Spring 2005 · Volume 1, Number 1


Contents

By Mark Dwortzan

Innovation and inclusiveness. These are the hallmarks of a Hebrew College education. So when it comes to national initiatives in Jewish communal leadership and transdenominational education, Hebrew College alumni are often key players.

The following three alumni are perfect examples. Each is spearheading a unique, creative vision for Jewish community transformation, but all share one main objective inspired by personal memories of Hebrew College programs: to offer deeply engaging experiences of Jewish community life to their constituents.



Arnee Winshall, founding chair and former president of JCDS, Boston's Jewish Community Day School in Watertown, Mass., has spent the last ten years developing a transdenominational, child-centered institution designed to capture the imaginations of Jewish children in grades K through 8. Margie Berkowitz, the director of Prozdor, has quickly transformed the College's Hebrew high school program into a formal/informal educational experience that integrates the choice and challenge of college with the Jewish enrichment and fun of summer camp. Finally, Jeff Finkelstein, the nation's youngest big-city Jewish Federation CEO, aims to transform the Pittsburgh Jewish community by helping to develop vibrant formal and informal Jewish learning programs that will inspire unaffiliated young adults to get involved.

ARNEE WINSHALL:
Creating Community from Scratch
"Everyone Counts," reads a sign posted in the math section of the first grade homeroom at JCDS, Boston's Jewish Community Day School. These words call attention not only to another sign below it displaying the numbers 1 to 100, but also to the school's founding belief.

JCDS was founded in 1995 by a group of seven parents, grandparents, educators and Jewish community activists of varied Jewish backgrounds—including Arnee Winshall P'68—who had a vision that differed from the other Jewish day schools in Greater Boston. The JCDS founders believed in integrating Judaic and secular studies (rather than compartmentalizing into half-day sessions), being intentially pluralistic to reflect the diversity of the Boston community and creating a bilingual, bicultural Hebrew-English immersion environment.

"We intentionally set out to create a strong, pluralistic Jewish community that respects and celebrates differences and learns from its members."
—Arnee Winshall

Most of all, they felt that creative pedagogy was needed in order to provide students with much-needed individualized attention. "Some kids we knew in traditional day schools had mild learning disabilities, while others were bright but intellectually unchallenged," Winshall recalls. "There was only so much teachers could do with a curriculum-driven approach, so we looked for more effective ways to engage students."

In the past ten years under Winshall's guidance, a new model of Jewish day school has come to life within a bright, colorful, spacious building in Watertown. Touting itself as a child-centered school, today's JCDS strives to engage all of its 154 students by recognizing individual learning styles and needs. Rather than relying solely on a one-size-fits-all curriculum, the school features hands-on group learning exercises; the strategic use of visual, auditory and other modes of communication; a strong emphasis on community service and the arts (student illustrations dot the hallways); and teachers who can turn anything into a teaching moment at the drop of a pencil.

Instead of being cordoned off into separate learning tracks, Jewish and secular studies—as well as Hebrew and English—are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the teaching and learning. Even students of different ages learn together for select classes. Moreover, students and faculty come from diverse Jewish, cultural and economic backgrounds. "We intentionally set out to create a strong, pluralistic Jewish community that respects and celebrates differences and learns from its members," says Winshall. "Our students learn how to work with and appreciate all types of people and learning styles, and that's a skill they take with them for life."

She attributes much of her personal contribution to the inspiration for JCDS to her teenage experiences at Prozdor and Camp Yavneh, both of which drew students from a range of neighborhoods, Jewish practice and ages. She recalls them as engaging, caring communities that integrated Hebrew and English languages. She also traces her preoccupation with the individualized, child-centered education that pervades JCDS to her personal experiences as a child and as a young woman.

Winshall got her first taste of this pedagogical approach at the age of 12, when she helped identify and solve individual students' learning problems as a tutor in her Hebrew school at Newton's Temple Reyim. She continued this focus years later, in between undergraduate and graduate studies in linguistics, as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thailand. Working for an English immersion program, Winshall helped develop self-paced materials and group learning exercises to meet the needs of students in large classes. Both experiences drove home the same lesson: everyone counts.

MARGIE BERKOWITZ:
Reinventing an Institution
For the first 75 years after its inception in 1923, Prozdor operated as an elite Jewish prep school with a small group of high academic achievers attending every year. The high school program focused on the basics: Hebrew language and literature, Bible study, history and Talmud. But when Margie Berkowitz P'61, MJEd'82, became the school's director in the fall of 1998, all that began to change.

"My vision was to create a program that would provide a meaningful Jewish educational experience for every kind of teenager," says Berkowitz with an enthusiasm undiminished by a bout of pneumonia, "with every kind of interest and background, from the scholars to the artists." In the past seven years, that's exactly what she's done. Today's students, who come from 65 cities and towns, embody diverse academic abilities, interests and Jewish backgrounds, and they choose from a menu of optional tracks, programs, hours and settings. As one of the school's recent graduates said, "There's not one Prozdor; there are 100 Prozdors."

"My vision was to create a program that would provide a meaningful Jewish educational experience for every kind of teenager."
—Margie Berkowitz

All these changes have boosted enrollment from about 175 in 1997 to more than 960 students today. "In entrepreneurial terms, we've tapped into the needs of the consumer and provided a product at a price people are willing to pay," Berkowitz maintains. "The education is strong enough, the trips fantastic enough and the time commitment realistic enough that our teens are lining up to buy it."

Learning activities at Prozdor fall into three categories: the formal (a wide array of courses led by instructors who range from secular Israelis to Orthodox rabbis), the nonformal (trips, Shabbatonim and other community-building events beyond the classroom), and the informal (weekly Sunday morning schoolwide break, student organizations and one-on-one contact with teachers). "As a student and camper at Prozdor and Camp Yavneh, I learned from my own experience how to create a committed and knowledgeable Jew by touching the heart as well as the mind, by bringing the learning and the living together," says Berkowitz. "And that's what we've created here."

Her experiences at Camp Yavneh—performing as Anne Frank onstage, meeting the man who would become her husband, Stan Berkowitz, z'l, P'60, and serving as camp director, to name a few—would shape decades of involvement in Jewish education. In the 1980s Berkowitz earned a Master of Jewish Education at Hebrew College and decided to build a career in the field. She subsequently directed Camp Yavneh in the 1980s and ran two major congregational schools in the 1990s. "This work served as a laboratory for bringing the best of Jewish camping into the classroom," Berkowitz says. "When David Gordis invited me to come back to Hebrew College and direct Prozdor, I knew it was the job I was born to do."

JEFF FINKELSTEIN:
Reaching the Unaffiliated
Jeff Finkelstein P'85, president and chief executive officer of the United Jewish Federation of Pittsburgh, also draws from his experiences at Camp Yavneh to construct his model for community transformation. "My vision is to make Jewish community a place where people from all Jewish backgrounds can comfortably connect, experience and even learn a little more about being Jewish every day," he says.

Since becoming CEO in late August, Finkelstein, 35, has wasted no time in realizing this vision. For example, one of his top priorities is to more fully engage Pittsburgh's Jewish young adult population in Jewish communal activities. "Our demographics show us that 70 percent of young adults between the ages of 22 and 39 are unaffiliated with any Jewish organization," he reports. "The next generation will most likely drop in and out of affiliation, so we need to redefine what it means to be affiliated." Toward that end, he has begun to partner with the JCC, the Hillel Foundation and other Jewish agencies.

"Jewish community should be a place where people from all Jewish backgrounds can comfortably connect, experience and even learn a little more about being Jewish every day."
—Jeff Finkelstein

Another major Yavneh-inspired goal of Finkelstein's is to transform Jewish learning in the Pittsburgh metropolitan area. "We need not offer only formal education in the classroom," he maintains, "but also informal learning experiences, such as youth groups and summer camps, which give people a positive feeling about being Jewish."

Finkelstein has lived and breathed that feeling from day one. Encouraged by parents who were deeply committed to Jewish identity and community (his father, Norman P'57, BJEd'61, MA'86, served as head of education at Camp Yavneh and now teaches at Prozdor; his mother, Rosalind, worked in the camp's front office), the Framingham native got involved in Jewish community activities at an early age. Finkelstein attended junior congregation weekly, enrolled in Prozdor and spent ten summers at Camp Yavneh, where he was one of Margie Berkowitz's campers.

After earning a BA in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary, a BA in sociology from Columbia University and an MA in Jewish communal service from Brandeis University, he set his sights on becoming an executive director for a large Jewish federation. In the past ten years Finkelstein worked at The Associated: Jewish Community Federation of Baltimore and then at the United Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh, most recently as vice president of development.

Through it all, Finkelstein says, "Spending summers at Camp Yavneh, in a Jewish environment, gave me a sense of Jewish peoplehood, and that's what my job now is all about."

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