Sophia Varon, 28, looks to create Jewish community wherever she goes.
After growing up in New York, Varon attended Macaulay Honors College at Queens College to receive a degree in psychology and a minor in business. Now, she serves as the assistant director at 4Front, Baltimore’s Jewish teen initiative. Additionally, Varon is the co-founder of a Moishe Pod in Federal Hill. Varon and her husband Asher Varon currently live in Federal Hill and belong to B’nai Israel.
What do you do as the assistant director at 4Front?
I supervise those who work directly with teens. My specific role is engaging and creating opportunities for adults who care about teens, and that goes into two categories. The first is parents of teens and the second is either youth professionals in the community who work directly with teens or Jewish professionals in the community who care about teens and want to make teens a priority within the organization.
What’s your favorite part about your job?
My favorite part of my job is meeting incredibly passionate teens and getting to experience every day the ways in which teens are really changing the world. I think that that’s incredible. Also, getting to meet those incredible adults who care about teens and really witness the tremendous role that they play in their teens’ growth and development, and that ability to change the world.
What do you like about working for a Jewish organization specifically?
I like that I get the opportunity to live out my values within my professional work setting that aligns with my life. We talk a lot about work-life balance. I do think that when you’re working within the Jewish world, we’re talking more about work-life integration. The things I do outside of my work life are connected to my work life whether that’s beneficial in the moment or not. I do really love that I get to bring my whole self to the workplace, and I get to really experience those values because you do work for a lot of your life, and it would be really sad if I didn’t get to experience that for that portion of my day.
How would you describe your relationship with Judaism?
It’s something that I have a passion for. I specifically have a passion for pluralistic Judaism, meaning making space for all the identities within the Jewish community to come into conversation together. 4Front is a pluralistic organization, and we welcome all different types of Jewish identities within our program, Jewish identities and other identities in general. I strive to both live my life like that and to expand the diversity and the pluralism that we see within all of our programming. I know a lot of folks are moving away from labels in this nondenominational space, but just for the sake of clarity, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, secular, however you identify Jewishly, we want you here, and I would love to be in conversation with you to talk through how you see your Judaism and how it fits into your life.
Do you do any volunteer work outside of your job?
My husband and I run Moishe Pod. It is like Moishe House, but it’s two people instead of three or four people, and we run three programs a month. We run that in Federal Hill. My husband and I started it back in October.
Where did the idea come from?
Well, I lived in a Moishe House near Boston, so I’ve always had this passion for community organizing and creating Jewish community where I live, especially in this pluralistic framework. When I found out that I was moving to Baltimore, I knew that I wanted to
uplift the Jewish community that was already present. I wanted to meet people and find people who have similar values to me.
Shira Kramer is a freelance writer.
