Search results for: Research

Although most Jewish supplementary religious school principals have graduated from various academic training programs, there are no data about how these programs sufficiently prepare educational leaders. This study examined the essential leadership and management skills of effective Jewish religious school leaders and assessed their preparation to undertake the key challenges of this complex job. This study also investigated the principals’ perceptions about their training and whether they experienced a knowledge gap as school leaders. The respondents felt unprepared to conduct essential tasks—such as working with lay leaders, managing human resources, and planning budgets—after completing their training programs.

Education at Holocaust museums worldwide often falls to volunteer museum educators. The Durban Holocaust Centre in South Africa is no different. We set out to understand who the educators at the Durban Holocaust Centre were, where their historical and pedagogical knowledge came from, and to examine the connection between the two. The study revealed the diverse nature of the museum educators’ biographies as well as their motivations for guiding. Their knowledge acquisition was generally a blend of formal objectivist and informal constructivist methods. It emerged that the self-learning model was successful as the educators were highly professional and sufficiently motivated.

This study explored processes of curricular reinterpretation made by teachers who teach about the Holocaust. We conducted holistic narrative analyses of in-depth interviews with 31 American Holocaust educators. Six teaching orientations were identified: passionate historical, mythologizing-transforming, social-contemporizing, empathic-personalizing, riveting-shocking, and pragmatic-socializing.

The thesis has sought to shed light into the relationship between the Jewish Diaspora and Israel through the lenses of the Brazilian Jewish community. Due to the fact that it holds the largest Jewish population of Brazil and hosts numerous prominent Jewish organisations, the state of São Paulo was chosen as the case study of the research. Based on the analysis of publications and websites of those institutions and, mainly, of interviews with the most important leaders of the Jewish organisations in São Paulo, the author has tried to bring to the fore their chief activities concerning Israel. Furthermore, the conduction of semi-structured interviews enabled the identification of attitudes and perceptions of the main Jewish Brazilian leaders towards Israel, as well as their role as members of a significant Jewish Diaspora.