Call it the Milken Community High School of Hard Knocks. Thanks to an organizing effort started by two very committed mothers, along with support from school administration and student enthusiasm, Milken is set to become the first local Jewish day school to field a tackle football team — and only the fourth Jewish day school in the country to do so.
There are a lot of differences between what Mars Academy in Encino promises and the offerings of a typical secular day school. Every student will have a cubicle instead of a locker. Individualized mini-lessons from a teacher will replace lectures. And it will be housed in a synagogue. “Our situation is quite unique,” said Andy Mars, the school’s founding director.
A program that is credited with creating a vibrant Orthodox community at UCLA needs to prove by the end of March that it can raise $80,000 annually to ensure its future on the Westwood campus. The Orthodox Union (OU) has paid the salaries for two professionals who founded and have been running Shabbat programming, Torah study and daily services at UCLA for ten years, and now OU (http://www.ou.org/) says Los Angeles needs to put up a share of the cost, as other communities have done to support the program at 15 campuses across North America.
The two organizational arms of the Reconstructionist movement are set to merge. Following a year-and-a-half of negotiations, the boards of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation have voted to form one body that will be responsible for Reconstructionist Judaism in North America.
Jewish businessman and philanthropist Leslie Wexner and his company\’s Limited Brands Foundation have donated $100 million to The Ohio State University. Wexner, 73, will give the university $65 million and the foundation will provide $35 million. Most of the donation will go to the university\’s academic medical center, the Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.
One hundred faculty members at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), have called on Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas to drop criminal charges against 11 current and former students arrested in February 2010 for disrupting a public speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States, on the UCI campus.
“I have learned much from my teachers; from my colleagues more than from my teachers; and from my students more than all” (Talmud, Taanit 7b). Experience truly is the best teacher, and while I have been teaching Jewish students in many settings for 30 years, I continually learn from them. I have learned what it takes to be an educator, and particularly a b’nai mitzvah educator, from supervisors, colleagues and students as well as from their parents.
A Hebrew charter school serving the Upper West Side of Manhattan has submitted its application to open. The application for Harlem Hebrew was submitted to Manhattan\’s Community School District 3, which runs from West 59th Street to 122nd Street, The New York Jewish Week reported. The area includes one of the country\’s most densely populated Jewish enclaves, as well as a slice of lower Harlem.
When he took over as dean of the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in July 2010, Josh Holo, already a professor at the college, brought with him a few photographs of 11th-century letters to hang on the wall behind his desk. Among the letters is one that mentions a major problem for the Jewish communities in Egypt at the time: how to raise funds to redeem fellow Jews who had been taken captive by pirates.
What was so remarkable about the diversity of the 625 educators gathered at the North American Jewish Day School Conference at the Westin Los Angeles Airport Feb. 6-8 was that the diversity was unremarkable
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