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As day school educators gather, focus is on investing in leadership and creativity
When Rabbi Adam Englander arrived at a recent national gathering in Denver of Jewish day school and yeshiva educators, he had a good sense of what conference sessions he wanted to attend and whom he wanted to meet.
But it turns out that one of the most valuable benefits Englander experienced at the Prizmah educators conference were the serendipitous encounters he had with colleagues and the new opportunities for collaboration and creativity they presented.
As head of school at the Hebrew Academy of Long Beach, or HALB, in Woodmere, New York, Englander’s main focus usually is what’s happening at his school, not elsewhere. But at the conference he met with two colleagues with whom he shares a leadership coach, they created a WhatsApp group chat for sharing ideas, and Englander soon walked away with a new idea for a dynamic workshop to run with his leadership team this summer.
“Already just from this group I have an amazing idea,” Englander said. “That kind of good stuff can happen where you might meet someone who is like, ‘Oh, yeah. I have the same problem as you.’ Now you are connecting with some principal from San Francisco whom you’d never have met in a million years.”
He added, “Day school leaders really need to take the time and energy to invest in themselves, and their own growth.”
“Creative Spirit” was the theme of the conference in January organized by Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools, the national network organization that was created several years ago through a merger of five different day school organizations. The conference in Denver drew more than 1,000 professional and lay leaders from over 200 Jewish day schools and yeshivas across North America. It was the third-ever iteration of Prizmah’s national conference.
With tens of thousands of students spread out over hundreds of schools across the continent, day schools have become laboratories of creativity: for learning, for Jewish action, even for tackling societal challenges.
“Jewish day schools are inherently creative places,” said Prizmah CEO Paul Bernstein. “The exceptional level of shared optimism and imagination around the bright future of Jewish day schools was palpable at the conference. Day school leaders clearly share a belief and innovative determination in the opportunity to grow enrollment in the next decade — by promulgating the value proposition of Jewish day school, ensuring a pipeline of excellent educators and addressing the challenge of affordability.”
A salient example of creativity in action is how day schools adapted to the Covid-19 pandemic, not just adjusting to remote learning and figuring out how to return to classrooms safely, but in reconfiguring teaching approaches to suit different kinds of learning.
“Because of schools’ creativity, and because of the way that different stakeholders in schools — from administrators to teachers to parents to students — were able to work together, they solved these brand new problems we hadn’t seen before,” Bernstein observed.
Another area of tremendous creativity is how Jewish schools are managing the challenges of affordability: Day schools are almost entirely privately funded, tuition is a barrier for many families, and yet tuition fees alone are insufficient to cover costs. In recent years, some schools have adapted innovative and flexible fee models, from setting tuition based on a fixed percentage of a family’s income to using Jewish community grant funding to cap tuition for new families.
Much of the conference was devoted to ideas for the future of Jewish day school education, covering everything from curricula to leadership to finances. One main area of focus is recruiting and retaining quality educators and school leaders.
Debra Skolnick-Einhorn, head of school at the Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School in Washington, D.C., who spoke on a conference panel about professional development, said she believes the key to better educator retention is improving compensation and benefits, providing more opportunities for professional growth, and expressing more gratitude toward staff.
Tal Ben-Shahar, an American-Israeli bestselling author who teaches about the psychology of leadership, spoke at the conference about the importance of investing in leaders.
“It’s important to focus on self-care for the teachers, invest in people in the field,” Ben-Shahar said. “It’s critical to treat teachers well, keep them involved, treat them as professionals, and value their opinions.”
“Jewish day schools are inherently creative places,” said Prizmah CEO Paul Bernstein at the organization’s biennial conference in Denver, January 2023. (Courtesy of Prizmah)
John D’Auria, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of four books on leadership, spoke about how great leaders focus on mutual learning — getting colleagues to share and learn from one another — rather than top-down leadership. It’s an approach embodied by many day school curricula, which focus on collaborative and experiential learning.
At the conference, Lisa Kay Solomon, Louie Montoya, and Ariel Raz from Stanford University’s d.school K12 Futures team offered an art project dubbed Hall of Descendants where participants could create a portrait and message for future children and educators.
“While we can’t predict the future, we know it’s going to be filled with a lot of uncertainty, complexity and tensions that we can’t solve,” Solomon said. “The hall creates a relatability to that distant time travel and a sense of responsibility about what we might do today to serve that future descendant.”
Brad Phillipson, head of school for the Jewish Community Day School of Greater New Orleans, said he found the Hall “a powerful exercise in prioritizing the values with which I most closely identify, personally and professionally, and in contemplating the world I want to pass along to future generations — through our students, through my child, and, indirectly, through what my students, and my daughter, will teach their children.”
Tal Grinfas-David, who led a session at the conference on creative leadership and Israel, said it’s important for leaders to take risks. More often than not, she noted, leaders can be “risk averse to placate, to take safe pathways.”
Grinfas-David, who is vice president of outreach and pre-collegiate school management initiatives at the Atlanta-based Center for Israel Education, turned to Israeli history for examples of leadership that educators could emulate.
“What I wanted them to see was examples of courageous leadership and risk taking and where that could lead,” Grinfas-David said. “Hopefully, they see that leaders of Israel have had to strengthen the future of the state regardless of the circumstances, just as the school leaders need to leave behind a legacy of a stronger institution.”
Bernstein, Prizmah’s CEO, said that the recent gathering underscored how important collaboration is to Jewish education — and that regardless of location or denomination, colleagues have a lot to learn from each other.
“What we are seeing is that when Jewish day school leaders come together, whether you are Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, pluralistic, or nondenominational, whether you are from the Southwest or the Northeast, from the U.S. or Canada and beyond — there is so much more that unites than divides,” Bernstein said.
Prizmah’s next conference will be held in the winter of 2024.
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The post As day school educators gather, focus is on investing in leadership and creativity appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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A chance for the descendants of Holocaust victims to reclaim a piece of the past
Levi Buxbaum boarded the S.S. St. Louis on May 13, 1939, both relieved and hopeful. Relieved to be leaving Nazi Germany behind, hopeful that he would soon reunite with his daughters. But 14 days later, when the ship arrived in Havana, most of its passengers were denied entry.
Refused safe harbor in Cuba, the United States and Canada, the refugees were forced to return to Europe. That June, Buxbaum and 222 other passengers disembarked in France. Discouraged but undeterred, he clung to the hope that he would eventually secure a visa to America.
It was not to be. Sometime between Nov. 6 and Nov. 8, 1942, Buxbaum died aboard a transport bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Until recently, that was all Bonnie Elkaim knew about her great-grandfather.
Now, thanks to the Center for Jewish History’s newly launched initiative, “Histories and Mysteries,” Elkaim knows what happened between Buxbaum’s arrival in France in 1939 and his death three years later. The project helps families investigate Holocaust-era cold cases through crowdsourced genealogy, expert archival research and community collaboration.
“I’m extremely grateful that I filled in some of the pieces. I didn’t want my great-grandfather to just be a statistic,” Elkaim, 58, told me in a Zoom interview.
The initiative was made possible by a nearly $300,000 grant from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, or the Claims Conference. Since the project was launched in January, genealogists at CJH have received nearly 50 inquiries from the United States, Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Canada, and have begun work on 11 cases.
“This project brings together passed-down family stories and the irreplaceable truth found in the archive. By taking part in this work, each person helps restore histories stolen in the Holocaust and gives families a chance to reclaim pieces of their past,” said Jenny Rappaport, head genealogist at the Ackman & Ziff Family Genealogy Institute.
Elkaim’s story will be the first shared publicly, released in weekly social media posts through July 31.
Miriam Frankel, CJH’s director of social media, said she hopes the project’s collaborative nature will resonate with audiences.
“What I love about the project is the communal aspect and being able to steward these stories into the digital world and affirm that they matter,” Frankel said.
The idea for the project grew out of the family history of Ilana Rosenbluth, CJH’s communications director.
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Rosenbluth’s father, then four years old, was living with his parents in eastern Poland. By month’s end, the country had been divided between Germany and the Soviet Union.
Rosenbluth’s family fled eastward, moving from Lvov to Siberia and eventually Uzbekistan, where food was scarce and disease rampant. During that time, her grandmother gave birth to a daughter, Lucia, known as Lucy, who later died of starvation.
In 1943, desperate to support his family, Rosenbluth’s grandfather boarded a train carrying bolts of fabric and disappeared.
“There are varying accounts of what happened to him, but the truth is my family has never had closure,” Rosenbluth said, adding that this initiative may be the last chance for us, and people like us to find answers.
As the number of living witnesses declines, preserving Holocaust history has taken on new urgency, said Gideon Taylor, president of the Claims Conference.
“We’re at a unique moment in time in terms of Holocaust memory and education. Fewer and fewer people have direct knowledge of it,” Taylor said.
A 2020 Claims Conference survey found that 63% of Americans do not know that six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and nearly half cannot name a single one of the more than 400,000 camps and ghettos that existed across Europe.
Elkaim, a retired New York City teacher, says she first learned about the Holocaust when she was nine years old.
“I only knew a few limited facts. I knew my grandparents had survived and my great-grandfather hadn’t. My grandmother felt a lot of survivor guilt and didn’t talk about it, and people didn’t ask questions then,” she said.
Now an educator and guide at CJH’s Anne Frank exhibition, Elkaim spent years searching for fragments of information that might transform her great-grandfather from an abstraction into a living, breathing person.
“I wanted to feel a connection with him,” she said.
When Rappaport received Elkaim’s inquiry, she immediately began contacting archivists in Germany and France. She also worked with CJH partner organizations, including the Leo Baeck Institute and YIVO, which held a census record from the General Union of French Israelites. The document placed Buxbaum in Vienne, France, between 1941 and 1942 and showed that he was unemployed. Rappaport also combed databases such as Ancestry.com, which contains extensive German vital records.
“Sometimes a single clue can rewrite an entire family story,” Rappaport said.
In Elkaim’s case, it was three clues.
The first breakthrough was the death record of Elkaim’s great-grandmother, Pauline Rothschild Buxbaum, which confirmed that he was in Kassel, Germany, on March 24, 1939.
Next came his 1876 German birth record, which verified his identity across multiple French documents.
Finally, a typed marriage record for Levi Buxbaum and Pauline Rothschild further confirmed the timeline, placing him definitively in Germany shortly before his flight from Nazi persecution.
Piece by piece, Rappaport reconstructed what followed.
In September 1939, Buxbaum was interned as an “enemy alien” at Camp du Ruchard, a former convalescence hospital for Belgian soldiers after World War I. He lived as a refugee for four years before being arrested and transferred to the Drancy internment camp. All the while he never stopped trying to get to America.
The last document bearing his name appears on Transport 42 from Drancy to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“He either died on the transport or immediately after arriving. There’s no way to know exactly. But I admire him so much and how hard he fought to survive,” Elkaim said.
The post A chance for the descendants of Holocaust victims to reclaim a piece of the past appeared first on The Forward.
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Jews and other minorities face similar levels of campus hostility, Brandeis survey finds
The first academic study comparing the experience of Jewish students on college campuses to that of other minority groups found that Jews and other marginalized populations, including Black and Muslim students, face comparable levels of discrimination.
The findings were part of a national survey involving thousands of respondents focused on antisemitism that also polled student attitudes toward other identity groups.
Nearly half of Jewish students said they had experienced at least one antisemitic incident during the current academic year — mostly seeing offensive graffiti or posters — but when it came to the overall campus climate Jews were slightly less likely than Muslims, and slightly more likely than Black students, to say that their campus was a hostile environment.
“Everybody is walking around with a chip on their shoulder,” said Leonard Saxe, director of the Cohen Center of Modern Jewish Studies at Brandeis University, which produced the study released Tuesday. “Addressing prejudice toward protected groups is perhaps seen as a zero- sum game: ‘If we pay attention to Black students that’s taking away from what we can do for Jewish students, but paying attention to Jewish students means not paying attention to Muslim students.’”
While a flurry of research about campus antisemitism followed the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and the college protests of the Gaza war that followed, few have sought to determine whether Jews are facing more or less discrimination than other students.
But the Brandeis study tracks with a less scientific study commissioned by the antisemitism task force at Columbia University in which high levels of both Jewish and Muslim students said they had felt endangered on campus amid protests related to the Gaza war.
In the Brandeis report, Jewish students were most likely to express concern related to traditional antisemitic stereotypes (62%) and antisemitism from the political right (60%) while fewer said they were worried about antisemitism related to Israel (45%) or coming from the left (also 45%).
When it came to college students overall, 9% showed a pattern of hostility toward Jews, meaning they were likely to agree with a series of antisemitic statements, compared to 17% who exhibited what researchers called “anti-Black resentment.”
Muslim, Black and Hispanic students, and those who identified as liberal or moderate, were the most likely to agree with negative statements about Jews, while white, Muslim and conservative students were most likely to agree with anti-Black views.
“It means that we need to target some of our interventions — educational interventions — to these groups if we want to have effects,” Saxe said. “If you only engage the Caucasian students, you’re not going to be addressing the problem.”
Jewish students expressed some of the lowest levels of prejudice toward other groups, according to the study, but 18% expressed “anti-Black resentment” while 3% were categorized as expressing hostility toward Jews.
The report also found that strident hostility toward Israel — opposing Israel’s “right to exist” and avoiding peers who support a Jewish state in Israel — did not neatly correlate to holding antisemitic views.
Half of “extremely liberal” students agreed with those statements about Israel but overall the very liberal population was least likely to express a pattern of hostility toward Jewish students. Very few moderate or conservative students expressed those negative views about Israel, but both groups were more likely to agree with anti-Jewish statements.
The 14% of Jewish students who agreed with the anti-Israel statements was similar to the number of students from other backgrounds who did.
The study was conducted during the fall semester last year. Researchers polled 3,989 undergraduate students at four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. through an online survey fielded by Generation Lab that included an oversample of 743 Jewish students.
The post Jews and other minorities face similar levels of campus hostility, Brandeis survey finds appeared first on The Forward.
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Rubio Says ‘Historic’ Israel-Lebanon Talks Should Outline Framework for Peace
Smoke rises after an Israeli strike, amid escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran continues, in southern Lebanon, March 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio hosted a rare meeting between Israeli and Lebanese envoys in Washington on Tuesday, saying he hoped the two countries would agree to a framework for a peace process, even as Israel pressed its war on Hezbollah.
The two countries went into their first direct negotiations since 1983 with conflicting agendas, with Israel ruling out discussion of a ceasefire and demanding Beirut disarm Hezbollah, an Iran-backed terrorist group based in Lebanon that seeks Israel’s destruction.
But the presence of Rubio, President Donald Trump’s top diplomat and national security adviser, signaled Washington’s desire to see progress.
CRITICAL JUNCTURE IN MIDDLE EAST CRISIS
The meeting comes at a critical juncture in the conflict in the Middle East, a week into a fragile ceasefire between the United States, Israel, and Iran.
Iran says Israel‘s campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon must be included in any agreement to end the wider war, complicating talks mediated by Pakistan aimed at averting further economic fallout.
The conflict that began with US-Israeli strikes on Iran on Feb. 28 has led to a major oil supply disruption, piling pressure on Trump to find an off-ramp.
Rubio opened the meeting between Israel‘s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, and his Lebanese counterpart, Nada Hamadeh Moawad, saying he hoped the talks could begin a process to permanently end the conflict in Lebanon and prevent Hezbollah, which he called a “terrorist proxy of Iran,” from threatening Israel.
The meeting marked a rare encounter between representatives of governments that have remained technically in a state of war since the modern state of Israel was established in 1948.
“This is a process, not an event. This is more than just one day. This will take time, but we believe it is worth this endeavor, and it’s a historic gathering that we hope to build on. And the hope today is that we can outline the framework upon which a permanent, lasting peace can be developed,” Rubio said.
Rubio was hosting Tuesday’s talks amid questions over his lack of in-person participation in talks with Iran, with the Republican president sending Vice President JD Vance to Islamabad over the weekend to lead the US negotiations.
Rubio was with Trump in Florida watching a mixed martial arts event as Vance announced in Pakistan that talks with the Iranians had concluded with no breakthrough.
State Department Counselor Michael Needham, US ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz, and US ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, a personal friend of Trump, were also participating in the talks on Tuesday.
LEBANON SEEKS CEASEFIRE
Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said in a statement on X as the meeting started that he hoped it would “mark the beginning of ending the suffering of the Lebanese people in general, and the southerners in particular.”
The Lebanese government led by Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam has called for negotiations with Israel despite objections from Hezbollah, reflecting worsening tensions between the Shi’ite Muslim group and its opponents.
Hezbollah opened fire in support of Tehran on March 2, sparking an Israeli offensive that has killed more than 2,000 people and forced 1.2 million from their homes, according to Lebanese authorities. Most of those killed have been Hezbollah terrorists, according to Israeli tallies.
Lebanese officials have said Moawad only has authority to discuss a ceasefire in Tuesday’s meeting.
But Israeli government spokesperson Shosh Bedrosian said Israel would not discuss a ceasefire.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar told reporters in Jerusalem ahead of the meeting that talks would focus on the disarmament of Hezbollah, which he said must take place before Israel and Lebanon could sign any peace agreement and normalise relations.
He said Hezbollah was a problem for Israel‘s security and Lebanon‘s sovereignty that needed to be addressed to move relations to a different phase. “We want to reach peace and normalization with the state of Lebanon,” he said.
The Lebanese state has been seeking to disarm Hezbollah peacefully since a war between the terrorist group and Israel in 2024. Efforts by Lebanon to disarm it by force risk igniting conflict in a country shattered by civil war from 1975 to 1990. Moves against Hezbollah by a Western-backed government in 2008 prompted a short civil war.
The current government banned Hezbollah’s military wing after it opened fire on Israel last month.