6 | APRIL 8 • 2021 

guest column
3 Lessons to Strengthen Israel Education
N

ewsworthy stories 
unfold in Israel at 
breathtaking rates. 
Repeated elections, COVID-
19 responses, pathbreaking 
Supreme Court 
decisions, 
the Abraham 
Accords — all 
are worthy of 
community 
discussion and 
age-appropriate 
student explora-
tion. Yet few Jewish students 
and their parents possess suf-
ficient understanding or dis-
cussion skills to explain them 
beyond a passing headline.
These rich topics relate to 
peoplehood, democracy, and 
the Land and State of Israel. 
They affect our Jewish iden-
tity and Israel’s role in it. We 
all could use a booster shot 

in our knowledge foundation. 
We realize that knowing core 
information, let alone the 
associated nuances, requires 
time, specifically education-
al foundations that can’t be 
packed into a few hours a 
week of Judaic studies in a 
post-b’nai mitzvah class or in 
11th or 12th grade.
Four years working closely 
with a dozen schools across 
North America have shown 
me the wonderful benefits 
and experiences from com-
prehensive and integrated 
approaches to Israel edu-
cation for students, parents 
and the community at large. 
The positive results from the 
Center for Israel Education’s 
Day School Initiative are 
replicable. These are three of 
the most important lessons 
learned. 

START EARLY AND OFTEN
We do not teach calculus in 
kindergarten, nor do we avoid 
grade-level benchmarks for 
fear that students will hate 
math. We also do not let 
each educator decide how 
and when to teach elements 
of math. Instead, we use a 
well-defined curriculum to 
help children acquire difficult 
foundational concepts and 
skills bit by bit, year by year.
Similarly, we shouldn’t 
expect 11th-graders to grapple 
with Israeli-Palestinian rela-
tions, Israel’s parliamentary 
democracy, its management of 
a pandemic or the debate over 
religion in Israel’s Jewish iden-
tity without a foundation of 
age-appropriate Israel educa-
tion. We need to educate from 
the earliest grades upward. By 
developing a knowledge base, 

a connection and a habit of 
informed conversation from 
an early age, we make possible 
the later discussions that we 
desire and for which students 
hunger.
An example is Jack M. 
Barrack Hebrew Academy 
in Bryn Mawr, Pa., which is 
building depth and sophisti-
cation into Israel education 
for its sixth- to 12th-grad-
ers. A three-part series for 
10th-graders, for example, 
builds on earlier lessons to 
address Jewish diversity and 
the compromises involved in 
maintaining peoplehood. Such 
learning leads to questions 
about the diaspora origins of 
Israeli democracy and how 
Israeli and American Jews 
influence each other.

Dr. Tal 
Grinfas-David

PURELY COMMENTARY

continued on page 10

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