Section archive - Informal Education

The qualitative case study presented in this article describes and analyzes the experiences of Israeli education students, who joined a delegation to Ethiopia last year. This journey opened the doors of Ethiopia to the Ethiopian community’s younger generation, most of whom were born in Israel, and to the non-Ethiopian Israelis.

The JustCity Leadership Institute (June 23–July 7, 2019) is JTS’s pre-college program, training high school students in the fundamentals of Jewish change leadership. Each summer, JustCity brings rising juniors and seniors together to live on JTS’s New York City campus, take college-level courses, engage in social justice work, and build community through vibrant Jewish programming.

A little over a year after its creation, Yeshiva Camp, the world’s only summer camp for descendants of forcibly converted Jews, has already had dozens of participants aged 11 to 25. They stay with the Venturas at their spacious synagogue in Sao Paulo, which the couple transform into a youth camp for each new group. “Connecting these youngsters with Judaism is only the beginning,” said Gilberto Ventura, the charismatic rabbi who established, with his wife Jaqueline, Yeshiva Camp as part of their Synagogue Without Borders congregation and outreach project. “What follows is connecting bnei anusim to the rest of Brazilian Jewry and society.”

Indian play at North American Jewish summer camps offered three sets of overlapping lessons. First, by providing activities created and understood as respite from urban pressures, including donning and removing so-called primitive faux-tribal identities, camps reinforced Jewish urban, modernist values and virtues. Second, as Indian play recapitulated the colonial process that had displaced actual Indigenous people to make room for the White, European settlers—Jews included—it provided Jews a vehicle to perform assimilatory and nationalistic sentiments. Finally, playing Indian offered camp staff members techniques for imparting visceral and emotional engagement with forms of spirituality they thought campers could absorb, particularly ones that overlapped with Jewish notions of Creation.