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I found out a drop about several sems and i was hoping some of you who have been there/ know a lot about them would be able to share some of your info with me. These are some I might be looking into:
BYA, Nachlas, Mechon Raya, Bnos Sarah, Tiferes, Hadar, Kesser Chaya, Binas, Ateres, and Seminar.
Please describe the type of crowd that goes there, and the academics. Thanks in advance.
I just got back from Seminar, and I can say I had a nice experience. I wasn’t one of those girls who was “obsessed” with seminary, though. It was a hard adjustment.
Seminar has a nice mix of “out of town” type girls, and the staff is very yeshivish, though the girls are not necessarily so- it’s a nice, solid, Bais Yaakov crowd and pretty friendly. The work wasn’t very hard, but there were some times in the year when we had a bunch of reports. But you weren’t constantly staying up late on schoolwork.
BYA and Nachlas, as far as I can tell, are pretty Yeshivish. They both have good reputations (and Nachlas has a stunning dorm). I think Nachlas has a little bit of a hard academic reputation, but I’m not sure about BYA.
Machon Raaya is also a little hard, but from what I’ve heard, the girls are really nice and everyone I know who went there loved it. It’s probably the same as Seminar in types of girls.
Tiferes and Hadar are known as very frum and very academic- I don’t know many people who went to either, but those I do know are really nice, sweet people, but also very smart (I’m pretty sure there’s a heavy workload at both places.) Hadar is very centrally located, but I heard the dorm is small.
Bnos Sara is also academic- I heard they only teach in Hebrew. I don’t really know much about it.
Kesser Chaya is a new school Rabbi Meisles of Pninim started but he said (this is what he told us in seminary) that it’s supposed to be for Seminar-type girls who don’t want to work as hard. So I think what he meant is it’s for solid, nice girls who don’t want to be bad or crazy in Israel (like some slackers do) but they’re just not very academic students. I think it’s also accepting people Seminar doesn’t have room for (the dorm is totally full), but I also think they got a lot of applicants this year, because Binas, which just had it’s first year, was also started by this Rabbi Meisles, and it was really successful- somehow, he got a great group of girls and insanely amazing staff members (like Rabbi Heller), so now people think Keser Chaya will also be really good. It probably will be.
Binas is the school I probably would have applied to if I had known about it when I was applying to seminaries. The girls there are really nice, and the school has awesome teachers and seems to be run really well. It also got tons of applicants this past year.
I looked into Ateres, and only didn’t apply because I wanted a bigger school. I really like all the people I know who went there, but I don’t really know much about the school itself.
The schools you put down are mostly really top schools, and I think all of them have a good reputation. The most academic are probably Hadar, Tiferes, Bnos Sara, and Nachlas, but none of the schools are easy, with maybe the exception of Kesser Chaya, but it’s first year will be starting soon, so nobody knows yet.
Good luck!
What type of school do you want?
I posted on another thread that I actually just got back from ateres. I read the post from WhyamIstillup, and I found a few mistakes… I don’t know you or what you want from seminary, but this is what I can tell you.
If you are looking for a lot of hashkafa, the places you will find that are Ateres and meohr, but very diffrent. The other seminaries of course have some hashkafa but not as much and do focus on text more. While Meohr and Ateres are both hashkafa based, Ateres is hashkafa that is from a source from text always, and is grounded not anything floaty or in the clouds, which is something I really enjoyed. Almost every subject had hashkafa brought out from it chumash, navi, everything! The reports were also that you had to use seforim and texts, but more mussar seforim, and the topic would be about Ahavas Hashem instead of let’s say the bigdei kehunah which was an example of a Bnos sarah report topic.
Bnos Sarah, Hadar, and BYA are def a little bit more academic. Machon Raaya is for one who is smart and intellectual and it’s a ton of work! Tiferes is known to be on the more yeshivish end of the BY seminaries, but is NOT academic. It does have some hashkafa also. It is hard to describe crowd, for some of these seminaries are extremely mixed! If you could maybe explain what you are looking to get out of your seminary year, what level of academics you want, and what crowd you would like to be with, I think I would be able to help you more after that. Also I don’t know where you live, but I hope you have a seminary adviser or a teacher that knows you who can help you with seminary stuff, for that will be most helpful. If you give me a little more info, I would love to help you further…!
Candy-
Sorry, I didn’t mention hashkafa vs. text- based, since the original question didn’t really ask, and I don’t really remember which schools do what. It’s a good thing you mentioned that.
I also didn’t mention Me’ohr, because she didn’t seem to be looking at it.
I was under the impression that Tiferes was academic because I have a friend who went there who went to an academic high school and she’s smart, but you could be right and it’s an easier school.
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