Section archive - Formal Education

While virtually all Jewish educators agree on the importance of teaching the Holocaust, opinions vary about when and how it is best to teach Jewish students about this horrific event in Jewish and human history. This project explores these choices and offers recommendations for teaching about the Holocaust in a way that is responsive to the particular needs of students and teachers at Jewish day schools.

This study examines Jewish values, explores how and in what settings these values are taught, surveys the current curricula used in a select group of religious schools, and determines whether the curricula reflect current theological ideas regarding Jewish values. Four Reform religious schools in the Los Angeles area were selected for this study, and current personnel were interviewed. The information gathered in this review and study is intended to provide the basis for a developmentally and socially appropriate curriculum guide for teaching Jewish values in a religious school setting.

What is the place of teaching about other world religions in a Jewish educational curriculum for adolescents? This article explores a course in world religions that has been taught at the Genesis Program at Brandeis University since 2001. Based on a participant observational study during 2002 and 2012, the author traces how the teachers construct goals and implement plans that include site visits to places of worship of the religions they are studying. The questions raised and the struggles of students to make sense of Judaism in the context of world religions is the backdrop for considering both why and how other Jewish educators might thoughtfully include the study of other religions as part of their Jewish education for adolescents.

Stan Beiner, Head of School of The Epstein School in Atlanta, GA, discusses a Sukkot initiative piloted as a partnership between this Jewish day school and six local congregations. Hundreds of students and families participated in a hands-on Sukkot experience at their choice of one of the six congregations on the first day of Sukkot.