Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Yeshiva University To Provide Free Tampons And Pads To Students

Over 85% of women have started their period unexpectedly while in public without any feminine hygiene products on hand — and thanks to recent student activism, students at Yeshiva University will no longer have to worry about dealing with such a dilemma on campus.

YU student Yardena Katz wrote in February for the campus newspaper The Commentator that while the school’s Wilf campus had tampon dispensers in the woman’s bathroom, “not one single tampon dispenser actually contained any tampons.” She added that “tampons are a basic sanitation need akin to the free toilet paper on campus, and although YU is only societally expected to supply the latter, as a university it should go beyond this expectation.”

Largely thanks to her article, according to the YU administration, the school has decided to make a change: free tampons and pads will be made available in various locations on the Beren and Wilf campuses, The YU Observer reported last week.

“We hope people use it as intended, for emergencies,” Dean of Students Dr. Chaim Nissel told The Observer. “If students start stealing them to hoard, we’ll have to rethink things.”

Laura E. Adkins is the Forward’s contributing network editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @Laura_E_Adkins.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.