After fears that the school would have to cancel its classes in Yiddish after this spring\’s semester, the University of Maryland has managed to raise enough money to keep the program going at least through 2013.
I recently visited the Westchester Fairfield Hebrew Academy in Connecticut and saw in practice what should be standard in Jewish day schools. Students with special needs are welcomed into the school through its PALS initiative (Providing Alternative Learning Strategies), enabling them to maximize their academic, social and emotional potential and offering them the myriad benefits of a Jewish education.
Meyer Luskin and his wife, Renee, are donating $100 million to UCLA, the university’s second largest gift in its history, Chancellor Gene Block announced Jan. 26.
Brooklyn College has rehired an adjunct professor whose academic work was said to be anti-Israel to teach a seminar on Middle East politics. Kristofer Petersen-Overton, 26, will teach the graduate-level course that begins Feb. 3, college President Karen Gould said in a statement issued Monday evening. Twenty students are registered for the course, The New York Times reported.\n
The Israel Sci-Tech Schools Network and Israel’s Education Ministry have launched a $50 million campaign to improve 50 schools on Israel’s periphery. The Sci-Tech Network, formerly known as ORT Israel, includes more than 180 schools that focus on technological training and high-tech curricula. The Education Ministry will match dollar for dollar up to $25 million to bring 50 schools in Israel’s poorest regions into the network, the group announced Tuesday night at a dinner honoring philanthropist Edith Everett. The schools will be equipped with new curricula, tools, infrastructures and technologies to provide students living in these economically lagging areas with marketable science and technology backgrounds and credentials critical to their own futures and that of Israel.
The state of New Jersey approved a second Hebrew immersion charter school. Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday approved 23 new charter schools for the state, including the Shalom Academy for students in Englewood and Teaneck, The Record of Hackensack reported. The new Hebrew-language charter school is set to provide a Hebrew immersion program for up to 240 students in grades kindergarten to eight.
A Yale University alumnus has donated $1 million to the campus Chabad House. Brad Berger, a private investor from Los Angeles who graduated from the university in 1977, made his pledge to the $6 million capital campaign on Sunday, the Yale Daily News reported Tuesday. The building when it reopens in 2012 will be called the Berger Family Building, according to the newspaper.
As a child, I always dreaded going to Hebrew school. Although it was only a few blocks from my public school, the lonely bike ride felt like miles as I watched my friends walk away in the opposite direction, arms linked together like a gum-wrapper chain. Being Jewish in the small town in which I grew up meant being different. It meant missing school in September for a holiday where I was hungry all day long and not having a Christmas tree or colored lights on our house during the dark month of December. And being different was the very last thing I wanted to be as an emerging adolescent.
Dr. Alan Bennett, a leader in Jewish education and a founder of the Neot Kedumim Biblical Landscape Reserve in Israel, has died. Bennett died in Cleveland at the Hospice of the Western Reserve on Dec. 21 after a short battle with cancer. He was 83. Bennett came to Cleveland in 1967 to work as education director at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple. He served for 15 years, beginning in 1978, as the executive vice president of the Cleveland Bureau of Education and oversaw its transformation into the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland. Upon his retirement he was named executive vice president emeritus, and in 1997 the JECC created the Alan D. Bennett Staff Development Award for Israel Study.
The personal papers and other materials of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, have been given to the University of Colorado. The material, including audio-visual material, have become part of the Colorado University-Boulder Library Archives, according to the Boulder Jewish News, after being in the care of Naropa University, which was working with the Reb Zalman Legacy Project of the Yesod Foundation to preserve, develop and circulate the rabbi\’s writings and teachings. The Jewish Renewal movement has infused modern Judaism with mystical teachings and contemplative practices influenced by Hasidism. The movement is run by ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal in Philadelphia.
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