20 Years of Stories: Meet Kevin and Vale
For siblings Vale and Kevin Levin, building Jewish community is a family business.
As first Moishe House Residents, and now staff members, they have become a dynamic duo within Mem Global – helping young adults in Latin America and beyond to dive into the magic of Jewish life and learning.
So, what’s it like to work with your sibling? Well, first, it involves WhatsApp – a lot of WhatsApp.
“I just checked,” Kevin says wryly, “and I have 92 different WhatsApp groups in common with her.”
When they were growing up, neither Vale nor Kevin could have predicted the enormous role Jewish communal work would play in their lives. As they tell it, they practiced some Jewish traditions, but without fully understanding their meaning.
“I remember being absent at school once a year for Yom Kippur,” Vale admits. “To be honest, I didn’t even realize that it was a Jewish holiday. I just knew it was a reason not to go to school!”
But when a friend from Vale’s Birthright trip invited her to a Shabbat dinner at Moishe House Buenos Aires – Villa Crespo in 2013, that began to change. The very next morning her friend called with surprising news: soon, she would be moving out of the House. All the remaining roommates had loved Vale… would she be interested in becoming a Resident?
Of course she was.
“My parents thought that I was joining a cult!” Vale laughs. “My dad was worried because I was moving in with an unknown girl and two unknown boys. He drove me to the Moishe House and he was driving soooooo slowly that I asked him if the car was OK. He said, ‘Yes, just in case you regret this crazy idea, we can go back right away!’”
Like for so many Moishe House Residents, unknown roommates soon became good friends, and Vale lived in that Moishe House for the next four years, until 2017.
In fact, she loved it so much that, once her time as a Resident was up, she found it hard to let go.
After moving out, Vale recalls, “I lived in an apartment in the same neighborhood as the Moishe House. The first night living alone, my former housemates invited me to have tea with them… I fell asleep on their sofa. Second night, the same. Third night, the same. Fourth night, I asked them not to invite me anymore because I needed to mourn my time as a Resident!”
But even though Vale’s time as a Resident was up, Mem Global was not to be without a Levin for long.
In 2018, Kevin was accepted to his dream Master’s program at Columbia University. “I loved the idea of moving to New York City,” Kevin says, “But it was a place I had only been for about four days in my life on a visit, and where I knew zero people. Literally zero! So, I figured I might as well apply to all the Moishe Houses in New York, because I thought it would give me a community and something fun to do while I was there.”
“Turned out,” he concludes fondly, “it was one of my best ideas I’ve ever had.”
After a virtual meet-and-greet, Kevin moved into Moishe House NYC – Park Slope. It became his home-away-from-home – and he wasn’t the only one. During one of the House’s massive, 50-person Shabbat dinners, he realized community members from at least fifteen different countries were gathered around the table.
“NYC is a great place where so many people from all over the world meet,” he explains, “but I also felt that a lot of those people were so often missing a community. I was very proud that people found that in our house.”
Back in Buenos Aires, Vale was still looking for something that would scratch the itch of being a Moishe House Resident. That’s when she saw it: a job posting for Moishe House’s Latin America Community Manager.
“I was extremely nervous,” Vale says. “Moishe House was a very important organization to me.”
The application process also overlapped with a difficult personal period: “by the time I was interviewing, my dad was in the hospital with a very bad heart condition. One night, I was in an ambulance taking my dad from a hospital to a specialized institution where he would then receive a heart transplant. In that moment, I received Eva [Srut, Senior Director of Global Community]’s call to tell me that I was the chosen one. … My first day at work was November 25th, 2019, my dad’s birthday.”
As the Community Manager for Latin America, Vale supports Residents across the region, including her former House. She loves helping them unlock “the responsibility and the superpower of hosting programs for others, living in community and building Jewish life through a place of belonging and shared values,” that she found so powerful as a Resident herself.
As Vale was beginning her new job in 2019, Kevin wrapped up his Master’s program and moved back to Argentina, where he began working at a Jewish day school for 8th to 12th graders. He continued his Mem Global journey as an MHWOW Host.
He applied to for a position at Mem Global in 2021, but jokes that he was “the runner-up.” Still, he didn’t give up, and in 2023, Kevin joined the Mem Global team as the Latin America Jewish Educator.
As a Jewish Educator, Kevin relishes the variety in his daily work. “Every week, it’s getting in contact with Moishe House Residents, asking them about a specific program that I see that they have coming up and offering help. I also get requests from Community Builders, both for programs and sometimes for things that they want for their own personal Jewish path, which I love.”
“He is like the ChatGPT of Judaism,” Vale adds appreciatively. “Every single idea that the Residents have, Kevin can turn it into a Jewish learning program.”
Yet instead of just giving young adults the answers, Kevin finds it most rewarding to help them become leaders of Jewish learning in their own right.
“The fact that I am so often not leading the educational moments, but giving people the tools and confidence to do it themselves, in a way that feels meaningful to them, makes it very different from other positions that I’ve had in Jewish education,” he reflects.
Both agree that Lati Con and Global Con (Resident training conferences that take place every other year) are a highlight of their work. The latest Lati Con took place in Buenos Aires and welcomed 32 Residents, MHWOW Hosts, and Retreatologists from across Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and Chile.
“Having everyone together, exchanging ideas for programming, helping each other, establishing friendships at a distance, learning about different Jewish communities around the world, building a big Jewish family…I just love it!” Vale enthuses.
Kevin also finds that there is something uniquely special about the Latin American Jewish community.
“The Jewish community in Latin America – and especially in Argentina, where about half of the continent’s Jews live – is extremely diverse. It’s also really intense in the way that people connect to each other.” He elaborates, with obvious amusement, “If you don’t know someone, there’s probably someone (and probably more than one!) that you know in common with that person. There’s a bit of a running joke in [Mem Global’s] global team that I know every Jew here, but that’s impossible since there’s, like, 180,000 of us. Maybe I know 70% of the Jews.”
He adds, cheekily, “I will work hard to get to 100, though. Check back in a few months.”
That deep sense of connection is part of what both Vale and Kevin now work to cultivate every day. After finding community, leadership, and belonging through Mem Global themselves, they are proud to help others discover that same potential.
Says Kevin: “So often people think that they’re not Jewish enough or they don’t have the stuff it takes to be a Jewish leader. … We can all be community builders if we put our time and energy into it, and we all have something to give to our community and make it richer, more diverse and more welcoming by doing it. And we, as the staff, are here to help people do just that.”
If you want to support more journeys like Kevin and Vale’s, consider giving to one of our 20 Ways to Give! Created in honor of Mem Global’s 20th anniversary, these are 20 meaningful opportunities to support the programs that make a difference for Jewish young adults around the world, including sponsoring Lati Con, the Latin American Resident Training Conference.