connect with," says Malomet.
Brandeis already has many Jewish groups on campus. This includes Hillel, a broad organization that has various branches that cater to specific denominations of Judaism, and Chabad, a group with roots in the Chassidic tradition. Kehilat Sha'ar differs in that it does not cater to a specific denomination, which its members see as positive. The members consider their services to be egalitarian. "The biggest thing that defines us from the rest of the community is that we have no denomination. We're just Jews," Ornstein said. "We're singing songs that are [from] each denomination and things that are universal to Jews. We sing in English too."
The other thing that sets them apart is the intimacy of these joint prayer and meal experiences. The Kehilat Sha'ar dinners are "very intimate-the way we set the table is so everyone is seated together and can see each other. It's a very communal meal," Ornstein says. The reason that this intimacy is so important is that "it enhances the experience if you can actually get to know the people that you're praying with rather than just seeing them," Kober explains.
Right now, most Jewish services on campus are just that-only services, with no events directly corresponding. Kehilat Sha'ar wants to make services an event that also include interaction with other members of the community by combining prayer with communal meals and events.
Hillel, a major on-campus Jewish group, is an "umbrella organization; we take a similar form to the religious groups. It's not a difference between us and Hillel, it's that we're trying to fill a void that wasn't filled by other religious groups," Kober notes. Bedo notes that Kehilat Sha'ar is "trying to expand the options rather than splinter off and be something else."
Kehilat Sha'ar serves as a melting pot for different types of Judaism. It is "both traditional and egalitarian, but one of the things that's distinctive between the preexisting egalitarian unions is that this is a place where people who haven't experienced an egalitarian service can dabble in that and people who haven't experienced a traditional service can do the same," Kober says.
The goal of Kehilat Sha'ar is to bring these people together so that individual Jews are not separated by their individual denominations.
Kehilat Sha'ar is "drawing from the entire Hillel and Jewish community and people who are maybe not affiliated with the Hillel community-people who are maybe just not affiliated right now no matter what denomination they associate themselves with," explains Ornstein.
Though Kehilat Sha'ar is a new organization, its founders hope that it will remain dynamic as it grows. "We hope this is a sustainable community where there are always going to be people here who feel like they don't have/identify with a particular religious community and we're really trying to serve that in any way that we can," Anziska said.
"[We] welcome those who just want to come and be who they are and partake in a spiritual experience as part of a group or community as well."

Editor's Note: Hannah Kober is a staff illustrator for the Justice.