Rabbi Bonnie Margulis will join the Trinity College community as director of Hillel and Jewish life on August 15, 2025.
Margulis brings to Trinity decades of leadership in a variety of settings, including as the rabbi of the Blacksburg Jewish Community Center and Virginia Polytechnic Institute Hillel, leading grassroots organizing and advocacy work in interfaith nonprofits, and most recently serving as the interim rabbi at Beth Hillel Temple in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
The Very Rev. Marcus George Halley, chaplain to the College and dean of spiritual and religious life, said, “I am so pleased that Rabbi Margulis will bring this wealth of experience to Trinity College to help us continue to create an environment where Jewish students can grow into ‘bold, independent thinkers who lead transformative lives.’”
Margulis said that her experience with social justice and her passion for working with young people aligns well with her role at Trinity’s Hillel. “In thinking about my work over the last 30 years, the things that have been the most meaningful, had the most impact, and brought me the most satisfaction were working with young people—both high school- and college-aged—such as organizing across campuses around voting rights,” Margulis said.
Building partnerships across faiths has been an important part of Margulis’s rabbinate, she said. “As executive director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, I worked with the organization 100 Black Men of Madison to create a podcast series with a group of African-American teens and Jewish teens sharing their lives and talking about their experiences, learning the ways in which they were similar and the ways they were different.”
Margulis hopes to strengthen similar interfaith relationships at Trinity. “Interfaith partnerships are crucial to the Jewish community and always have been; our safety lies in other communities’ safety, and vice versa,” she said. “We’re living in extremely frightening times. The Jewish community needs allies and friends. Imam Osman Simsek [Trinity’s director of Muslim life] is working to build relationships between the Muslim and Jewish communities at Trinity, and that’s so important. There’s a lot of work to do, and I have a lot of experience doing it, but you can’t do it without partners.”
Halley said that Margulis shares the Spiritual and Religious Life team’s belief that cultivating connection and empathy across differences is one of the best tools to combat anti-Semitism. “The more we can humanize one another, the more we can chip away at the hate and bitterness that grows in the shadows,” Halley said.
Margulis holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Jewish history from New York University and was ordained at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. She has held teaching positions at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, leading classes about Judaism, the Hebrew Bible, and Jewish history, among other subjects. She also has worked with college interns and mentored high school students in her synagogue’s religious school.
For college students, Hillel offers a Jewish community away from home and a place to enjoy Shabbat dinner or celebrate the holidays, Margulis said. “Hillel has been for over 100 years the core home for Jewish students on campus and welcomes non-Jews, as well,” she said.
Margulis said that she hopes to help rebuild strained relationships that have suffered due to global events in recent years. “There’s also a lot to be done for the Jewish community dealing with a lot of stress and trauma right now,” she said. “One of my main goals, in the face of the trauma and unease that students may be feeling, is to bring back the joy of Judaism and to make students at Trinity Hillel feel safe, comfortable, and happy.”
Her work leading Hillel will begin with listening to the needs of students. “The students have already expressed to me that they would like programming that would bring more people into Hillel,” Margulis said. “My job as director is to help facilitate bringing the student-driven goals to life, with my own guidance and input, of course. I’m really looking forward to getting to know the students and starting to work with the Hillel board to set goals and priorities for the year to come.”
