Mark Zuckerberg’s College Roommate Becomes a Rabbi
Image by Facebook
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lived with six suitemates at Harvard as he worked on launching the social media site 12 years ago. Three of those suitemates went on to become co-founders of Facebook. One of the three others who didn’t wound up taking a drastically different path: He’s now an ordained rabbi in Israel.
Arie Hasit, a 33-year-old from Cherry Hill, New Jersey, completed a five-year program at the Conservative movement’s Schecter Rabbinical Seminary in Jerusalem last week, the reported Tuesday.
Hasit did try to hop on the Facebook train while living with Zuckerberg, but was reminded that didn’t have any computer science skills. He graduated from the Ivy League school in 2005 with a double major in history and Near Eastern languages and civilizations. His senior thesis focused on Israeli hip-hop.
“They were like, ‘Arie, we like you and you’re our friend,’ and that was definitely true, we’d continue to hang out socially, ‘but no, you don’t have anything to offer here,’” he told the AP.
Hasit did become Facebook’s fourth-ever user in 2004, after Chris Hughes and Dustin Moskovitz.
In August he moved to the small Israeli town of Mazkeret Batya, where he’ll lead a congregation — and make about $25,000 a year after taxes. “[E]very time I go into overdraft, I do wonder if it would have been smarter to join them,” he said.
Another small consolation prize came in the film “The Social Network,” David Fincher’s 2010 cinematic telling of the early days of Facebook. After graduating from Harvard, Hasit enrolled in the IDF. Benjy Rutland, one of his fellow officers, recalled seeing Hasit light up when a scene in the film featured a kippah-wearing student playing drums (Hasit liked playing drums).
“He was happy there was something he could sort of hang his hat on,” Rutland said.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
