by Lori Silberman Brauner
NJJN Staff Writer

July 23, 2009

After a 10-year hiatus, the Alexander Muss High School in Israel now has a local go-to person to promote its study-abroad program.

Ellen Goldner, who recently concluded her three-year term as the founding president of The Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life, has a new portfolio: serving as the MetroWest community’s recruiter and admissions director for the High School in Israel, a two-month program for teens that combines intensive academic studies with field trips around the country.

Goldner, whose position is funded by the Muss program, is based at the Partnership’s office on the Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany.

Muss program participants — high school sophomores, juniors, and seniors — embark on a 250-hour college-level “core” course covering 4,000 years of Jewish history, from prebiblical to modern Israeli times.

The program is conducted at its boarding school campus in the Mosenson Youth Village in Hod Hasharon, near Tel Aviv. Upon completing the course, students are eligible to receive up to six college credits.

Explaining that the students only attend classes “maybe three days a week,” Goldner said that everything they learn in the classroom is experienced firsthand on trips throughout the country.

“It brings Jewish learning to life,” she said.

The Muss initiative is just the newest component of J-Teen MetroWest, the Partnership’s Jewish Teen Educational Experiences Network. Goldner is working with the Partnership’s executive director, Robert Lichtman; Rabbi Shmuel Greene, director of teen initiatives; and Michal Greenbaum, coordinator of Jewish service learning.

J-Teen promotes “all the teen programming at the Partnership,” said Goldner, a Mountain Lakes resident. “All these are identity-shaping programs for teens.”

Goldner said she, MetroWest Israel Program Center shliha Orli Dudaie, Greene, and Greenbaum are working to strategize how to approach public and private school students “about all teen programs.”

A former preschool teacher, Goldner is also past president of United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ and a former UJA campaign chair and Women’s Department president. She also taught three-year-olds at Oheb Shalom Congregation in South Orange for many years.

As the Partnership’s founding president, Goldner acknowledged the unusual relationship in which a lay leader crossed over to the professional side of an agency. But she and Lichtman stressed that they always have worked as a team. “One doesn’t supervise the other; one supports the other,” Lichtman said.

“We’re just used to working together,” agreed Goldner, “and working well together.”

For Goldner, the new role holds personal significance. Both of her children, whose formal Jewish education had ended with their b’nei mitzva, participated in the Muss High School in Israel during the summer between their junior and senior years of high school. “They came back completely changed kids,” Goldner said. “History came alive for them.”

Goldner’s son Josh eventually returned to Israel to study at Tel Aviv University, participated in the World Union of Jewish Students program for college graduates, and eventually made aliya. Before having her own children, Goldner’s daughter Rachel served as a preschool director at a JCC in Skokie, Ill.

“I love kids and I cannot wait to send them to Israel,” Goldner said. “I can’t wait for our MetroWest kids to have that experience.”

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On one foot

The Alexander Muss High School in Israel (www.amhsi.org), accredited by the Middle States Association of College and Schools, runs for five sessions during the school year as well as the summer. Exams and papers are part of the academically oriented program, and students are able to continue their coursework from their home schools.

Students, who typically attend public and secular private high schools, are housed at a boarding school that also hosts native Israelis and Russian and Ethiopian immigrants. Students have the opportunity to participate in extracurricular activities and be matched with a host family in Israel if they have no relatives of their own there.

“It’s serious study in an extremely fun atmosphere,” Ellen Goldner said.

“Generous financial aid is available” for the program, which costs $8,000, she added. Area

students are eligible for scholarships from United Jewish Communities of MetroWest NJ’s Gift of Israel program and from the Muss program itself, among the many funding sources.

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