Extracurricular Archives - The 91Ӱ�� School

91Ӱ�� FTC Robotics Team Heads to State Championship

Yaelle — Thu, 06 May 2021 17:56:29 +0000

The CouGears, Yeshivat 91Ӱ��’s FTC (First Tech Challenge) Robotics team, is proud to have earned a spot in the NJ State Championship this June, after ranking 11th out of almost 40 teams in the Northern Leagues regional championship held virtually on April 22. There, the team earned a second place award in the Control Award category, which recognizes excellence in coding. The team put together an informative five-minute presentation for the judges and answered a variety of questions in a series of panel interviews over the course of several days.

Only about 30 teams out of several hundred in New Jersey make the state tournament each year. “We are certainly a David among Goliaths, as we are going up against teams that meet for many more hours than we have available with our dual curriculum,” said the team’s faculty coach, Travis Merritt. “I could not be more proud of the work that these students have accomplished.”

Abi Langer ’21 and Eliana Bane ’22 served as senior and junior captains, respectively, guiding and motivating the team through many challenging moments. “After months of hard work and long hours, our little robot, The Shot, successfully accomplished its goal of intaking orange foam disks and spewing them out into a 3ft high goal,” said Langer. “I couldn’t contain my excitement at our whopping point average across 6 matches of 142.2 points. In September, the robot was nothing more than an idea and a jumble of metal and plastic parts, but after many designs and redesigns and re-redesigns our little Shotty did it and we could not be more proud.”

Over the course of the year, the team adapted to an ever changing set of circumstances but persevered through it all to produce a highly effective and reliable robot. To practice, the CouGears worked on their robot in many different locations within 91Ӱ��, and took their field apart and put it back together more times than they could count. The robot is now ready for its fourth iteration as Team #15762 prepares for 91Ӱ��’s first state tournament in school history.

The team extended their thanks to Dr. Shawn Langer, 91Ӱ�� Engineering Program Director Rifkie Silverman and The Gottesman Fund for their critical contributions to the program.

In addition to Langer and Bane, the CouGears FTC team includes Jonathan Katz (programming captain), Ilan Davidovsky (mechanical captain), Eytan Abramowitz (driver and doc specialist), Isaac Badner, Isabelle Bersson, Aaron Goldgewert, Oran Goodman, Joshua Kaplan, Nate Mohl, Jude Shankman, Eitan Traurig and Eitan Weinberg.

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Beni Romm ’21 Talks Tanach

Yaelle — Thu, 22 Apr 2021 17:52:48 +0000

The night before Yom Ha’atzmaut, Beni Romm, a Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� senior from White Plains, went to sleep before the sun, at 7:30 p.m. Romm, the first place winner of the 2020 Dr. Shimshon Issacheroff Chidon HaTanach USA, needed to be ready to represent America at the International Chidon HaTanach, scheduled for 4:00 a.m. EST (11:00 a.m. Israeli time). By 2:30 a.m., his tech connection was up and running. In an ordinary year, Romm and fellow competitors, from around the world, would have spent a week touring Israel and bonding. However, COVID-19 meant that only Israelis would be on stage at Jerusalem’s Binyanei Ha’Umah; everyone else was virtual. By the time most of America woke up, Romm had climbed to the top three in the notoriously difficult competition, with Israeli contestants gaining the other top slots.

For Romm, the experience of studying Tanach has been an immersive one, suffused with religious meaning. “The study of any literature allows one to appreciate the mind of its author,” explained Romm. “When one immerses himself in a particular canon of literature, he finds his thoughts shaped by and expressed in terms of the literature he is studying. This takes on religious significance when that literature is Tanach, and one realizes that his own mind is being brought into greater alignment with the Perfect Mind, the ultimate Author of the Tanach.”

Romm’s favorite part of Tanach? “Kohelet, by virtue of the fact that it’s in Tanach at all,” he said. “It raises many of the sentiments extolled as the pinnacle of wisdom by today’s ‘New Atheists’ (an apt demonstration of its own aphorism, ‘Ein chadash tachat hashemesh,’ There is nothing new under the sun). By canonizing it, the (proto-)rabbis acknowledged that such musings, while poignant, are not the end of wisdom and man’s search for spiritual fulfillment, but only its beginning. ‘Sof davar hakol nishma, et ha-Elokim yera ve’et mitzvotav shemor’” “The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep his commandments; for this is the whole man.”

Romm also learned about what it takes to advance in the Chidon, striving for the seemingly impossible. “In general, long term, your brain is capable of so much more than you think it is,” said Romm. “Your memory and your mind is a muscle, just like anything else. And if you work it with discipline, you can learn far more than you thought capable.” Romm also thanked his Chidon coach, 91Ӱ�� Hebrew Department Chair and 2016 International Adult Chidon HaTanach Champion Rabbi Yair Shahak, “for his dedication to helping me prepare for the International Chidon. His coaching and advice have been invaluable.”

One of Shahak’s goals was to give Romm strategies to remember the tiniest details, and know as much as possible. “He studied day and night,” said Shahak, noting that Romm has a natural affinity for spotting connections in the text. “One of the things that struck me about Beni is how much he relies on and utilizes simple logic based on linguistic and historical sources to be able to identify answers. For example, he correctly identified that metziltayim (cymbals) only appears during Bayit Sheini, so any quote with that word will only appear in Ezra, Nehemiah or Divrei Hayamim. Or, for example, knowing the history and geography of empires—that also played into his success. To say that it’s been a joy learning with him is an understatement.”

Over the course of high school, Romm said that his Jewish education “has really come from both sides of the faculty: Judaic and secular studies. This is a really unique aspect of 91Ӱ��.” Outside the classroom, he founded a Chidon Club at 91Ӱ�� and recruited a large membership. Earlier this year, 17 91Ӱ�� students advanced past the preliminary exam to the national round of the Chidon this May. When asked what advice he would give to new participants, Romm cited Mishlei 23:1: כי תצא ללחום את מושל בין תבין את אשר לפניך, “When you go out to fight against the ruler, you have to understand very well what’s in front of you,” said Romm.

“This holds true for every goal in life,” he explained. “You really have to understand what target you’re trying to achieve. With that in mind you can work towards that goal and be successful. My goal was really to master the material and win, and in that way I was able to gain a greater mastery of the material than if I were learning ‘lishma.’”

Yet, Romm is certainly no stranger to learning for its own sake. Now that the Chidon is over, he has set new goals: learn the remaining parts of Nevi’im Achronim to the same level which he prepared for the Chidon (“functionally equivalent to memorization”), sharpen his existing leining knowledge and complete shnayim mikra with the Septuagint with Koine Greek—with the aspiration of learning Greek so that he can study Second Temple and Mishnaic Judaism in college.

His work for the Chidon helped with it all. “As you’re learning you’re immediately, automatically connecting in your head all the places where similar words appear in Tanach,” he said, “as if you have a concordance in the back of your mind, and that’s a very useful tool to have.”

Romm believes that his ability to lein was indispensable in helping him learn and memorize as much as he did. He noted that boys are usually taught this skill in preparation for their bar mitzvah, while girls are not. This, to his mind, perpetuates a systemic inequality, to use contemporary terminology, when it comes to memorizing the text of the Torah and Nevi’im. “I think that this is not an ideal situation, because the Torah should be open equally to everyone,” said Romm. “We should not be putting pedagogical barriers in front of women when it comes to gaining mastery of Tanach.

“If I were to approach this problem, I would recommend that the community reconceptualize what the role of leining is—the learning of how to read and chant the Torah trop—and how it’s taught,” he explained. “Currently in the community, leining is associated with the public reading of Torah and Haftarah in the synagogue, but historically this was never the purpose of the leining. Cantillation exists not just in the parts that are read aloud in the synagogue but in all of Tanach, because it’s there to serve as both punctuation and an aid to memorization. Therefore, the skill of leining is not a skill in kriat Torah, but talmud Torah. Such that in order for there to be equality in the acquisition of skills in this area, Jewish schools should allocate class time to teaching the ta’amei mikra and how to lein.”

Romm is graduating from 91Ӱ�� this year, and plans to major in mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania following study at Yeshivat Har Etzion. He described the experience of briefly meeting people from Israel and around the world through the virtual Chidon programming as one of the highlights of the Chidon experience. “I hope to meet as many as I can next year in Israel,” he said.

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Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� Takes On Tanach

Yaelle — Wed, 24 Mar 2021 18:10:21 +0000

In preparation for the International Bible Contest for youth, Chidon HaTanach, in just a few weeks, 91Ӱ�� senior Beni Romm ‘21, the reigning Dr. Shimshon Issacheroff USA Chidon HaTanach Champion, went head to head on Wednesday with his Chidon coach, and Hebrew teacher, Rabbi Yair Shahak, first place winner of the 2016 International Adult Chidon HaTanach and 91Ӱ�� Hebrew department chair. The two competed against each other in a five-round mock Chidon covering material from 21 sefarim, in front of an excited, distanced audience of nearly 100 students. Dr. Yaelle Frohlich—91Ӱ�� history teacher and a 2016 International Adult Chidon semi-finalist—moderated the event with former National Champion Uriel Simpson ‘21, with contributions from Tamar Rosenfeld ‘23 and Shoshana Schwarz ‘23.

Romm has also been instrumental in recruiting new members to 91Ӱ��’s Chidon HaTanach Club (faculty adviser Rabbi Asher Bush), and it was announced this week that, following a 90-question preliminary exam on large portions of Tanach, 16 Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� students will have the opportunity to compete in the national round of the competition in early May: Tamar Rosenfeld ‘23, Josh Knoll ‘23, Ari Spivack ‘23, Maya Tratt ‘24, Eliora Gissinger ‘24, Elza Koslowe ‘23, Rami Kirsch ‘23, Gabe Rothman ‘23, Shoshana Schwarz ‘23, Liam Lewis ‘23, Ari Elkin ‘22, Rebecca Kermaier ‘23, Gavriel Weinstein ‘23, Sarit Greenwood ‘23, Alex Massel ‘23, and Ben Fisher ‘24.

“This year the excitement and level of achievement has been buoyed by the enthusiasm generated by our own national Chidon champion, senior Beni Romm, who has served as mentor to the group,” said Rabbi Bush.

Indeed, when all the students were brought together for a group photo, they eagerly discussed their Chidon test scores—but they weren’t talking about their own results. Rather, they were excited to tell the photographer about how well their friends had done, and about the joys of studying together.

“The best aspect of being a part of Chidon is being given the opportunity to learn Tanach in a way that emphasizes grasping the text in the original Hebrew along with being able to recognize and remember key phrases and little details of stories that I would not have picked up on otherwise,” said Tratt.

“I love finding connections between different sefarim and seeing how all of Tanach relates seamlessly,” added Kermaier.

Romm had words of encouragement for his fellow Cougars going into the national round: “Yishar Kochachem for all of the Tanakh that you have learned this year,” he said. “You should be proud of your hard work and dedication to Talmud Torah. The Chidon, however, offers an opportunity to more than just learn Torah. It offers an opportunity to know Torah, to internalize it, to approach mastery. This path is far more difficult than simply learning Torah, but also far more rewarding, in my experience. If you work towards this goal, you will be able to say of yourself: תורת אמת היתה בפיהו.”

In addition to the Chidon, Torah knowledge abounds in another extracurricular: Torah Bowl! Earlier this month, the Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� Girls Torah Bowl team won first place at their virtual meet. In preparation for the competition, they learned the last 12 perakim of Bamidbar along with Rashi’s commentary.

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91Ӱ�� CouGears Robotics Team Completes First Match

Yaelle — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 19:16:55 +0000

Robotics at Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� is having a year like none other, with over 50 students attending weekly meetings and forming 11 different teams. The highest level team, the FTC (First Tech Challenge) 91Ӱ�� CouGears team #15762, now in its third year, competes against public and private schools from across the state of New Jersey and recently had its first match of the year.

Navigating COVID-19 has been a unique experience for the team, as they have had to find appropriate space to build the robot and conduct practice matches while safely social distancing. But, as always, the team is proud of its ability to adapt and problem solve. After all, problem solving is the main skill practiced by the team as they design a robot to perform at a high level. After building three different robots this season, the team successfully iterated their design to perform well in scoring points for the team.

“We have grown and developed as a team, each year better and more improved from the last,” said CouGears team member Nate Mohl ‘22. “Our team has worked very hard since September, brainstorming, building and coding a working robot. We saw all of our hard work, long hours and dedication pay off.”

The 91Ӱ�� CouGears held their first official match of the season on February 24. In matches, different schools’ robots compete and score points against each other by shooting rings into goals and moving objects around the playing field. The programming team develops code to move the robot autonomously for a portion of the match and drivers use remote controls to operate the robot the remainder of the time. The CouGears say they look forward to fine tuning their robot even further over the coming weeks, before the next live-streamed match.

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91Ӱ�� Students Win New Jersey Scholastic Art and Writing Awards

Yaelle — Mon, 03 Feb 2020 16:17:58 +0000

Four 91Ӱ�� students have won recognition in the 2020 New Jersey Scholastic Art and Writing Awards for their literary and artistic creations. Their pieces, nuanced and poignant, explore the human condition from both a general and Jewish point of view. Mia Hahn ’21 won an honorable mention for her short story, “The Old Man’s Heart.” Rochel Leah Itzkowitz ’21 received a silver key award for her short story, “History Always Repeats Itself.” Hahn and Itzkowitz are also editors of Kalliope, 91Ӱ��’s literary arts magazine.

Meanwhile, Molly Lopkin ’20 won two silver keys and two honorable mentions for four of her poetry pieces, including one titled “Exodus 32:6, 2019” which was inspired by Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Taken” and the story of the golden calf and is about resisting peer pressure. In the art category, Hannah Finkelshteyn ’20 won a gold key for a work titled “Anxious.” The piece will be displayed alongside the other gold key winning art at the Montclair Art Museum from February 15 to March 22.

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Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� CouGears Win First Place at Robotics Meet

Yaelle — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 16:21:36 +0000

Yeshivat 91Ӱ��’s varsity robotics team, the CouGears, won first place at the FIRST Tech Challenge’s Robo-Wrangle II robotics meet this past Sunday in Emerson. The meet featured 27 teams from public and private schools across the state of New Jersey. 91Ӱ��’s robot was especially recognized for its skill in picking up building blocks and transferring them to a build platform. The CouGears also had a reliable autonomous code that earned respect from many teams and made them a sought-after partner within the competition.

Engineering and science teacher Mr. Travis Merritt mentored the CouGears, who were one of two yeshiva day school teams to compete in the meet. “I am especially proud of our team, because we are working within a yeshiva schedule, but it’s not a yeshiva league,” said Merritt, noting that the yeshiva school day ends later than most other schools, plus the CouGears of course cannot work on Shabbat. “I cannot emphasize enough what an accomplishment this is.”

Robotics team member Zachary Gold ’20 said that every individual on the team played a part in the victory. “Seeing such a jump from a 15th place finish last year to first and second place finishes this year is incredible,” said Gold, referencing the CouGears’ second place finish at their first qualifying tournament of the year, back in December. “I attribute much of this success to a strong team effort this year. Everyone has a role—from senior to sophomore, from captain to team member.”

Jonathan Sarasohn ’20, who is one of the CouGears captains, agreed. “The most rewarding part of the competition this past Sunday was seeing the result of all of the hard work we have put into our robot over the course of the past few months,” said Sarasohn. “Being part of the 91Ӱ�� CouGears has allowed me to gain real-world engineering experience, and has influenced my decision to study mechanical engineering in college.”

The next stop for the CouGears will be the league tournament.

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Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� Sports Management Club Visits NBA Headquarters

Yaelle — Tue, 14 Jan 2020 15:32:20 +0000

Yeshivat 91Ӱ��’s Sports Management Club visited the headquarters of the National Basketball Association (NBA) on January 13, an inspiring and fun close to the first semester! The Sports Management Club, new to 91Ӱ�� this year, provides students with an opportunity to meet and learn from professionals about the industry as a whole, and about the experiences of religious Jews in the sports world.

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91Ӱ�� Drama Society Produces ‘A Few Good Men’

Yaelle — Tue, 16 Apr 2019 16:42:38 +0000

The Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� Drama Society put on a gripping production of Aaron Sorkin’s “A Few Good Men” on April 7 and 8. Set in Guantanamo Bay in the 1980s, the play follows two marines on trial in a military court for the murder of a weaker soldier in their own unit. The heroes of the play are military lawyers, U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander Joanne Galloway (played by Molly Lopkin) and U.S. Navy Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee (played by Shifra Dimbert). Galloway and Kaffee realize that the case is more complicated than first meets the eye, and despite past failures (for Galloway) and a penchant for plea bargains (for Kaffee), refuse to let the case drop before uncovering the truth about a superior officer’s role in the crime.

91Ӱ�� Drama Society Director Danny Hoffman said he chose the play because it provides many interesting ideas for the students to think about and discuss. This is Hoffman’s second year directing the 91Ӱ�� spring production, taking over from Rabbi Dr. John Krug, who continues to serve in a mentorship role.

The production starred actors Daniella Atiya, Max Burgida, Addie Coates, Mia Cohen, Shifra Dimbert, JJ Feit, Dalia Goldstein, Maayan Keigher, Kayla Kramer, Lily Levine, Jemma Lifschitz, Molly Lopkin, Tzvi Mershon, Sophie Ostrove, Dylan Speiser, Tamara Sragow and Tzipora Lifschitz. Orly Hahn and Kaylie Jacobs served as associate directors, with Hannah Finkelshteyn as production designer, Jarret Lazarus and Daphna Cohen as assistant stage managers and Margalit Ramirez on tech.

Photos of the production courtesy of Jonathan Sarasohn.

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Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� Walks the Runway for Sharsheret

Yaelle — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 01:45:39 +0000

The third annual 91Ӱ��-Sharsheret fashion show at Lord and Taylor took place on Thursday, March 28. Seventeen Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� students modeled Pesach-appropriate dresses from Lord and Taylor’s collection. Along with the fashion aspect, founder Na’ama Kaye, a senior at 91Ӱ��, introduced a speaker from Sharsheret who spoke both to the audience and the high school girls about what she learned having survived breast cancer. All proceeds from the night went to Sharsheret, raising tzedaka for this worthy organization.

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91Ӱ�� Delegation Visits Google Headquarters

Yaelle — Fri, 01 Jun 2018 13:00:13 +0000

Ten Yeshivat 91Ӱ�� junior and senior computer science students who are seriously considering future STEAM careers got a one-of-a-kind tour of Google Headquarters in Manhattan on May 29. There, they heard from Principal Software Engineer Micah Lemonik about careers and internship opportunities at the company, what it’s like to build a career at Google and how individuals in various fields of engineering work together, as well as different careers in engineering and computer science.

“It was very interesting to see the way that a multibillion dollar tech company, like Google, manages its employees, and how the many different engineering career choices are applied to projects on a larger scale,” Sam Goldberg ’19.

“I was almost afraid to explore computer science because I thought of it as someone sitting behind a computer all day,” said Michal Katz ’19. “After seeing Google, my view of the entire concept has done a complete 180. It just comes to show a young ‘engineer’ that there really is no limit to what we have the potential to accomplish.”

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