Search results for: Community programs

The MOFET JTEC Leadership Seminar in Israel will deal with issues and models of Jewish leadership throughout the history of the Jewish people, up to the present time, examining the participants' management and leadership styles and helping them promote community leadership in the roles they are currently performing or will perform in the future.

Synagogue Web sites are — after an agonizingly slow start — coming of age. Rabbis are blogging and posting sermons on YouTube. Members are signing up and paying for classes online. And several synagogues have launched virtual yahrtzeit boards — complete with e-mail reminders. With the High Holy Days past, many synagogues are contemplating ways to fill their pews on a regular basis. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, the key to building a physical sense of community may well lie in enhancing a synagogue’s online community, social media experts say. That’s why, despite the slumped economy, more and more congregations are realizing the importance of investing in fresh, easy-to-navigate synagogue Web sites (preferably equipped with “donate now” buttons).

The Steinhardt Foundation for Jewish Life, in partnership with other Jewish organizations, has begun a national initiative designed to create models of excellence in Jewish early childhood education, increase the number of families with children attending quality Jewish early childhood centers, and raise the number of families continuing to engage in Jewish learning and living after pre-school – The Jewish Early Childhood Education Initiative. More than a dozen nursery schools across the country are currently participating in the initiative. Founded in 2003, JECEI, seeks to combine progressive education techniques imported from Reggio Emilia, Italy with a deeply embedded Jewish curriculum. This year, the program is expanding to new schools in communities across the country.

The Kehillah Partnership of Northern New Jersey is an innovative, community-wide effort to build a stronger and more engaged Jewish community across institutional and denominational lines. Now in its second pilot year, the Kehillah Partnership aims to reinvigorate community through the sharing of resources, the enhancement and integration of informal and formal Jewish education for all ages, and the creation of new opportunities for the unengaged to connect and identify.