Jeffrey Lasday, the new head of the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education, has set some lofty goals for the organization.

“I’d like to raise the status of how Jewish educators are perceived and put together more support for them; I’d like to recruit more people into the field through benefits and salaries,” said Lasday, who recently moved to Maplewood from St. Louis after taking the reins of the Manhattan-based CAJE.

“We’re looking at empowering Jewish educators through issues of advocacy, teacher training, and providing educators with the tools they need.”

As for CAJE itself, he thinks the 30-year-old organization devoted to promoting excellence in Jewish education needs an attitude adjustment.

“There’s a culture here that was born of the ’70s and ’80s. It’s a culture of being very informal, of looking to change the world, and of individuals who rebelled against the existing establishment,” said Lasday.

The result was an organization, once known as the Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education that eschewed titles such as “rabbi” or “doctor” in service of countercultural ideas of egalitarianism.

“The value was that everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner,” he said.

But that ideal conflicts directly with another value at CAJE. “We are striving for excellence in Jewish education,” he said. “Not everyone can be an excellent teacher.” And in his view, excellent teachers are what the field needs.

Lasday, 49, took the helm of CAJE on Jan. 1, following the Dec. 31 retirement of its longtime leader Eliot Spack, who served as executive director of the organization for 26 years.

In St. Louis, Lasday was executive vice president of the Central Agency for Jewish Education. Previously, he served as director of the Columbus Commission on Jewish Education in Ohio and assistant executive director for the Milwaukee Association for Jewish Education.

Lasday holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is past president of the Association of Directors of Central Agencies and serves on the board of the Jewish Education Service of North America.

The CAJE search committee was impressed by his longtime advocacy for the work of CAJE, including regular attendance at its signature annual conferences.

“Jeff’s skills, passion, and experience were all factors that led to his selection,” CAJE president Fran Pearlman said in a statement. “He brings to the Coalition a commitment to and fervor for Jewish educators and Jewish education, as well as sound business acumen. We are thrilled that Jeff will be leading us into the future.”

Anyone who attends the annual CAJE conference this summer will immediately notice some changes, Lasday said. Instead of accepting proposals for sessions from anyone in the field, he said, “We will take a more directed approach and ask the people we feel are the best in their fields to teach.”

Educators will also find a heavier emphasis on collaboration with other organizations. Pointing at the first word in the organization’s name, he said, “When we talk about a coalition, who are we a coalition of: individuals or groups?” He added, “We need to work with other national Jewish educational organizations that are like minded,” including JESNA, the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education, and JEXNET: The Network for Experiential Jewish Youth Education.

The challenges facing Jewish education “are too big for any of us to tackle on our own,” he explained. “Where we are able to put together a coalition, it’s amazing what we can get done.” He has learned that funding is more forthcoming for multi-organizational projects, and “the proposals are much more exciting.”

A collaboration with Storahtelling, a theater company that offers avant-garde performances on Jewish themes, is already in the works for the summer conference, to be held Aug. 5-9 in St. Louis.

The Union for Reform Judaism will have a track at the conference, and a joint effort with the Whizin Institute for Jewish Family Education that began last summer will continue this summer.

Lasday readily acknowledges the steep challenges facing the field of Jewish education, particularly the severe shortage of qualified teachers and administrators, a phenomenon also observed by other leaders in the field.

“If you go back 100 years and look at Jewish education, you will find horrible teaching conditions, no books, no classrooms, and no teachers. Today we have classrooms, textbooks, curricula, but we still do not have teachers,” he said. “You can have a wonderful Jewish day school initiative. But with no headmaster, no teachers, no heads of Judaic studies, how are you going to grow?”

Lasday expects it will take his entire career before the problem finds its solution. One way to get there, he said, is money.

“If you want excellent day schools, congregational schools, and camps, we need to invest in Jewish education.”

The biggest challenge he faces at CAJE, he said, is money. “Each year we have fewer members and less income. We have an aging membership. We’re looking at who we’re attracting and asking the big question: how do we attract the next generation?” One way to do this, he believes, is “to build a lay leadership with a more national profile.”

In addition to the challenges he faces every day in his work at CAJE, Lasday, who spent most of his life in the Midwest, is also getting used to living in New Jersey. Lasday said that he and his wife, Lori Serbin Lasday, director of the day school division of the Alexander Muss High School in Israel Program, are still shul shopping in the area. They have two grown children, David and Ilana. David is living in Israel, where he volunteers with PeacePlayers International-Middle East, a program that brings Israeli and Arab kids together in friendly basketball competitions. Ilana is a senior at the University of Maryland. She plans to return to Israel for her second summer as a counselor for a Young Judaea Israel travel program.

Before arriving here, he acknowledged, “my concept of New Jersey was Newark and then Manhattan.”

But that is changing quickly for this new Garden State resident. “I found Maplewood and fell in love. It’s like living in Mayberry RFD!”