On Thursday, May 22, nine high schools from the Metro area gathered at the Young Israel of Woodmere to practice their skills and demonstrate their knowledge at the third annual Yeshiva League Model United Nations. The event is usually held in one of the participating schools on a Sunday, but because this year there were no Sundays in May available, the conference met on a school day and therefore in a shul with sufficient classroom space to accommodate the program.
YLMUN is the students’ way of saying that they’re not satisfied with competing only once a year at Yeshiva University’s Model UN in February. Since most of the participants tend to be the same sort of students who take AP exams, YLMUN is scheduled for late May, after AP exams are complete.
Mr. Alex Libkind, longtime coach of Model UN, Debate and Model Congress at HAFTR, is the main organizer of the conference, together with student leaders with multiple years of Model UN experience. He has designed the event to fulfill two wonderful goals: To train underclassmen in Model UN skills, and to allow experienced seniors to move up to being committee chairs, a role reserved for college students at YU’s Model UN.
In MTA’s case, both of these goals were fulfilled wonderfully. MTA brought a team of twelve students, including three veteran seniors who chaired committees and four rookies attending their first Model UN. The results were outstanding, with one of the rookies, Menashe Basalely, earning an Honorable Mention for his work on the Science and Technology committee, and two veterans, Reuben Frieber and Matis Kahn, earning awards for their work on the Middle East Summit and Security Council, respectively. Those three awards combined to earn the team a third place finish among the nine schools.
While the MTA team bids farewell to its seniors, led by captains Amir Gross and Meir Kaller, who chaired committees on the status of women and decolonization, respectively, it has great cause for optimism as it looks to the future. First, the underclassmen have the skills and now the experience to step up, and second, many of MTA’s current seniors will be YU Model UN committee chairs upon their return from a year or two in yeshiva in Israel. They will surely follow in the footsteps of previous graduates who guided and advised the team while down the block at YU.
