Two Connecticut educators tapped for new national fellowship
September 9, 2009 by Cindy Mindell, Connecticut Jewish Ledger
BRIDGEPORT - A new fellowship has been created by the Lookstein Center at
Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and the charter group of 14 participants includes two from Connecticut,
Howard Blas and Ira Wise. The two educators were selected from a group of more than 200 applicants.
The
Bar-Ilan fellowship, created in partnership with the Jim Joseph Foundation, seeks to identify, train, and empower leading educators in both formal and informal Jewish education settings to develop and lead virtual communities of practice in their professional fields.
The program will include professional development in the fields of leadership, group building and dynamics, educational techniques, and online collaborative technology. The Fellows will also have the opportunity to study with leading Judaic scholars, enriching their Jewish knowledge through text and experiential learning. The highlight of the program will be the launch, development, and cultivation of virtual communities of educators in various fields of Jewish education, facilitating discussions and
long-term online collaborative group projects.
The ongoing training of the first cohort will take place over a period of two years, and will include a series of seminars in the U.S. and at Bar-Ilan, home to many of the leading theoreticians and practitioners in the field of Jewish education, leading scholars in Jewish studies, as well as social scientists who focus their research on the Jewish community.
Upon completion of the first Israel seminar and return to their respective home environments, the Fellows will start to create online communities, which will make available more resources and opportunities for a greater number of Jewish educators throughout the world, and promote the use of technology to improve Jewish education.
Howard Blas of New Haven will use the fellowship to create an online community for Jewish families with children with special needs. He holds Masters degrees in social work and special education and has been involved in teaching Jewish special education throughout his professional career.
Blas is director of Camp Ramah’s HaTikvah, a
special-needs camping program for children with developmental disabilities.
As a private teacher, he works with Jewish children with special needs in Manhattan, in Jewish studies and bar/bat-mitzvah preparation.
“I’m very passionate about my Camp Ramah work,” he says, where he began in 1984 and moved into the special needs program before taking a break. When Ramah was looking for a program director,
Blas returned, and will mark his 10th summer in that position in 2010. “I thought the Jim Joseph program would go hand-in-hand with what I do at camp,”
Blas says.
HaTikvah is a regular division at Ramah, where
Blas says campers have plenty of opportunity to interact with “typical kids.”
Blas’s kids have gone to Israel, built a guesthouse at camp that is fully run by members of their unit, and engaged in camping and
vocational-training programs. Ramah has hired a number of HaTikvah graduates.
“One of the things I’ve always struggled with is that parents want to make HaTikvah a
year-round experience,”
Blas says. “One of the ways to do it is online,” a goal of the foundation, which seeks to train Jewish professionals to build online collaborative communities. “This concept struck me as a way to connect all the different HaTikvah groups during the year - campers to campers, parents to parents, staff to campers and to staff, etc.”
After using the fellowship to establish the initial community,
Blas says he hopes to apply it to other Ramah camps with
special-needs programs to widen the network, then work to create a central online address for information on Jewish special needs.
“I feel very honored,”
Blas says of the fellowship. “This is, ultimately, an
acknow-ledgement of Jewish special needs, by making possible a resource to connect Jewish families and specialists.”
Ira Wise is director of education at Congregation B’nai Israel in Bridgeport and has long been interested in how popular culture can be used in Jewish education. Wise teaches a class at Merkaz, the Community High School for Jewish Studies at the Jewish Community Center of Eastern Fairfield County, looking at how Jewish values can be learned from films, a class he also offers to other Jewish educators.
“Kids like film,” he says. “I take clips from
general-release films - not ‘Jewish’ films - and we’ll use them as a
jumping-off point to discuss characters’ motives and behaviors in terms of Jewish values. For example, you can use the recent ‘27 Dresses’ to explore Hillel’s philosophy of ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ and ‘If I am only for myself, what am I?’”
Wise sees technology as not only a tool, but a necessity for keeping Jewish learning and life relevant. “Everybody in their 20s and 30s is a digital native,” he says, “and the rest of us are digital immigrants. My goal has always been to make a very good klitah, or connection, between the two. If we don’t keep Judaism in front of both the digital and analog lenses, it will only be seen half the time, it will become less relevant and will end up sitting on the coffee table, unused. Judaism has to be relevant in all facets of our learners’ lives.”
With the fellowship, Wise will try to figure out how the digital lens can work in Jewish education, especially in response to those who have been predicting the death of the Jewish supplemental high school. “You can’t bring the kid kicking and screaming to the curriculum,” he says, citing the
19th-century writings of American educator John Dewey. “You have to bring the curriculum to where the kid is. Figure out where our learners are and bring Judaism to them by using their language. Right now it’s digital.”