On Sunday, April 2, 2017 Areyvut invites schools, synagogues, families, community organizations and individuals to fill the day with kindness. Areyvut is a non-profit organization whose mission is to empower people to infuse their lives with the core Jewish values of chesed (kindness), tzedakah (charity) and tikkun olam (social justice). We are asking organizations and individuals to commit to service programs and acts of kindness at specific times so that on April 2 we can facilitate kindness continuously for an entire 24 hour period.

While we start the month of Adar -- a time of happiness in the Jewish calendar, this past week has been anything but for the Jewish day school community. Day schools from coast to coast, along with other Jewish institutions, were targeted with bomb threats. As you can imagine, this had a significant effect on those school communities and their students. One class had just concluded its ceremony conferring the first Siddur (prayer book) to its first grade class; some were in the middle of reading the Torah; others were celebrating Rosh Chodesh, the new Jewish month; while others engaged in the daily tasks of learning. These threats also have a multiplying effect: our entire community of schools now suffers from the anxiety and fear that these threats engender, whether their schools have been the direct target or not.

As appreciation of the impact of Jewish camping has grown, so have efforts to increase the number of campers able to participate in these settings. Inclusion of campers with disabilities, though not a new phenomenon, has likewise expanded. As more services are provided to campers with disabilities, more camps are hiring an Inclusion Coordinator to spearhead and manage these initiatives. This article explores the work done by these professionals and the challenges they face in doing so. The work of Inclusion Coordinators is discussed in the context of the evolving nature of camp-based inclusion efforts as a whole. The authors see inclusion at summer camps as an area in which much creative work has been done, and would benefit not only from additional resources but also from increased coordination as “a field.”

Continued professional development (CPD) is defined broadly as learning opportunities with well-defined sequence and learning objectives. These should be designed to enhance a leader’s professional competence, knowledge and skills. CPD may include multi-session programs, such as certificate programs and leadership institutes, as well as professional workshops. Effective continued professional development is linked to personal development goals and school improvement initiatives – it is not an end in itself but a means to instructional improvement.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study conducted in a large Reform Jewish Sunday school in the UK. It focuses on learners’ experiences and perceptions of learning to read Hebrew in the school as well as in the other sites in which they were learning to read. These experiences and perceptions are neglected in other research accounts. The findings reveal important insights into learners’ experiences, enjoyments, frustrations and expectations regarding both the purposes and the processes of learning to read in Hebrew and raise issues about learning and teaching. The findings contribute to wider debates about literacy and learning to read and address questions raised in the literature concerning what children do with, and make of, the language learning they experience in their community school setting.

Since its launch five years ago, Jewish Heritage Europe has become an essential one-stop shop for news, information, and resources concerning, as the name indeed suggests, matters of Jewish culture and built heritage in Europe: museums; synagogues; cemeteries, and so on. Ruth Ellen Gruber, the author of Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe who has chronicled Jewish life in Europe for over twenty-five years for the JTA among other places, edits the site, which is supported by the Rothschild Foundation (Hanadiv) Europe. Here, Liam Hoare talks with Gruber about the site’s development and how European attitudes towards Jewish heritage have changed in the time she has been reporting on these issues.