From Ghana to Iceland, 3,000 Jewish Teens Revel in New York
Weekend brings spiritual energy to the often tumultuous life of a teenager
Californian Lev Yakov Voskoboynik says he found his Jewish identity through CTeen, as he and more than 3,000 teens and chaperones from as far as Ghana and Iceland gathered in New York for the 15th and largest-ever CTeen Shabbaton to date.
Voskoboynik started his journey to Jewish observance as a 14-year-old at the CTeen Xtreme camp, a travel camp geared for high school students, he tells Chabad.org. His parents, worried about his lack of Jewish interest, enrolled him in the camp to try to spark some feelings for Judaism. Fast-forward a decade, and after graduating high school, attending yeshivahs on the East Coast and receiving rabbinical ordination, Voskoboynik now runs a CTeen chapter with his wife, Talia, as part of Chabad of the Rivertowns in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. This year’s Shabbaton is his fourth weekend as a chaperone and his first as a featured speaker on Sunday morning.
“Those two weeks in summer camp were life-changing for me; they opened my eyes to the beauty of Yiddishkeit,'' he says. “When I came home, I was so inspired that I started keeping some of the mitzvahs I had learned about in camp.”
An avid tennis player and popular figure in high school, Voskoboynik says he slowly started to understand what Judaism meant to him through his involvement with Rabbi Eli Rivkin, co-director of Chabad of Northridge, Calif., who signed him up to attend the CTeen Shabbaton in New York.
“What got me hooked was the energy and excitement,” he says. “I had friends back home in California, I was a successful athlete and I thought I had it all, but there was a realness that was missing. When I went to the Shabbaton, I realized just how shallow what I had really was, and I made a commitment to increasing my Jewish observance.”
Voskoboynik relates that “people want to feel important, like they’re a big deal, and the only way to really feel that is by letting yourself see G‑d’s hand. How He has a need and mission for everyone in this world, and that G‑d cares about you and wants your success.” Read More…
