From Seeker to Jewish Leader: How BCI Shaped Adira Rosen’s Journey

“I came here looking for the arts and actually left being like, whoa… the Judaism.” 

That’s how Adira Rosen, a third-generation participant at the Brandeis Camp Institute (BCI), describes the life-changing impact of the immersive Jewish experience that has shaped generations of her family, as well as her own path toward the rabbinate. 

For Adira, BCI is more than a summer program—it’s family history. Her grandmother attended in 1951, followed by her grandfather in 1952, and her mother in 1975. In 2021, Adira carried on the tradition, participating in the program seventy years after her grandmother first stepped onto the same grounds at the Brandeis Bardin Campus in the beautiful Santa Susana Mountains just north of Los Angeles. 

“It’s really astounding,” Adira reflects. “The BCI that my grandmother experienced and the BCI I experienced weren’t so dissimilar. Both offered an opportunity to figure out how to lead a Jewish life creatively through artistic practice and making tradition our own.” 

Growing up with music as a central part of her Jewish life, Adira found BCI’s artistic workshops deeply meaningful. Participating in the music workshop felt like connecting the roots of her Jewish identity while channeling her own evolving vision of Jewish creativity and leadership. A theater director by training, Adira entered BCI seeking an artistic recharge. But what she discovered went far deeper. 

“I came here looking for creativity,” she recalls. “But I left realizing that the kind of creative leadership I was searching for looked a lot like the rabbinate.” 

At BCI, she witnessed rabbis acting as “directors of creative community,” blending spiritual guidance with artistry and authentic human connection. This revelation shifted her career aspirations dramatically from the theater stage to the pulpit. 

“Theater felt lacking in long-term community building,” she says. “At BCI, I saw rabbis building community in deeply authentic ways. That’s what I wanted.” 

Since her BCI experience, Adira has studied in Jerusalem at Pardes and is now pursuing rabbinical school in Boston, committed to becoming a Jewish leader who crafts immersive, holistic Jewish lives for others. 

Today, Adira serves as a Program Fellow at BCI, helping new participants navigate the same transformative journey she experienced. She describes her role as part camp counselor, part spiritual mentor, and is entirely focused on building authentic Jewish community. 

“It’s a lot of listening and helping people realize they’re welcome to live Jewishly in a way that feels authentic to them,” she explains. “We’re examples of people integrating Judaism into our lives, here as sounding boards, friends, and guides.” 

Adira sees firsthand how BCI quietly—but powerfully—cultivates Jewish leaders. Leadership emerges in small moments: someone volunteering to read Torah for the first time, experimenting with leading a prayer, or discovering a personal connection to Jewish practice. 

“BCI is a process-oriented program,” Adira explains. “You’re just on a journey with no set destination. But then we see participants leave and become leaders by starting Jewish nonprofits, becoming rabbis, or hosting Shabbat dinners in their homes.

Adira believes BCI is essential to shaping the next generation of Jewish leadership. “My hope for the Jewish future is that people feel empowered to live Jewish lives in every moment,” she says. “BCI offers the chance to slow down and ask: Who am I as a Jewish person? And what does leadership look like for me?” 

For Adira, Judaism itself has become a creative practice, an ongoing act of building community, celebrating tradition, and partnering with the divine to shape meaningful lives. “Judaism is about creating strong communities where we hold each other through life’s highs and lows,” she says. “BCI taught me that when you create community intentionally, you create connections that last far beyond these 26 days.” 

And as countless BCI alumni like Adira go out into the world to become rabbis, artists, educators, and community builders, it’s clear that BCI is, in fact, one of the Jewish community’s most powerful engines for cultivating leaders.