Section archive - Informal Education

Welcome to the special online edition of the Journal of Jewish Communal Service devoted to Jewish service-learning, a collaboration between Repair the World and the Jewish Communal Service Association.This landmark issue features insights from Jewish service-learning experts around the world and around your corner

Mark S. Young writes that Jewish experiential learning is not 'fun' which takes place outside the classroom as some would have it. Experiential learning as an approach to Jewish education has the ability both to strengthen one’s Jewish literacy and to create strong, positive emotional bonds with Jewish life. Further, this approach can take place anywhere, both inside and outside the classroom.

Recently The Lookstein Center's Lookjed Mail List, featured an essay on the Chidon HaTanach - The US National Bible Contest. In contrast with standard Lookjed posts, however, this one offered the perspective of two students on their experience as participants in this program. Ezra Frazer, the coordinator of the Chidon HaTanach in the United States presented an introduction to the program, its goals and purpose. Yishai and Yael Eisenberg wrote an essay that describes the Chidon from the perspective of student participants.

On April 2, 2012, three students from Bishop O’Dowd High School, a private Catholic school in Oakland, CA., stood in the damp woods outside Trsice, a town in the eastern part of the Czech Republic, participating in the dedication of a memorial to the Wolfs, a family of Jews who spent three years hiding in that very spot during World War II. They had participated in Bonnie Sussman’s Holocaust course and now were participating in the Holocaust Study Tour (HST), a two-week trip to Europe that takes the idea of “hands-on” education to a new level. They were now joined with a dozen other students from around the country and their teachers.