New Jersey Jewish News
MetroWest Feature

A new name, mission, and president for local Jewish educational service

by Robert Wiener
NJJN Staff Writer

Come the end of the fiscal year, on July 1, you can say “goodbye” to the Jewish Education Association of MetroWest and say “hello” to The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life.

Ellen Goldner, a past president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey, will serve as the new entity’s first president (see sidebar below).

The Partnership was formed after more than a year of study by in-house task forces at UJC MetroWest. Along with the name change, new president, and new organizational structure will come a focus on early childhood through the teen years. Programming for other target groups, including adult education, will be become the responsibility of other local agencies.

Robert Lichtman — whose current title with the agency is executive director of Jewish education and identity initiatives — has overseen the transition since becoming its head in December 2005. He expects to have a partnership board in place by the end of the summer. It may include some current JEA members and advisers, “as well as some new faces from the MetroWest community and beyond,” he said.

For its first three years, the partnership will be a wholly owned subsidiary of UJC MetroWest, unlike the JEA’s status as an independent agency. “After three years, we will study whether to become independent,” Lichtman said.

Lichtman said the name change “has a lot to do with branding and lot to do with showing a new focus for the agency. It is not the JEA. The sense I had was that the JEA tried to be all things to all people and was perceived as not excellent. The mission of this new agency is to focus on early childhood through the teen years and be excellent.”

The Partnership will occupy the same office space as the JEA on the first floor of the MetroWest federation building on the Aidekman Jewish community campus in Whippany, but it will cease to be responsible for funding and administering the Waldor Memorial Library, which is adjacent to its offices. Although the library will initially receive funds from the Partnership’s budget, its new affiliation has yet to be determined.

In forming The Partnership, the task force followed “about 80 percent” of the recommendations made by TBF Consultants of Potomac, Md.

According to Lichtman, the changes will be “bold and dramatic.”

“Unlike before, where the JEA was among the constellation of agencies in the federation, we are hoping to make Jewish education an integral part of everything that we do in the community. It is a long-term vision,” Lichtman said. “We will be working in partnerships with the synagogues, the agencies, and with other Jewish organizations such as the American Jewish Committee, which is involved in Jewish identity issues.”

In addition to the focus on early childhood and teens [see sidebar below], the changes include:

• Adult education programs will fall under the purview of JCC MetroWest.
  
  
• Moreh, a year-long program of training and mentoring for novice teachers, will expand to include veteran educators who “would like refresher courses or who have been teaching without the benefit of pedagogic skills,” said Lichtman. “One of our mission goals is to service the preteens and teens in congregational schools. We are trying to ratchet up the professional level of what’s going on in the class.”
  
  
• Merkaz, a learning center for teachers housed at the JEA, will be “much more focused, and it won’t be called Merkaz,” said Lichtman. He said the “top 100” of its original resource materials will be available on-line and on DVD. According to Lichtman, such user access will enable Joan Bronspiegel Dickman, who was “doing 85 percent Merkaz and 15 percent early childhood, to do 85 percent early childhood and 15 percent of what used to be called Merkaz.”
  
  
• Central Hebrew High School, an after-school and Sunday program for area teens, will remain in place for the 2006-07 school year, while future board members of the partnership begin a makeover to make it “less…a traditional school and more as a community of learners, with the learning…more experiential and informal,” said Lichtman.
  
  
• Education for children with special needs will initially remain under the Partnership’s purview “unless we figure out a better place for it,” Lichtman said.

Under UJC MetroWest’s 2006-07 budget, The Partnership will receive an additional $65,000 in allocations on top of the $917,000 the JEA received during the last fiscal year. “The good news, the wonderful news, is [that all the agencies] were braced for a cut and we got an increase,” said Lichtman.

He said the current staff will remain in place “for the present time; then we’ll see,” adding that “there may be some efficiencies” in the future.

Lichtman said he hopes to receive grant money from the Jewish Community Foundation of MetroWest for a young people’s storytelling program “to make Jewish liturgy and literature come alive.”

He also has plans to offer internships so that high school students “can build their resumes as they learn side by side with a journalist or an attorney involved with Jewish community activities.”

Lichtman was eager to be working with Goldner, a Maplewood resident and philanthropist, who is a former early childhood educator. She “got down on her hands and knees every morning and played with three-year-olds. Can she help Jewish education? Absolutely,” said Lichtman.

‘Teach the child, reach the family’

THE PARTNERSHIP for Jewish Learning and Life, which will replace the Jewish Education Association of MetroWest come July 1, will focus primarily on early childhood and teenage education.

A prevailing concept at the partnership will be “to teach the child and reach the family,” said Robert Lichtman, who will become executive director of the new entity.

“Every little person who walks into an early childhood classroom represents a family that is thinking about Jewish identity. This is growing in recognition around the country, and that is what we are going to be recognizing here,” Lichtman said.

One example of a way to fulfill this vision, he said, was to revamp the traditional model of a teacher slipping a note into a child’s backpack saying, “Today, Sarah learned about lighting Shabbat candles” and encouraging her parents to light them at home.

Instead, he suggested, a new approach might invite the parents to come to Sarah’s class to take part in a candlelighting ceremony. Or perhaps parents might open their homes on Friday nights so that “Sarah and her classmates can visit one another on Shabbat, enabling parents of all the children to be involved with each other.”

Those mothers and fathers “are young adults whom we haven’t seen since the time of their bar or bat mitzva,” he said. “They come back 10 or 15 or 20 years later with a little Jewish soul in tow, and they think about enrolling their children in a Jewish education program. I call this the ‘second coming.’ It’s the opportunity we’ve all been waiting for. How do we greet them? Do we get down on our hands and knees and greet them at the child’s level? Obviously, we do and we also reach out to family.”

To Lichtman, such outreach “is not proselytizing so much as inspiring a family to go on this journey with their children.”

Lichtman also foresees a transformation of the Central Hebrew High School for teens, from a traditional school to a “community of learners.”

In order to provide a mix of formal learning, informal experience, community service, and ritual practice, the program might encourage the average 10th-grader to use the community as a resource. “We’ll give them a menu: ‘Here are all the places in MetroWest where you can do your formal learning, your informal learning, your community service, and your ritual practice,” said Lichtman. “‘Go and do.’”

Beyond gaining the possible value a Central Hebrew High School diploma may have in its own right and with college admissions officers, the students might be offered incentives such as iPods and concert tickets “if they hit benchmarks along the way before graduation,” said Lichtman.

“We should celebrate every Jewish teen who goes through a significant Jewish experience and finishes it successfully,” said Lichtman.

Lichtman also acknowledged that, in a time of increasing interfaith dating and marriage, the after-school experiences allow students to interact with fellow Jews.

“The social aspect is not only to have fun with other kids,” he said. “It is to create these interactions that may lead to Jewish families in the future.”

— ROBERT WIENER

A new gavel for a past president

A YEAR AFTER finishing her three-year term as president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest New Jersey, Ellen Goldner will play an active role as president of the new Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life.

“I am very passionate about this mission,” she told NJ Jewish News. “I feel that although there are many excellent Hebrew schools and early childhood programs, they can be better. They can be more exciting. Our children deserve to have exciting Jewish educators and education.”

Goldner declined to “pass judgment” on the Jewish Education Association of MetroWest, the agency that will be superseded by the Partnership. Instead, she focused on her rapport with Robert Lichtman, who is overseeing the transition between the two entities.

“I see Bob and me as facilitators, letting rabbis and principals know what exciting programs we are offering,” she said.

For the past year, Goldner taught in an early childhood education program at Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange, an experience she described as “a gift to myself” as a former preschool teacher.

But she plans to be dividing time between her new post and visits to her grandchildren, who live in London and Chicago. “Teaching does not give you much flexibility,” she said.

She said part of her commitment to the new partnership stems from her own upbringing.

“I did not have a good Hebrew school experience, and my children did not have a good Hebrew school experience,” a condition she addressed by sending them to Jewish summer camp and high school in Israel, “where they got very turned on.”

To Goldner, those programs provide models that might “encourage the Hebrew schools and day schools to have more experiential programming.” She said she also hopes the community will draw on the ideas and enthusiasm of a teen educator the Partnership plans to hire.

She would also like to see young people become involved with UJC MetroWest and its agencies. “We tell them about tzedaka. We tell them about being kind to elderly people,” she said. “Let them go to the Daughters of Israel [geriatric center in West Orange] and adopt a grandparent there. Let them do hands-on things. I don’t think kids learn only by sitting in a classroom. I think they learn by doing.”

— ROBERT WIENER

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