New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature
Local schools pilot new JDC curriculum
Two local religious schools have been chosen to pilot a new curriculum encouraging middle-school students to act on behalf of Jews around the world.
Developed and launched by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the curriculum offers the story of Henry Morgenthau, founder of JDC, as a model for today’s teens.
The curriculum is being piloted by 12 schools in the New York metropolitan area, including the religious school of Congregation Agudath Israel of West Essex in Caldwell and the Academy for Jewish Studies, which is the combined religious school program of Congregations Beth El and Oheb Shalom, both in South Orange.
AJS and Agudath Israel will both implement the curriculum next year, in the eighth and seventh grades, respectively.
Called “Just Like Henry,” the curriculum teaches global communal awareness through the story of Morgenthau, who, as United States Ambassador to Turkey in 1914, urged Jewish philanthropists in New York to raise funds on behalf of poverty-stricken Jews in Palestine. The request led to the founding of the JDC, which distributed relief to needy Jews in Palestine and war-torn Europe.
The curriculum was conceived and drafted by Abby Pitkowsky, JDC’s director of global Jewish education, with the help of an advisory committee that included Susan Werk, Agudath Israel’s education director, and Linda Specht, director of AJS.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to teach kids about arevut [being responsible for each other] and hesed [kindness], and what educator is not looking for that opportunity?” said Pitkowsky. “It provides a real outlet — it’s not just theory. It’s not just a nice midrash about a rabbi in the sixth century who did acts of hesed but rather about a man you can emulate. It raises awareness among the North American community about Jewish communities around the globe and an organization in their backyard that is there to answer their needs.”
Werk, who called “Just Like Henry” “a really lovely curriculum,” thinks it’s a good fit for her seventh-graders. “They do a lot of social action,” she said.
The curriculum, Werk said, is a way to introduce them to the work of the JDC as well as Jewish fund-raising in general. “People are always looking for mitzva projects, and they want to send things” to the needy, said Werk. “This explains why they should actually send money instead.”
Specht thinks it taps a real need among middle school students. “They don’t know that Jews in other countries are in dire distress,” she said.
Implementation of the curriculum at Agudath Israel, which, said Werk, may include a role for parents, is still in the brainstorming phase. At AJS, Specht said, plans call for the curriculum to be expanded to a fuller set of lessons on Jewish community and the cultures of Jews who live in different countries.
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