Rabbi Shmuel Greene, new director of teen initiatives at the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life, says, “We have to make the teens interested and excited about their own Jewish journey.”
August 7, 2008
After a two-year nationwide search for someone to help shape its “new model of Jewish education,” the Partnership for Jewish Learning and Life has found its director of teen initiatives, Rabbi Shmuel Greene.
In the newly created position, Greene will undertake the restructuring of Central Hebrew High School, the community-wide Partnership program for MetroWest students in grades eight through high school.
The school meets once a week at the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy in Livingston, the Alex Aidekman Family Jewish Community Campus in Whippany and at Congregation Shomrei Emunah in Montclair. Partnership executive director Robert Lichtman said that the goal is to create “a new model of Jewish education” that focuses on experiential learning.
Greene is also charged with integrating existing teen programs with Central Hebrew High School and developing new programs to engage more teens across the MetroWest area.
“We’re trying to break down the walls in order to transition into something much broader,” said Greene, who began working full-time July 1 at the Partnership’s Aidekman campus location.
Greene is no stranger to Jewish educational initiatives. Before coming to the Partnership, he worked from July 2006 to July 2007 for Chabad in North Shore, Mass., where he established a Hebrew high school for post-bar and -bat mitzva public school students who wished to continue their Jewish education.
He is also no stranger to New Jersey. From 2002 to 2005, he served as educational director at Rutgers Hillel in New Brunswick.
“That’s part of the reason the Partnership hired me, because I’ve brought that experience,” Greene said. “Teens today and college students are not that different in their mentality. Both college-age students — especially on a big campus like Rutgers — and Jewish teens in MetroWest have the same difficulty with doing Jewish programming: the fact that they’re doing so many other things.” Greene likened Jewish offerings for young people to a marketplace; to attract consumers, he said, “you have to stand out.”
“There’s only so much a parent can force a kid to do today,” he said. “The bottom line is we have to make the teens interested and excited about their own Jewish journey.”
Greene said he believes he has the recipe for success. The most crucial ingredient is giving teens “the tools so they can take ownership” of programs offered. Once they have the tools and the knowledge, Greene said, they will want to “get their hands dirty” and take activities on themselves.
“I’m not going to have my teachers come in and say, ‘Okay, this is what the Torah says, this is what Judaism says, this is what this says.’ No. It doesn’t work that way,” Greene said.
Instead, teens should be told: “‘This is what the text says, now what do you think?’ Learn the text first, understand what it says, and then get the different interpretations. ‘Where do you stand? Why do you stand there?’ Challenge them.”
Another ingredient in drawing in youth, he said, is building a sense of community and belonging.
As Lichtman explained, the new Central Hebrew High is “going to be more experiential, more relevant to what kids are experiencing in life” by giving them what Greene calls the “Jewish tools” to grapple with the adult issues they face.
“It will also have access points for kids of the community,” Lichtman added, “so that even if you’re not a Central Hebrew High kid, you’ll be able to participate in what’s being offered, and if you are a Central Hebrew High kid, you’ll be able to participate in what else exists outside the community.” That means the school will provide information about such programs alongside the curriculum and possibly offer credits or a Jewish diploma for non-enrolled students.
“We will succeed if teens get that what they learn is applicable to their life and we will succeed if they actually apply it to their life,” Lichtman said.
Greene said he has begun to prepare for the school year, contacting teens and getting them excited about the initiative.
A onetime paratrooper for the Israel Defense Forces, Greene is a graduate of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was ordained by the Chabad Beit Din in Israel. A Minnesota native, he made aliya at age 11 before going to Canada in 2000 to serve as a pulpit rabbi in Vancouver.
He lives in Highland Park with his wife, Esther, and three daughters.
Though he expressed a desire to someday return to Israel, Greene said he feels strongly about his work in the States.
A student of talmudic scholar Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, Green said one of his credos is “the Jewish people needs help, and that means I’m going to be where I can do the most for the Jewish people.
“Right now, that’s here.”
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