How to teach Jewish identity

(JNS) - Many American Jews assume that it's easy to be Jewish in Israel given the ubiquity of Hebrew and history in the Jewish state, where one needn't pay tens of thousands of dollars annually for day school or thousands for synagogue membership to raise children who are knowledgeable about Judaism. But senior Israeli educators told JNS that is not the case.

Several Israeli education officials, who spent a week visiting New York schools and synagogues, told JNS that Israeli students aren't taught what it means to be part of the Jewish people or to appreciate Jewish diversity and pluralism. And where students at U.S. Jewish community day schools learn to read and understand classical Jewish texts, that's not the case in Israeli secular public schools, they said.

Israeli "kids receive their Jewish education by osmosis," which isn't enough of a way to do so, Peri Sinclair, director-general of the Tali Education Center, one of the trip organizers, told JNS. The other partners were the Jewish Agency for Israel and the Israeli Education Ministry.

Values relating to Jewish identity are not currently taught in Israeli schools, and while Israelis come in skin tones and cultures from Ethiopian to Scandinavian, South American to Russian to Middle Eastern, schools don't cultivate an appreciation for that diversity, according to Sinclair.

"In Hebrew there is no word for 'pluralism,'" she told JNS. "People may talk about amiyut, peoplehood, but that is a new term coined just 10 or 15 years ago."

The trip, which was held from Dec. 10 to 16, included 23 participants, including heads of education departments from a dozen municipalities all over Israel. It was part of a program that began in February, and the senior educators met monthly across Israel and went on two retreats.

Educators have been brought to America to learn about American Jewish life in the past, but not at such a high level, with the ability to bring new ideas to hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students, Sinclair told JNS.

The idea with this trip was to transform educators at the top of their fields, so that they can infuse teaching in Israeli secular schools from the top down, she said.

"They have so much power to make a real plan to teach Jewish identity through texts that belong to all of us," Talia Afik-Grossman, head of Israeli Jewish culture at the Education Ministry, told JNS.

The trip in New York included Shabbat visits to Upper West Side synagogues of several denominations and, during the week, a meeting with Eric Goldstein, CEO of UJA-Federation of New York, about the place of philanthropy and volunteer leadership, and intra-communal challenges.

They visited the Heschel School in Manhattan and met with its leaders and students and also went to the Shefa School, which is dedicated to children with language-based learning disabilities. They also visited two pluralistic K-8 Jewish day schools in Brooklyn-Luria Academy and the Senesh School.

The group also met with Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, the openly gay co-founder of Lab/Shul, a diverse congregation in Manhattan. He spoke with the Israeli educators about the challenges of building a community where people with complex identities feel comfortable, and where celebrating Israel has been a controversial issue for some members, according to trip organizers.

On their final day in New York, Dec. 16, the educators gathered at the North Pool of the 9/11 Memorial site for a somber ceremony of remembrance of those who died in the 2001 terrorist attack, as well as of those who died in Israel in the terror attack on Oct. 7, 2023. At the end of the visit, they began singing the Israeli national anthem, but Sinclair urged them to do so quietly, given increasingly common antisemitic attacks in New York.

Nani Reisberg is director of education for all schools in Israel's South Sharon region. Inspired by what she saw in New York, Reisberg told JNS that she wants her schools to start programs in which Israeli and American Jewish students will learn together regularly, initially meeting on Zoom.

"I feel a sense of calling to create connections between students in Israel and in New York," Reisberg said.

Afik-Grossman, of the Education Ministry, observed that Jewish American schools create community for the entire family, not only for students. "The school here is not only for academics," she said. "In Israel it's very different. Each family has their own community."

One of her main objectives on returning home from New York will be to create ways to teach "non-religious Jews that Judaism also belongs to them."

"I want them to read it, talk with the texts and learn how these texts are relevant to them," she said.

"I want every child in the non-religious schools to understand that Judaism belongs to them just as much as it does to children in religious schools. These students have never been asked to open the texts, to think about what kind of Jewish identity they want," she said. "I want them to know that this is their birthright."