Traditionally, Hillel has been overseen by a steering committee, composed of three elected members and one appointed member, and a coordinating council on which any undergraduate may vote after attending two meetings.

Major decisions are made by the coordinating council, which meets monthly during the academic year and currently counts more than 100 voting members.

But members say this forum has proved unwieldy. As a result, Hillel has developed a leadership council, composed of 24 student heads of various Hillel programs.

The role of the council, which met for the first time on January 11, will be to discuss issues facing Hillel and come up with practical ways of implementing visions and goals, says Andorsky.

While some see the creation of the leadership council as a necessary response to changes in size, others see it as a way to represent the different groups within Hillel.

"One of the reasons the [leadership] council was created was to have a wider representation of people. That seems particularly relevant now considering the current make-up of the steering committee," says recently-elected Associate Chair Leah J. Solomon '97.

Tucker emphatically rejects this notion, arguing that the council was created to facilitate decision making.

"[The creation of] the council was not an issue of appeasing constituencies," says Tucker. "It was an attempt to bridge the gap between the steering committee and the coordinating council. The steering committee provides vision, but we need a smaller group to implement the agenda."

According to Solomon, 15 of the 24 members on the council are Conservative, seven are Orthodox, one is reform and one is not part of any minyan.

Historical Differences

Some Hillel members say that any attempt to type people by the minyan they attend is bound to lead to over-generalization.

"There are people who are Conservative, who observe almost all of the same rituals as the Orthodox," Andorsky said. "A person's Jewish identity is not defined by where they go to service. All a denomination will tell you is which service a person prays in."

In fact, Andorsky and Tucker both say that they are as observant as many Orthodox Hillel members. For example, both keep Shabbat, the Jewish Sabbath, and do not use electricity or travel in cars on that day.

All the leaders interviewed stressed that despite different worship styles, there is a great deal of communication among members of the various minyans.

"The type of friendships and seriously meaningful conversations [among groups] that we have at Hillel, you would never find in the broader Jewish community," Wexler says.