Alternative Breaks with Berkeley Hillel
2010-2011 Alternative Break trips!!
Join other Jewish students this winter break for a service learning trip to Montevideo, Uruguay!
We will discuss social justice with pre and post trip sessions, and we will spend a week building houses and visiting the Jewish community in Montevideo. Cost is $2,000 with generous scholarships available.
Please contact Lisa Motenko for more information.
Berkeley Hillel’s Eden Project presents our first ever food justice alternative break program!!!
Join us for a year long program about FOOD! We’ll shop at local farmers markets, share recipes and cook dinner together, study food justice, attend the Hazon Food Conference, and launch several food related programs in our community including a CSA through Hillel, an herb garden on our balcony, Challah for Darfur, and anything else we think up as we explore the food scene in Berkeley – the largest mecca of the Slow Food Movement outside of Italy!
This experience will culminate with a weeklong trip to OZ farm in Northern California. Over the course of the week, participants will learn a wide range of skills in sustainable and organic agriculture such as planting, harvesting, natural building and composting. To complement the physical work, participants will have the opportunity to engage in texts and hear speakers discuss topics such as Jewish agricultural laws, medicinal herbs, and global food security. Students will gain exposure to the growing food justice movement, both within the Jewish and secular worlds.
Students will leave with a greater understanding of the complex issues surrounding sustainable food production and the necessary skills, knowledge and resources to affect positive change in their communities and on campus.
If this opportunity sounds too delicious to pass up, contact Oren Persing for more details.
Hurricane Relief Work in the Gulf Coast
In the past four years, Berkeley Hillel has taken seven groups of 20-40 students each to Mississippi and Louisiana to help with hurricane relief in the gulf coast over winter and spring breaks. They have worked with the Inter-faith Disaster Task Force and the National Relief Network to gut homes, put roofs on houses, clean up neighborhoods, and rebuild homes.
This past March, Berkeley Hillel partnered with the Jewish Funds for Justice to take 19 students to New Orleans for an Alternative Spring Break service project. The students, along with Berkeley Hillel staff, helped to rebuild homes and parks that were damaged in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster and worked with school age children on a literacy project. The students were able to see the destruction of the hurricane and flooding and also meet the residents of the wonderful communities they were working in.
The Goals of the trip include providing students with an opportunity to serve the non-Jewish community and to come to better understand and appreciate this community, to introduce students to the gravity and ongoing seriousness of the situation on the Gulf Coast, and to inspire students to return to the Cal community as representatives and leaders promoting a value of and commitment to service.
"We entered a world so different from our own, a world that needs help. How thankful we all were to be able, equipped, and willing to lend our hands and hearts to the people of Louisiana and Mississippi, our new friends, who would've done the same for us."
"I went into my alternative break trip with an expectation of a vacation with a good deed attached. What I came out with was an education, a completely new and different experience, a more complete understanding of a situation than I ever could have gotten from home, and a whole new group of friends. I came away with the motivation to make a difference in a bigger way than a week over break."
Latin America and Beyond
Berkeley Hillel has sponsored alternative break trips to Nicaragua and El Salvador and will be sponsoring a trip to Uruguay this coming winter! The participants helped to build a community center, learned about the communities, and were inspired to continue their service work on the local level here in Berkeley.
We are always looking for new and educational experiences and would love suggestions on different places for next year's alternative break trips!
For more information or suggestions on any of our Alternative Break trips please contact
Lisa Motenko.