Spurred by a major grant from one of the country’s largest Jewish foundations, the rabbinical seminaries of three major synagogue movements are forging a groundbreaking partnership to train Jewish educators.
The S.F.-based Jim Joseph Foundation announced May 24 that it was giving a combined $33 million to the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, the Modern Orthodox Yeshiva University and the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
“To say these three are deserving of this kind of support makes me very proud to be a graduate of one of them,” said Menlo Park’s Lisa Langer, who received her degree from the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at HUC–JIR.
The grant is aimed at helping the three seminaries attract more teachers to the field of Jewish education and offer them better training.
“I think this is tremendous — for the three schools, for the field of Jewish education as an academic pursuit and for the Jewish community in general,” Langer said. “It’s a generous nod to the significance of the work of Jewish educators and the possibilities of Jewish learning.”
After earning her graduate degree in Jewish education in 1994, Langer worked for Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills and the S.F.-based Bureau of Jewish Education. She spent one year working for a secular nonprofit.
“I learned that my skills were indeed transferable to the secular world, but my neshama, my soul, was not,” Langer said. She returned to the Jewish world as an educational consultant for the Union for Reform Judaism, where she currently works.
The grant not only will help the seminaries develop their education programs, but it also will help to establish formal partnerships among the three seminaries.
Each school will be required to use
$1 million over the next four years to work with the other schools on marketing Jewish education to prospective teachers and incorporating modern technology into Jewish pedagogy.
“The presidents of the three institutions, thanks to the Jim Joseph grant process, have spent more time together in the past two years than our predecessors did in the previous decade,” said JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen, formerly the chair of the Religious Studies department at Stanford. “I think it is historic that you have these three institutions and their leaders working together in this fashion.”
Under the new initiative, each school will continue to teach its own brand of Judaism, but will cooperate on elements of the educational process that affect all three.
According to Jim Joseph’s executive director, Charles Edelsberg, the three schools met May 27 with representatives from the tech giant Cisco to learn about “telepresence” technology. And they are talking with the MacArthur Foundation about digital media and learning.
Outside of the interschool partnerships, each institution will use the bulk of its grant money to better train teachers.
For YU, that means continuing to beef up its graduate school of Jewish education, which has grown from one faculty member to 11 since 2003. The school now has more than 160 students seeking master’s degrees in Jewish education. The grant also will fund the creation of a certificate in informal Jewish education and a job-placement program for students.
JTS will spend approximately $1 million per year on scholarships for its nondenominational school of education. The institution also plans to expand its early childhood education program and set up informal Jewish education programs at congregational and day schools.
HUC–JIR will use about one-third of its grant on financial aid for students seeking master’s degrees at its New York and Los Angeles campuses. The school also is planning to create an executive master’s program and three new certificate programs in Judaica for early childhood educators, Jewish childhood education, and adolescence and emerging adulthood.
Jim Joseph hopes the schools will graduate 700 to 1,000 teachers over the duration of the grant.
The support from Jim Joseph “will make the field much more visible and give it a little more kavod [respect],” Langer said.
Staff writer Stacey Palevsky contributed to this report.