Section archive - Trends in Jewish Education

Part of a four-part series funded by the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe that looks at Jewish life in east-central Europe since the collapse of communism, the Ukraine report calls for the development of a common organisational framework to bring together the various Jewish communities throughout the country; support from international foundations to enable the Jewish community to become less dependent on external sources of financial support; and a more inclusive policy on Jewish status issues given the high levels of intermarriage in the country.

At the Jim Joseph Foundation, we have invested time and dollars over recent years exploring the role that we, as a funder, can play in moving the field of Jewish education closer towards the adoption of shared measurement tools. Grants to the Jewish Survey Question Bank, JData, and the Consortium for Applied Studies in Jewish Education have helped key Foundation partners from the research community advance measurement, assessment, and knowledge-sharing across initiatives and varied educational settings. Looking towards the year ahead, we are optimistic that two collaborative projects now in development will take this work to the next level, as key leaders from within the field of Jewish education endeavor to develop shared measurement tools for two important age cohorts—Jewish college students and Jewish teens.

Teachers’ beliefs regarding civil sanctity were studied in the context of their pedagogical activities regarding two Israeli national memorial days ‐ Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Day and Holocaust Remembrance Day. Interviews were conducted with 30 educators in six secular and six religious junior high schools with diverse populations and 12 memorial ceremonies were observed. Teachers’ beliefs regarding civil sanctity were revealed. These include the relationship between civil and religious sanctity, how sanctity is represented pedagogically, the existence of hierarchies of sanctity in schools and processes of sanctification and desanctification in schools.

This paper discusses the Yiddish-language foundational act of the Max Nordau shule in La Plata, Argentina. It also discusses the historical and political context of the school’s foundation and the founders’ educational attitudes toward progressive education and Yiddish as the language of instruction and daily use. The paper reveals insights gained from a study of the Yiddish language foundational act document, such as the importance of Jewish elementary education for the survival of Jewish culture and the transmission to children of a strong Jewish identity.