Like a CEO discussing the innovations in a newly minted car model, Rabbi Glenn Karonsky bubbles over with excitement about the prospects for the upcoming year’s educational programs.
“There’s just a lot of great programs,” said Karonsky, who is the executive director of the Center for Jewish Living and Learning, the educational division of the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay.
The CJLL is unveiling some new programs aimed at teenagers. One such program is Rites of Passage, geared toward at eighth-grade students. Another is enhancing the Midrasha program, which serves high-schoolers as well as eighth-graders.
“This is an important time to reach out to teens because this is the time when they will be making choices about continuing their Jewish education and we want to make it as attractive as possible,” Karonsky said.
Rites of Passage is a weeklong backpacking trip designed to feature and explore Jewish environmental ethics. Designed for small groups, the program has been tried in past years with much success and is now moving from the experimental stage to the forefront.
Midrasha will also be experiencing some changes. A major component of the curriculum includes weekend retreats for the Gesharim group (eighth grade), Etgar (ninth grade), and Kesher (10th to 12th grades).
“We have had an incredible amount of success with these retreat programs,” said Karonsky. “However, most of the planning and execution of these trips has always been done by the teachers. While this hasn’t detracted from the experience, we think it could be better,” with greater student involvement.
“We have these fantastic teachers in the program who love doing what they do, and they don’t mind planning the trips; they see it as part of their experience,” he continued. “We want to make it part of the student’s experience.”
Jonathan Emanuel, the new director of teen services at CJLL, has dealt extensively with the new program already. He helped design a leadership-initiative program for youth last year while he was a co-director.
“It has always been a passion of mine to use peer leadership and to work with students in the classroom and on the retreats,” he said. “What we found was that the students not only wanted to do leadership activities, although they didn’t call them that, they craved the ability.”
The Hazon leadership class was the end result of Emanuel’s stint with the Ti-ke-a Fellowship for Education of Jewish Teens, a project of the S.F.-based Bureau of Jewish Education and the CJLL, funded by the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund.
“We tried it out last year at the Contra Costa Midrasha and the kids were very proud to be pioneers in a sense,” Emanuel said.
The program involves placing students in a yearlong leadership class within Midrasha, where they help to plan events and retreats.
The future plan is to extend leadership opportunities throughout the program, which offers classes in Oakland, Berkeley, Contra Costa County and Fremont.
The hope is that the program will advantage of the students’ eagerness to take more active roles in the organization.
Emanuel sees the program as having a newfound importance in ensuring the continuity of teen involvement.
“We keep kids in the program to 12th grade with the Israel trip; it gives them time to bond and encourages their interests,” he said. “That’s why, more than ever, this new focus of peer leadership is important since we have had very few kids going to Israel.”