Search results for: Day schools

This issue of HaYidion celebrates teachers, recognizes their challenges and addresses their issues in ways that we hope will honor their commitment and professionalism. In our Jewish day schools, we must appreciate and respect our teachers and value the many ways in which they serve our students. They open the gates to Jewish learning, without which we do not exist as a people. RAVSAK’s Executive Director Marc Kramer recently wrote that it is not enough for us and our students to just “feel Jewish,” to have a “Jewish identity.” Judaism requires a knowledge base that goes far beyond “Mah Nishtanah,” the blessings for the Chanukah candles and eating bagels. Our teachers provide this base.

Day schools don’t last forever, but they should. Here’s the typical pattern: Parents send their kids to a day school. The kids graduate. The parents become uninvolved. The kids, well, they grow up. They get married, have kids and, if everything goes as hoped, send their children to day school. This is a flawed model. The huge gap in a family’s active day school engagement is one reason that schools face such serious sustainability issues, and why they serve only a small fraction of the population. The solution to this problem — and perhaps to the problem of Jewish day schools in general — is that the schools need to think bigger.

For all of us, day schools are an investment in the future. In the end, this isn’t about just preserving the identity of individual Jews. The Jewish day school is about strengthening Jewish communities — because Jewish day schools can function as core pillars of the Jewish communities they serve, places where ideas are shared and relationships made. They can help foster a sense of togetherness among Jewish families. They can be hubs for Jewish continuity, conduits to other Jewish agencies, synagogues and camps, and ultimately the mechanisms that will create the identified and engaged Jews who will support programs such as Birthright Israel for those young people that fall outside of day school reach.

The William Davidson Graduate School of Jewish Education and the Department of Hebrew Language at JTS are offering a unique opportunity in the summer of 2014 for 15 qualified day school teachers to enter a four week (June 30 - July 24, 2014) Hebrew immersion program geared for teaching Judaic studies (Limudei Kodesh) in grades K-12 – the Ivriyon.