Claire Mikowski launched “Bubbe’s Holiday Kitchen” at another San Francisco congregation, where multigenerations of families cooked holiday meals and learned about the rituals behind them.
And at the two North Bay congregations where she works, Sherry Knazan turned kids’ tzedakah projects into family affairs.
Those are but a few ways that a freshly graduated group of 11 Jewish family educators converted a three-year course of study into new courses of action in their jobs.
“I can’t say enough about how fabulous that program was,” says Knazan, a teacher and family educator at Tiburon’s Congregation Kol Shofar and Santa Rosa’s Congregation Shomrei Torah. “We were always asked to reach higher than we could reach, to be better than we thought we could be.”
Now that she has completed the Family Education Fellows program, Knazan thinks she has stretched to those new heights as a teacher of Jewish ideas, values and culture.
“It’s the best thing I’ve done Jewishly, professionally, and I am involved in a lot of other things,” she says.
Her fellow educators seem equally enthusiastic about the program, which was run by the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Jewish Family Education Project. Funding was provided by a hefty $600,000 grant from the Jewish Community Endowment Fund.
Jaroslow at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom says she is “100 percent stronger in terms of Jewish education.”
Though the program ended recently, its participants have pledged to stay in close contact, maintaining the bonds formed during their three years of study.
“We have become good friends, very supportive colleagues,” says Amy Kassiola, family educator at the Peninsula Jewish Community Center. “It’s kind of a lifetime experience that you cherish.”
Mikowski, educator at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Israel-Judea, says the former classmates already are sharing ideas with one another and volunteering in their colleagues’ programs.
The goal of the project, headed by the BJE’s Vicky Kelman, was to produce just such a collaborative community of educators who would, in turn, ignite families to “take charge of their own Jewish lives.”
Kelman said Jewish education too often is something that takes place after a parent drops off a child at religious school for a weekly lesson. “The goal was to get parents out of the car and into the Jewish school or institution and get the Judaism out of the institution into the car and back in the home as part of their everyday lives.”
A child’s lessons often don’t stick if youngsters “don’t know any adults who take it seriously other than the rabbi and the cantor,” Kelman said.
During the fellowship, which started in September 1999, educators met for one day monthly to discuss readings, hold seminars and hear guest speakers. They took a two-week trip to Israel in February 2001, signed up for outside study programs and had regular homework assignments.
“Most of them feel they’re much more confident, ” Kelman said. “They feel part of a community of dedicated Jewish educators as opposed to the isolation many of them felt before the program.”
Jaroslow said she came to Beth Sholom with a dozen years’ experience as an educator but little background in Jewish programs. “From the very first session, we were all able to learn from each other.”
The fellowship added to her knowledge with its sweeping study of the Torah, Hebrew, values, family issues and educational theories.
As a direct result, she organized a new moms group called B’Yachad (Together) at her San Francisco synagogue and has managed to intertwine discussions about parenting skills with lessons from the Torah. When talking about sleeping issues, for instance, she was able to incorporate a Torah portion dealing with autonomy.
“It increases the Jewish identity of the parent,” she said, “so they become thoughtful Jewish parents from the beginning.”
For her part, Knazan decided to turn the year-end decision in her Hebrew school classes on how to allocate their tzedakah money into a family-learning event.
She invited representatives from several charitable organizations to her synagogues to give presentations to a combined gathering of parents and youngsters. She then distributed $1 bills to families and asked them to discuss how they would distribute the money collected over the course of the year.
“We can’t teach in a vacuum,” she said. “We need to empower parents and families to continue doing what we were doing in the classroom.”
The other fellows were Gesher Calmenson, Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati; Marla Lake-Racket, Congregation Emanu-El, Tom Loos, Rosenberg Early Childhood Center, and Jennifer Markowitz, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, all in San Francisco; Deborah Newbrun, Camp Tawonga near Yosemite; Irene Resnikoff, Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael; and Solange Tajchman, Peninsula Sinai Congregation in Foster City.