Search results for: Lookstein Center for Jewish Education in the Diaspora – Bar Ilan University

Education is about communicating, and that requires the ability to listen, often to multiple voices. We want our students to be able to process that, but for them to hear their teachers, their teachers need to be able to hear them. The same is true for all the other communications which take place in our schools – between parents and teachers, between the principal and the board, between administrators and teachers, and more. When everyone is on the same team, or at least is able to have a respectful dialogue about how to move forward, then education can happen. This current edition of Jewish Educational Leadership, the first in our new format as an online-only journal, is dedicated to opening up the conversations. The articles included touch upon all the key players in schools – students, teachers, administration, parents, board members, and funders. There is much more to be said than what appears in the articles, and we invite you to join the conversation and share your thoughts as well.

While researching for her film Operation Wedding, Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov, a renowned Israeli filmmaker, witnessed first hand that Jewish solidarity can change the course of history. She found rare archives, interviewed former key KGB members, and uncovered a web of lies, rewritten facts, and political secrets. She found that the collective memory of the plight of Soviet Jews is fading and that there is little documentation. The Lookstein Center has created a collection of lesson plans and educational activities to complement these findings, and to teach the next generation that all Jews are responsible for one another and that every single individual can make a difference.

Ever since the institution of formalized prayer there has been anxiety about the impact of that decision. “When one makes his prayer fixed it is no longer a supplication” (Mishnah Berakhot 4:4). The implications are educational as well as theological. Educating to the formal structures of tefillah functions as an important gateway to socializing the student into an adult community of Jewish prayer, but the more we focus on that important element the more we constrain the individual expression and the internal prayerful experience. In the contemporary educational scene, this dichotomy often expresses itself as a lens of the school’s halakhic orientation. Read more about tefillah, in this issue of Jewish Educational Leadership.

Jewish Educational Leadership invites articles for Spring 2017 Issue focusing on Tefillah. Tefillah is a challenge for adults – witness how many people struggle to make it to their synagogue, struggle to find meaningful moments when they get there, and struggle to pray when not in an organized prayer environment or in deep crisis. No wonder that the Rabbis called tefillah an avodah, a labor. Teaching students to engage in tefillah raises the challenge even further. The next issue of Jewish Educational Leadership is dedicated to addressing the question of how to address tefillah.