The Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership
7/2010

BJE is about partnerships – collaborating with a variety of groups, institutions and individuals to achieve the goal of enhancing quality, increasing access, and encouraging participation in Jewish education.  It is also about informing the community of its religious and cultural heritage and enduring connection with Israel.

Among the many ways BJE seeks to achieve its goal is to bring educational communities together, be they across town or across the world.  For example, when the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles established its Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership in 1997, BJE recognized an opportunity to collaborate with the Federation and its Israel and Overseas Department.

The Tel Aviv/Los Angeles Partnership seeks to foster and create mutually beneficial relationships between the citizens and institutions of Tel Aviv and Los Angeles and to strengthen shared Jewish identities and destinies.  Among the Partnership’s activities is a School ‘Twinning’ Program (STP).  The STP began with six paired schools in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles.  Today there are 36 participating schools (18 in each country).  The school partnerships consist of everything from the simple exchange of holiday greetings and emails between classes, to video conferences, and from jointly prepared curricula to travel exchanges of students and parents between the two schools.  The purpose of the program is to create a sense of shared community and common goals between the students, parents and faculty.

One of the STP’s key activities in which BJE plays a major role is a Joint Teachers Seminar.  It is a critical “greenhouse” for incubating new ideas and perspectives and tries to challenge teachers conceptually, as well as help them connect broad themes and ideas to practical classroom activities.

The seminar is held annually in December and brings together representative faculty from all participating schools for ten days of collaborative study.  It is an opportunity for faculty to share best practices, develop a shared language and examine significant Jewish themes pertinent to the School Twinning Program.

The seminars have explored a wide variety of subject matter - the concept of “Peoplehood” and its relationship to Jewish self-perception; the idea of “Homeland” and how American and Israeli Jews may view it differently; the proposition “To Be a Jew” and ways that idea has been expressed in Jewish life; the image of the “educated Jew;” the affective and spiritual elements of Judaism (titled, “With All Your Heart”); the concept of Tikkun Olam and the Jewish view of engagement in the world; and the idea of belonging to a community and how we act on the precept of “Kol Yisrael Areivim Zeh LaZeh,” (All Israel is Obligated to One Another). 

For more information about the Partnership contact BJE Associate Director Phil Liff-Grieff.