Section archive - Learning Resources

What if a B’nai Mitzvah project could make a lasting change in the world? That’s what Clara Rotter-Laitman questioned as she embarked on her Jewish Learning Opportunity through the Avodah Justice Fellowship in Chicago. Together with illustrator Kayla Ginsburg, Clara created a “zine,” a homemade magazine, for Jewish students and educators to help in creating more meaningful B’nai Mitzvah projects.

A comprehensive program called Lehavin U’Lehaskil (To Understand and Discern) has been developed to help students gain a mastery of the Hebrew Tanach text. It focuses on providing teachers a systematic approach to teach our students how to learn Tanach independently in the original Hebrew text. It empowers children by teaching them the skills needed to become confident, independent learners of Tanach, through decoding and translating words, phrases and verses from the Biblical text. This curriculum provides standards and assessments, and a clear, organized, systematic approach to teach the children skills, high frequency words and sharashim (verb roots). Workbooks, Teacher Editions, digital versions, and various manipulatives are used to slowly teach – step by step – all the skills needed so that all children – on any level – can achieve mastery of the language of Tanach.

Israel's National Library launched an online database called Ktiv, aggregating tens of thousands of digitized Jewish manuscripts belonging to collections from across the globe. Scholars and laypersons can access almost half of the known handwritten Jewish texts from Spain to Afghanistan, which have been digitized and catalogued online. In some cases, parts of a manuscript that have been long divided between collections will be reunited digitally for the first time in centuries. The archive contains nearly 4.5 million images from 45,000 manuscripts — slightly more than half of all known volumes. They include prayer books, biblical texts and commentary, philosophy, literature and scientific writings, in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic and more.

The rabbis of the Talmud tell us that the Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam [baseless hatred] (Yoma 9). On Tisha B’Av, we mourn the destruction of the Temple, as well as other tragedies in Jewish history, and are also charged with ridding ourselves of sinat chinam. In schools today, though students may not necessarily say hurtful words to their peers, the anonymity and distance that the Internet provides can make it a space where sinat chinam and bullying thrive. How do we help our students understand the meaning of baseless hatred and how to prevent it? In honor of upcoming Tisha B’Av, take an opportunity to check out these resources, which you can use next year to teach students about the dangers of sinat chinam in the digital space and how they can confront cyber bullying and promote kindness and empathy online.