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Monday Night School Collaboration
NEW MONDAy NIGHT SCHOOL COLLABORATION
Diversity
By Mike Fishbein, Director of Teen Education
Monday Night School (MNS), our weekly Jewish education program for 8-12th grade teens, is the hub of Temple Israel’s teen education program. MNS is the home of a vibrant community of teens, and is a place of wonderful Jewish living, relationship building, learning, and fun. This year, the tent posts of this vibrant teen community are spreading out in an innovative way. Monday Night School has been relaunched as a community program. We are anchored at Temple Israel, but open to any teen in our area who is seeking Jewish learning and connection. While we expect that the weekly experience of our students this year will not be very different from that of recent MNS years, we know that this new approach to MNS is indeed different in some ways that are significant and important. Central to our new vision for MNS is our belief that diversity of perspective enriches our learning, and we are thrilled to think of the myriad ways in which the Jewish lives and identities of all our students will be enhanced when they become connected to a broader representation of the Jewish life of their community. We set the foundation of this vision by entering into partnership with two of our close neighbors, Temple Beth Zion (TBZ) and Congregation Kehillath Israel (KI), both of Brookline. The clergy and educators of those synagogues will encourage their teens to enroll in MNS, just as we do. Members of our partners’ clergy – KI’s Rabbi Rachel Silverman and TBZ’s Rabbi Claudia Kreiman and Cantor Becky Khitrik – will teach as part of the MNS staff, just as Temple Israel clergy have always done. Incorporating these teachers will both bring a new group of excellent educators to our school, and will allow students from partner communities to see their own synagogues represented in the MNS staff. The hallmark of MNS is the ownership TI teens have of the program’s direction. Now, MNS belongs to the teens of KI and TBZ as well.
Our goal is to be welcoming of Jewish teens in our neighborhood (broadly defined), including those of other streams of Judaism. We have received a small but meaningful grant from CJP with which we will create promotional materials and conduct outreach. Throughout this year, we will work to inform other local synagogues, as well as unaffiliated families of teens in the area, about MNS, and we will invite them to enroll. We are embracing the practice of “audacious hospitality,” championed by URJ President Rick Jacobs. We have a wonderful story to tell about our school, and about our teen community. We are sharing our story beyond our walls, and we are embracing partners who want to join our continuing work – helping our teens to build an ever more vibrant Jewish community for themselves.
We believe that hearing an enhanced diversity of Jewish voices will only serve to strengthen all of our students as learners, as thinkers, and as young American Jews.
