A 17-year-old Piedmont resident with a burgeoning interest in biomedical engineering has been selected as the national president of NCSY, the Orthodox Union’s youth movement. Sarah Engel is the first person from the Bay Area ever to hold the position.
Engel, who attends Modern Orthodox Beth Jacob Congregation in Oakland and is a senior at Meira Academy, an Orthodox school for girls in Palo Alto, said she wants to help others experience the same growth in Jewish life and identity that she has gained from participating in NCSY.
“Everyone wants to change the world; NCSY gives you confidence,” Engel said. “I really want to make Torah and Jewish education more accessible.”
Founded in 1954, NCSY aims to engage Jewish teens and encourage them to embrace Jewish learning and build Jewish lives. NCSY has chapters across the United States, and at least 10,000 teens participate, with about 5,000 more active members, according to Dovid Bashevkin, NCSY’s director of education.
Engel first got involved in NCSY as an eighth-grader when the local chapter director invited her to join the Northern California middle school board. She was born in the South Bay, where she attended a Conservative synagogue with her family, but when she was 6, they moved to Piedmont and started attending Beth Jacob.
“We began keeping Shabbat and walking to shul,” she said. She attended Modern Orthodox Oakland Hebrew Day School through eighth grade, then began attending Meira Academy, where she boards during the week.
With NCSY, Engel has enjoyed social events, weekly “latte and learning” events at Starbucks with rabbis and guest teachers and Shabbatot retreats. Last year, she sat on the NCSY West Coast board.
Engel’s NCSY chapter director encouraged her to apply for the presidency. Her application was one of 100 submitted, but it stood out due to her glowing references, leadership skills and introspective essay, Bashevkin said.
“Her emphasis [was] on making the Jewish experience hers, and that the Jewish experience needs to be a product of both her history and her own choice and decision making,” Bashevkin said.
In her application, Engel described being self-conscious when she first decided to dress more modestly, but then gaining confidence in her decision.
“I had learned a lot about the meaning behind modesty in Judaism. It seemed like such a beautiful tradition and such a beautiful concept in Judaism,” Engel said. “With the support of my NCSY director and adviser, I felt much more confident about it.”
As NCSY national president, Engel will travel as frequently as every other month, taking trips to New York and to NCSY chapters in different regions. She will work with the students on the national board, promote NCSY programming and test new initiatives. In recent years, all previous NCSY presidents have been from the East Coast.
Though being an Orthodox Jew in the Bay Area isn’t always easy, Engel said “it’s a really unique opportunity to represent your beliefs and values. Everything that I do has to be very genuine because not everyone else around me is doing the same thing.”