Education has always been at the heart of Bet Am Shalom. In 2007, we challenged ourselves to re-imagine Jewish education for our children and the congregation as a whole. The result of a two-year Visioning process is the Statement below.  We invite you to read more about our new Hebrew School format and our intergenerational programming. Then come learn along with us.

Our Vision Statement for Jewish Learning:

IMAGINE a Jewish community in which all of its members are engaged in learning and in teaching. 

IMAGINE this community as Bet Am Shalom Synagogue, a congregation that is participatory, inclusive and egalitarian, a Reconstructionist community living Jewish life in all its forms.

IMAGINE that we accept fully our individual and communal responsibility to receive the tradition, values and practices of the Jewish People and live them to our best ability as we understand them today, so that we may pass them to our children and to future generations as an inheritance.

IMAGINE a community that educates for the totality of Jewish life in exciting, intergenerational and age-appropriate modes, addressing the skills and concepts necessary to participate in Jewish life and the dispositions that support the desire to participate in it.

In order to attain this vision, we recommend that we utilize every opportunity and every context available to us to make education an integral part of communal life. We envision that some educational modes will take place in classrooms, while others are most appropriately in informal settings, within and outside the synagogue facility. Some modes will be led by trained educators and others will be led by members of the community of all ages. We see educational modes as including:

• Family learning Mentoring
• Experiential learning Home learning
• Service learning

Since supplementary religious school today often doesn’t supplement a full Jewish experience at home, children’s education has become the responsibility of the School. We now see that children’s Jewish education, and the education of each member of the community, is the responsibility of the congregation.

NOTES

Inherent in this vision are:

* Tefillah
* Eretz Yisrael – ancient and contemporary
* Shabbat and Hagim
* Tikkun Olam
* Sense of Peoplehood – historical and contemporary