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Sofiya Zilberberg (Courtesy of Sofiya Zilberberg)<\/p>\nSofiya Zilberberg was looking to move to Philadelphia on a budget for graduate school when a random guy on Facebook asked her if she was Jewish and spoke Russian.<\/p>\n
Sofiya Zilberberg (Courtesy of Sofiya Zilberberg)<\/p>\n
He was from the Russian speaking Moishe house in Center City and looking for someone to join. Luckily for Zilberberg, this was the budget-friendly housing option she was looking for and she was both Jewish and spoke Russian.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I first came [to Philadelphia], I was 22 and I didn\u2019t really know how to make friends or how to connect or how to network,\u201d she said. \u201cI was a small fish in a very very big pond.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zilberberg is originally from Brooklyn, New York, but at the age of 7, she and her family moved to Ellicott City, Maryland, for what she described as a semi-secular Jewish life. She and her family attended services on High Holidays and Hebrew school at Congregation ARIEL-Chabad Jewish Center in Pikesville, Maryland. However, she only really discovered other Jewish organizations after becoming a Moishe House resident.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t even know where to start. So I kind of like, fell under my roommate\u2019s shadow, who was a resident a year longer than I was, and he kind of showed me the ropes of like, this is how you go to different places and you meet people. I ended up making a lot of connections with young Jewish professionals in Philadelphia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Zilberberg considers herself an almost-modern orthodox Jew because of the connections she\u2019s made with her Judaism and with others from Moishe House. \u201cI\u2019m observant. I\u2019m like, leaning towards, or in the direction of modern orthodoxy. I\u2019m not quite there yet, but I\u2019m getting there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
While Zilberberg came to Philly for her graduate degree, wanting to become an optometrist, she ended up finding so much more.<\/p>\n
\u201cI really wanted to go to the Salis University College of Pennsylvania for optometry, and after I didn\u2019t get accepted, I ended up looking into their other programs so I get my foot in the door at the school and meet the professors,\u201d she explained. \u201cI ended up finding this master\u2019s in low vision studies, and I had all the prerequisites for it because I already did my pre-optometry program. So I ended up following that route and two years later, I graduated with my master\u2019s and got a job opportunity here in Philly. So I ended up staying.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zilberberg became a Moishe house resident in 2022. Not long after, her sister followed and met her husband. Finding that living in a house with newly-weds wasn\u2019t ideal, Zilberberg recently decided it was time to move out \u2014 to an apartment down the block.<\/p>\n
\u201cI still do all of the events with the Russian speaking Moishe house, but I also have my own little pad,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen it comes to event planning for Moishe house, we\u2019re all doing it together, but then you kind of just have a separate space for yourself to go and, like, live.\u201d
For Zilberberg, watching the Moishe house grow a community is what drives her to stay involved.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat keeps me going is the look on everybody\u2019s face, or the conversation or the laughter that goes around when you put something on like a beautiful Shabbat dinner, and then you see people that don\u2019t normally have Shabbat dinner at home come to your space and be like, \u2018this was such a beautiful dinner. I might keep Shabbat next week,\u2019\u201d she explained. \u201cJust that might, like the fact that they\u2019re already thinking about it means that we\u2019ve influenced them, or we\u2019ve shown them the beauty, which is exactly what we wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
Outside of her involvement with Moishe house and her day job, Zilberberg attends services at Mikveh Israel and Mamash Chabad, she teaches Hebrew school on Wednesdays at Chabad of Fishtown and enjoys doing Pilates.<\/p>\n