Parents at this 85-family Reconstructionist-Conservative congregation say it can take up to half an hour to round up kids for their car pools at the end of the school day because the children don’t want to leave.
Long derided as uninspired places that do little to interest children in Judaism, Hebrew schools around the country are struggling to re-envision themselves.
Influenced by the success of Jewish camps, many Hebrew schools are exploring how to be more fun and more hands-on.
Some are revamping their entire structures, while others are enriching the curriculum with activities like retreats, problem-solving exercises and computer games.
“We’re doing more hands-on things like building a sukkah rather than learning about a sukkah,” said Rabbi Joel Hoffman, who directs a communitywide Hebrew school in St. Louis.
The new approach was one of the recommendations to come out of a major outside evaluation of the school. “The children may learn fewer things but they really learn it because they’re more involved,” said Hoffman.
That view was echoed by Rabbi Michele Sullum, education director of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism. “The only way you can learn something is by doing it,” she said.
Frustrated with students’ inability to read Hebrew, her school switched from a traditional classroom approach to an “experiential” model. Now students learn prayer by praying each school day rather than memorizing a text.
And they learn Hebrew by reading “Hebrish,” an innovative approach in which students read English stories transliterated into Hebrew letters.
The technique, which gradually introduces Hebrew vocabulary, makes children interested in deciphering Hebrew letters even before they have mastered the vocabulary, said Sullum.
In revamping the curriculum, Sullum was influenced by the Montessori approach to general education as well as her own fond memories of the Conservative movement’s Camp Ramah. By adapting the camp’s songs, activities and highly social emphasis, the synagogue tries to infuse some of its spirit into Hebrew school.
In San Francisco, Congregation Emanu-El also models its religious education program after camp.
Each grade is named after one of the 12 tribes of Israel and keeps its tribe name year after year. Children learn in small groups within their tribe, and also get together for a variety of retreats and field trips.
“No lectures are allowed,” said Emanu-El’s rabbi-educator, Peretz Wolf-Prusan. “It looks a lot like camp…When people come here to observe the school, there are circles of kids all over the place.”
Other schools are keeping children in classrooms but trying to make the learning more engaging.
For suburban Detroit Hebrew schools, that means bringing in technology. The community’s federation is spending more than $700,000 to install computers in all of its congregational schools, train teachers in how to use them and create a Web site designed to help children learn about Jewish lifecycle events.
Rachel Erlich, the media center director of Temple Israel, a Detroit-area school already using computers extensively, said, “Kids like the computer because it puts them in the driver seat, it’s interactive and it’s different.”
Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, a Conservative synagogue in suburban Cleveland, is engaging students in a more old-fashioned way: through problem-solving projects. Teachers are trained not to give children answers, but instead suggest where they might look — reference books, traditional texts, the Internet and even phone calls are all encouraged.
In one problem, seventh-graders must advise a fictional rock star what to do when she learns that the toys she endorses are made from sweatshop labor. To find the answer, they must research what traditional Jewish texts have to say about labor, slaves and proper business practices.
Another problem, one of fifth-grader Jack Goldberg’s favorites, involves viewing several Passover videos and then deciding together which would be the most appropriate for Christian students learning about Jewish traditions.
His mother, Meryl, said the problem-solving approach has been successful, serving as a “springboard for family discussions…The kids enjoy the give and take as opposed to sitting and listening all day.”