Because “it’s very hard to find a cool person in a 50-year-old”
The classroom is filled with energy despite the hour. It’s 9:40 a.m. and students work to unscramble the Hebrew word on the board as their classmates trail in. At 10:10 the class is immersed in Israel, travelling to Tiberius and the Dead Sea. By the time the entire class has arrived, students are sitting in a close-knit circle, taking turns reading the Shema with a greater fluency than the week before.
Staffed by energetic undergraduate students, the Boston-area Jewish Education Program has transformed the way kids and parents are thinking about Hebrew school. Based on the campus of Brandeis University, the program allows college students to tackle the classroom from a different angle as educators at the start of each week, teaching Hebrew school to elementary school aged kids.
“I was excited for the opportunity to work at BJEP because I want to teach in a Jewish Day School and this was a great learning experience for me,” said junior Tali Puterman. The staff is made up of a group of carefully selected Brandeis students, including both some who want to pursue education and others who are simply passionate about teaching Hebrew and Judaism.
“They need to feel passionate,” said BJEP Director Dena Glasgow of the students she hires to teach at the program. “Because that’s what they are going to pass to the kids. They’re not professional teachers. They have to some extent compensate, or have something else that’s special. And to me it’s the passion and caring,” she said. “And generally coming with the passion is a deep knowledge about some aspect of Judaism. I try to match the teachers and their areas of passion to what they’re teaching.”
And so, while most Brandeis students are still asleep, early on Sunday morning, BJEP teachers are busy preparing for their 9:30 classes. In contrast to typical classroom lesson plans, the morning agenda is filled with interactive activities to keep the students engaged. Kids build candy sukkahs and play soft ball trivia to learn about the holidays. Other mornings consist of treasure hunts where teams receive a different Sabbath table item for each activity completed in Hebrew, with students racing to complete their table first for a team victory. Giving kids the tools to bring what they learn in their homes, Puterman says the best part of BJEP is the positive feedback from parents and kids, “so we know that what we are teaching them is translating to their lives at home.”
Music, art and Israeli dance become the guides to learning about different aspects of Judaism, ranging from prayer to Jewish holidays and Israeli culture.
“I walk in to drop my kids off [and] they’re playing YouTube videos,” said BJEP Treasurer Sam Matz who has two children in the program. “And that makes a difference. Your kids are always looking for someone cool. And it’s very hard to find a cool person in a 50-year-old,” he said
“It’s just the energy that young teachers bring to the class that makes it fun. Because what little kid doesn’t love having a youthful, fun, cool teacher?” said Karen Brenner, a parent who decided to leave her synagogue’s Hebrew school after trying it with her older sons. “After [they] were done, they didn’t really want to continue, which a lot of kids go through, and I just wondered if there was a different approach to religious education,” she said.
Families travel from all over Greater Boston in search of a more engaging educational experience, drawing a diverse mix of 160 kids from across the religious spectrum to the Sunday morning BJEP program.
“There are a lot of adopted kids so you get shades of color. I’ve seen several families with same sex-parents. It’s just much broader here than it is in a synagogue in one community because you’re drawing from lots of communities,” Brenner said. “And I think it draws a broader population because people, for whatever reason, may not feel they belong in their community, whether it’s financial, whether it’s a bad experience with their rabbi.”
And matching the diverse BJEP student population, the teacher’s backgrounds vary just as much. “The diversity begins with my faculty where we have [teachers] from all different backgrounds,” Glasgow explained. “We have a strong representation of Conservative, Orthodox, Reform, secular and Israeli. And I don’t even have to try. It just happens,” she said.
“I work at BJEP for the diversity in both staff and students,” said senior Dani Carrus, one of the BJEP teachers. “Everyone at BJEP teaches me something new whether it be how to be a better teacher or a new way to look at Judaism,”
But despite the diversity of both the students and teachers, the program works to create an open classroom where religious labels aren’t important. “My teachers know they’re teaching in a population where they can’t say to a child, ‘You need to do this or you’re not a good Jew,’” Glasgow explained. The program educates its students on different aspects of Jewish culture and life with an open religious outlook on different customs and traditions.
“I’m more cultural than religious,” explained Matz. “My sons had Orthodox teachers and there’s no proselytizing, there’s no arm twisting, there’s no judging. It’s more of what I was looking for in Jewish education,” he said, adding that his son was the only child at the Passover Seder this year that was able to read the four questions in Hebrew.
“Brandeis has a sense of free intellectual exploration so that no one is going to make you think a certain way. And that’s very comfortable for parents,” Glasglow said.
Sitting in a BJEP classroom early Sunday morning, it becomes difficult to distinguish individual backgrounds in what becomes a unified group of passionate Jewish students and teachers.
“When I think of Noah coming here it almost feels like a little mini college experience,” Brenner said. “Not that he’s at Brandeis at BJEP, but that he’s got this different kind of environment and experience with all these components.”
Dafna Fine is a junior at Brandeis studying economics and journalism. She served on the Brandeis Orthodox Organization Board during her freshman year and now works as Features Editor for the Justice.
