By Barbara Bayer
Editor
You could describe Ricardo Zepeda as a Renaissance man. The Hyman Brand Hebrew Academy senior, who will graduate May 12, is an athlete, musician, scholar and leader.
He serves as chapter president of the local USY chapter, vice president of summer programs for Midwest NCSY, a Torah reader, a Bar Mitzvah tutor, plays soccer and basketball, a camp counselor and an oboist in the Kanas City Youth Symphony.
Todd Clauer, HBHA’s Upper School principal, describes Ricardo as a “passionate young man who relishes every opportunity to learn and grow, whether it be in the classroom, in sports, in a music hall, or as a highly engaged leader in Jewish youth organizations.”
If he absolutely had to choose, Ricardo said he enjoys USY the most.
“It’s a lot of fun. A lot of my camp friends also do USY, so it’s really nice to see them when I go to regional conventions. This year I was a convention chair so I planned Kinnus. It’s the biggest convention of the year held over Thanksgiving weekend. This year it was here,” he said.
“I planned that with two other people, Jacob Flekier and Moriah Abrams. It was really, really fun. I get to see all of my friends in a Jewish environment and it’s always a good time.”
As NCSY’s Midwest Region’s VP of summer programs, his job was to help recruit people to summer programs.
“So I talked to a lot of people about summer programs and got them involved,” he explained.
Ricardo can recommend these programs through experience. A couple of summers ago he participated in NCSY Kollel in Israel. He spent six weeks in Israel learning from renowned Jewish educators taking classes in Talmud, halachah (Jewish law), Chumash (Bible) and hashkafa (philosophy). The experience also includes competitive sports leagues and seeing the Holy Land.
“It’s an all guy program where you learn Judaic things all day. It’s really fun,” he said.
NCSY Kollel is based 20 minutes outside of Jerusalem in Beit Meir. Ricardo chose the program because he wanted an educational program along with traveling.
“I still got to see a lot of the country, but I got a lot out of it and I learned a lot. They have some of the great rabbis of America who go there like Rav Hershel Schachter, Rav Mayer Twersky and Rav Zvi Sobolofsky, and other great rabbis from Israel who teach there. It’s an incredible learning experience,” he added.
But he won’t be going to an NCSY program this summer. After graduation he will spend the summer as a counselor at Camp Herzl in Wisconsin. He learned a lot about inclusion last summer when he served as an ozo, counselor-in-training at the camp.
“When I was at public school (he left HBHA and went to public school for fifth, sixth and seventh grades) I felt like I was the kid who fit in in every group. I had friends who were the weird video game kids, I was friends with the popular kids, I’ve just always been able to make friends and I feel bad for kids that struggle,” he said.
Then last summer one of the things he learned as an ozo was to do the best you can to involve any camper who may not seem as involved as the others or may even be an outcast.
“You have to include him because you want everyone to feel included, you want to make everyone feel safe and welcome and I think that’s really important because you see a lot of people who don’t really have a lot of friends and you feel bad for them and you see other people mocking them … There’s usually something really cool about him, you just don’t know because you are too ignorant to find out what it actually is.”
HBHA’s Clauer said, “As a local and regional leader for NCSY and USY, Ricardo continually searches for ways to explore his Jewish identity, while always seeking ways to include others in programs.”
The son of Ernesto Zepeda and Sandy Suffian, Ricardo had been to Israel once before his NCSY program with his HBHA freshman class. Last month he traveled to Poland and Prague with HBHA juniors and seniors. It was an experience he will never forget.
“Poland was a very meaningful experience. I had been taught about the Holocaust through my Jewish education and just education in general at HBHA and through my youth groups and religious schools, but it’s a completely different experience just learning about it and someone telling you, 300,000 Warsaw Jews were sent to Treblinka and were killed and then actually going to Warsaw and seeing where the ghetto was, where these people fought, where these people were sent off to die.
“For me, Majdanek was the biggest shock just because you can see pictures of these concentration camps but it doesn’t capture the feel of driving around Lublin and suddenly this concentration just pops up and you really see how terrible it actually was,” he expressed.
Ricardo wanted to experience something new when he left HBHA in his middle school years, and doesn’t know exactly why he had the urge to return to the Jewish day school. But he does know he absolutely loves the school and his friends.
“My class is a really, really good, tight knit class. Everybody in my class I’ve known pretty much since kindergarten except two people. And it feels like those two people have always been in my class,” he said about the 15-member senior class.
He said HBHA gives him a good sense of community and is a very special place.
“I’ve created these special bonds with people that are unbreakable and I can say I will be friends with them for the rest of my life, whereas in (a public) high school there’s just so many different people. I have a lot of friends who go to public school and I feel like they are not as good of friends with their friends as I am with mine. I just feel like I have that sense of community, that sense of belonging and I know that someone’s always watching my back.”
He was accepted into both KU School of Music and the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana Bloomington and has chosen to attend Indiana in the fall.
“I really, really love the oboe and it’s really the reason I applied to those music schools because I just love oboe so much I don’t just want to drop it. I want to keep playing it at a very high level, not as a profession, but I want it to be a big part of my life for the rest of my life.”
Ricardo hopes to get a degree in music and eventually wants to attend medical school and become a doctor. He hasn’t decided what type of doctor he will be, but would like to work with athletes.
A member of BIAV, rest assured he will find some way to keep Judaism in his life.
“Judaism has given me a lot of connections in terms of youth. There’s a lot going on in the Jewish community of Kansas City, there’s a lot of youth group chapters. I’ve always been involved in synagogue things. I’ve gone to Shabbat services almost every Shabbat. I’m in USY and NCSY. I can’t imagine myself without Judaism. It’s influenced my life so much. I really, really enjoy it. It just makes me happy.”