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Looming Jewish teacher shortage prompts new accelerated training in well-known Jerusalem program
When Rabbi David Wallach was looking for an institution to help him become a better Jewish day school teacher, he was frustrated to find that most of the places he researched offered either training in Jewish studies or general teacher training. It was hard to find both.
Then he discovered the Pardes Teacher Fellowship in Jerusalem, where he ended up getting his master’s degree in Jewish education.
“Pardes is the only place that integrated for me both the Jewish studies and the pedagogy,” said Wallach, now 32 and a teacher and assistant director of Jewish studies at Les Ecoles Azrieli Herzliah High School in Montreal, Canada. “It wasn’t that you learn Judaism in one place and learn education in another. This entire program is about the pedagogy of Jewish learning. That approach is unique, powerful and invaluable for me.”
More than 270 Jewish teachers and educators-in-training from North America have gone through the Pardes Teacher Fellowship, a two-year master’s program that offers participants intensive Jewish learning, Jewish educational pedagogy, practical student-teacher training and mentoring in North American day schools.
A mainstay for over two decades, the well-known fellowship is being redesigned for next year to make some key changes that administrators believe will better serve the future teachers of Jewish day schools: Instead of requiring two years in Israel with monthlong student-teaching stints along the way, Pardes is offering an accelerated program that requires just one year of intense study in Jerusalem followed by a second year of teacher training in schools in North America.
The program is funded, so students’ expenses are minimized and they receive a stipend, and at the program’s conclusion they obtain their master’s degree. Pardes is currently accepting applications for the fall.
“This is a unique opportunity to study pedagogy with spectacular teachers in Jewish education,” said Aviva Lauer, director of the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.
There’s another reason for the changes at Pardes: a looming crisis in Jewish education to which the Jewish world hasn’t fully woken up, according to some educational leaders.
“The crisis that we knew was coming is here. Jewish day schools, early childhood centers and part-time congregational schools across the country face a shortage of educators to fill multiple openings for lead teachers, assistants and substitutes,” wrote the authors of a recent piece in the online publication eJewish Philanthropy published by leaders from the Association of Directors of Communal Agencies for Jewish Education. “This is no longer simply a ‘challenge.’ Rather, it is a crisis because of continuing trends in the overall job market, exacerbated by the pandemic.”
The shortage is related in part to low salaries in the profession. A recent report by the Collaborative for Applied Studies in Jewish Education showed that fewer new teachers are entering education and more current teachers are leaving. As a result, many Jewish schools are hiring staff without appropriate training.
“We are looking for teacher candidates who love Jewish text, Jewish living, and Jewish tradition, recognize that the children are our future, and want to serve their communities as role models for the next generation,” said Rabbi Avi Spodek, director of recruitment at the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators.
Rabbi Jordan Soffer, head of school at the Striar Hebrew Academy in Sharon, Massachusetts, used his training in the Pardes Teacher Fellowship to enhance his classroom teaching. (Courtesy of Pardes)
Pardes’ revamped fellowship program tightens its format with a more modular structure that offers more credit for the pedagogy courses students take in Israel and credit for some courses online. The purpose of the change is to enhance the practical training and enable those who can only get away to Israel for a single academic year (plus two summers) to participate.
“The new format is a soft easing-in to teaching,” Lauer said, giving students time to immerse themselves in a school before becoming full-time teachers.
The principle that guides the Pardes approach is subject-specific pedagogy, according to Lauer: “Not just how to be a teacher but how to be a Jewish studies teacher. It’s learning how to integrate and balance textual content with what we call ‘meaning-mining.’ It’s about introducing our students to varied lenses through which they might teach Jewish texts, and helping them explore what will be important and meaningful to them to teach their future students.”
The Pardes program boasts a star-studded staff, including Yiscah Smith, Rabbi Meesh Hammer-Kossoy, Judy Klitsner, and Rabbi Zvi Hirschfield for Jewish studies, and Rachel Friedrichs, Reuven Margrett, Sefi Kraut, and Susan Yammer for the pedagogical components.
“The teachers are so special,” said Josh Less, a current fellow. “They are all unique in their own ways and have a great grasp of their subjects.”
Pardes attracts students from a diversity of Jewish denominational, cultural and professional backgrounds. The program’s alumni include six heads of school, five principals, 12 Jewish studies department chairs and six directors of Jewish life, among scores of Jewish teachers.
Less, 28, who recently completed a round of teacher training at the Milken School in Los Angeles, said the Pardes program has given him critical classroom experience and essential Jewish study skills that he learned in Pardes’ beit midrash, or Jewish study hall. He plans to become a full-time day school teacher but first wants to get his rabbinical ordination.
“My advice to someone thinking about this program is: Definitely do it!” Less said. “The program is such a blessing for the right person who wants to do intense learning and teaching. It’s intense but indispensable.”
Wallach said the most valuable thing he took away from the Pardes program was how to connect learning to practice. When he teaches about Passover, for example, Wallach turns his classroom walls into an art gallery, hanging dozens of images of the Seder’s four children drawn from different haggadahs and asking his students to explain which images speak to them. That gets them talking. Once they’re done analyzing, he asks the students to create their own images of the four children.
“This kind of exercise always gets them. They are intrigued by it. They are involved,” said Wallach, who has been teaching for seven years. He credits Pardes with showing him this kind of approach to learning.
“It wasn’t just: Here’s how to teach, in theory. It was about how to teach this specific Jewish studies text, the pedagogy of it,” he recalled. “We practiced it, and we had a chance to actually live it, both with our peer training and the teaching.”
Wallach added, “All the best teachers I know went through Pardes.”
Having excellent teachers is critical for the future of the Jewish people, Lauer said.
“Our goal is to give our fellows outstanding training – for their own sake, for the sake of the schools that will hire them, for the sake of the children and for the sake of the future of the Jewish people,” she said. “People who graduate from our program are avidly sought-after and seen as stars in the field. We are hoping to find the new stars. The Jewish world needs new stars.”
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The post Looming Jewish teacher shortage prompts new accelerated training in well-known Jerusalem program appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique?
AppleTV+’s new thriller Unconditional has the trappings of so much streaming content.
A young woman disappears into hostile territory. Her mother, already juggling a family health crisis, does her own sleuthing to get her daughter back. People die, twisty alliances emerge. It’s all part of the suspense boiler plate, and it sizzles just enough to keep your interest. What makes the show, airing May 8, different from every other show is the early response.
Sight almost entirely unseen, the internet was in an uproar. The show is Israeli, and the announcement trailer showed the character Gali (Ronn Talia Lynne) in her IDF uniform. Pro-Palestine accounts were quick to shout “hasbara” or “overt ziopropaganda” for a show whose premise is ostensibly a sympathetic story of an Israeli taken prisoner by the evil, Putin-era Russian state. (The trailer makes no mention of Palestinians or a war in Gaza. The show doesn’t either.)
The online response alone proves the challenging optics for anything Israeli, but the show actually has quite a bit to say about the Jewish state’s propaganda apparatus — within the country and without.
On a layover in the Moscow Airport, Gali and her mother, Orna (Liraz Chamami), are taken in for questioning. Security claims to have found drugs in Gali’s backpack — an echo of the Naama Issacher affair from 2019 — and she’s summarily sentenced to seven years in a Russian jail.
Orna returns to Israel and hires a PR handler to plead Gali’s case. Together they curate a specific image to sell to the state media.
Gali is a “happy, good-hearted girl. She served in the army, like everyone” and even extended her service, Orna says in radio and television interviews. The file photo for news segments is exactly what so many outside of Israel would object to: Gali in uniform. In Israel it tugs heart strings. Abroad, it makes the abductee a war criminal who had it coming.
It’s probably not giving much away, given that the hands behind this show are the creators of Hatufim, which became a hit in the U.S. as the antihero-forward War on Terror commentary Homeland, that Gali is not a perfect victim. This is a strange sort of hasbara, if one Israel often produces, the kind that’s peopled by problematic characters operating in the society’s gray zones. (See streaming hit Fauda, following a morally-dubious undercover unit made up of trigger-happy adulterers exploiting their Palestinian contacts.)
What’s surprising, given the premise, is how much time the show spends not in Russia or Israel, but in India, where Gali and Orna were touring before their fateful missed connection in Moscow. It’s here we’re given entree into the Ugly Israeli abroad, a stereotype that is growing increasingly common thanks to reports of poor behavior — stealing money from temples, creating chaos in hospitals and restaurants — in the global East. (On the flip side, many Israelis, like a couple at a noodle shop in Vietnam, are being harassed by other tourists for no reason other than their country of origin and some feel the need to hide their identity while traveling.)
Gali sings the praises of an Indian gastropub that will give you dysentery. “We are so lucky because for the last three months the kitchen has been condemned by the health department,” she smirks. “But yesterday some truck driver hit a wild boar, so they gave them an exemption. So it won’t be a waste.”
In a later episode, one of Gali’s companions wisecrack about the pestilential heat and jibe that prisons in India are particularly atrocious. (This must ring alarm bells for those aware of Israel’s carceral system for Palestinians.)
Russia is equally backward. Unlike in Israel, “not everyone here is happy to work with a woman,” a Russian arms dealer weighs in. If you didn’t get it, these countries are backward. Israel has its problems, but at least it has women in power!
Watching, I was reminded of social media posts by Indians complaining about racism and drug use from IDF veterans on the so-called “Hummus trail.” One post by AJ+ said the soldiers come there to “detox” from “carrying out a genocide in Gaza.”
Unconditional is under no illusions that Israelis can be a disruptive presence. If anything, it pushes the concept to new places. These Sabras ruin mindfulness workshops and start shoot-outs in hotel lobbies. It’s not great for the brand.
But then again, we live in a climate where simply acknowledging the existence of Israelis — as seen in a recent ballyhoo surrounding author R.F. Kuang — can prove controversial or politically-loaded, no matter how neutral the depiction.
Why Apple would give their imprimatur to an Israeli project today, when public opinion of the Jewish state has fallen off a demographic cliff, is a valid question likely explained by the positive reception of another Israeli import on the streamer, the show Tehran, about an IDF hacker stuck in Iran. From within the silos it’s hard to tell if audiences will cancel their subscriptions, as some have threatened.
Maybe, like Gali’s uniform, the show is a Rorschach. BDS types may boycott, yet the show seems to echo many of their talking points about Israel’s overzealous campaign in Gaza after Oct. 7 — at least by way of metaphor.
In a late episode, Orna tells her government companion Rita (Evgenia Dodina) about a time a classmate broke Gali’s arm, and the teacher excused his actions because his mother was in the hospital.
“You’re exactly like the teacher,” Rita tells Orna. “You give me a thousand excuses for Gali. ‘It’s because of me. It’s not her fault. Poor thing.’ It doesn’t matter she didn’t understand what she was getting into, and it doesn’t matter she didn’t mean to.”
Orna says it’s different with Gali — because it’s her daughter. One can overlook a lot when it’s your family, or, for that matter, your country.
The post Is this Apple TV thriller hasbara — or societal critique? appeared first on The Forward.
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Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City
(JTA) — An Israeli man was indicted on Thursday in connection to the violent assault of a Catholic nun in Jerusalem last month, after prosecutors said he targeted her over her Christian identity.
Yona Schreiber, 36, from the West Bank settlement of Peduel, was arrested last week and has since been indicted on charges of “assault causing actual injury motivated by hostility toward the public on the grounds of religion, as well as simple assault,” the state attorney’s office said in a statement.
According to the indictment, Schreiber, who is Jewish, attacked the nun just outside of the Old City in Jerusalem because he identified her as a Catholic nun. Schreiber allegedly pushed and then kicked the nun as she was lying on the ground and also attacked a passerby who attempted to intervene.
תקיפת הנזירה אתמול באזור קבר דוד בירושלים – שוטרי מרחב דוד איתרו את החשוד (36) ועצרו אותו בחשד לתקיפה ממניע גזעני >>> pic.twitter.com/agRpznR84X
— משטרת ישראל (@IL_police) April 30, 2026
The nun, a researcher at the French School of Biblical and Archeological Research, suffered bruises on her face and leg due to the attack, the state attorney’s office said.
The attack, which drew condemnation from Catholic leaders as well as faculty at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, comes amid mounting concern over hostility toward Christian clergy and holy sites in Israel.
Cases of Jews harassing Christians have risen sharply in recent years. Last month, the IDF punished a soldier who was filmed bludgeoning a statue of Jesus in southern Lebanon. This week, the IDF also announced that it would discipline a different soldier who was seen placing a cigarette into the mouth of a statue of the Virgin Mary in a photo posted on social media.
Israel’s attorney general asked the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, where the indictment was filed, to hold Schreiber in detention for the duration of the legal proceeding.
The assault carries a maximum prison sentence of three years, which could increase to six years if prosecutors prove the attack was motivated by religious bias.
The post Israeli man indicted in attack on Catholic nun in Jerusalem’s Old City appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish real estate magnate Steven Roth likens Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ rhetoric to ‘from the river to the sea’
(New York Jewish Week) — Jewish real estate mogul Steven Roth compared New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s “tax the rich” rhetoric this week to racial slurs and pro-Palestinian rhetoric on an earnings call for his company, Vornado Realty Trust.
“I consider the phrase ‘tax the rich’ when spit out with anger and contempt by politicians both here and across the country, to be just as hateful as some disgusting racial slurs and even the phrase, ‘from the river to the sea,’” Roth said, referring to the phrase commonly used at pro-Palestinian protests that many Jewish groups consider antisemitic.
The remark by Roth, who has long been a notable philanthropist to Jewish causes, adds to mounting tensions between New York business leaders and Mamdani over his recently announced “pied-à-terre” tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million.
During the call Tuesday, Roth also expressed support for Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel, whose $238 million dollar penthouse was featured in a video by Mamdani announcing plans for the tax last month.
“We are all shocked that our young mayor would pull this stunt in front of Ken’s home and single him out for ridicule,” Roth said. “The ugly, unnecessary video stunt is personal for Ken and sort of personal for me.”
Roth’s comments touched on a longstanding source of friction between Mamdani and some New York Jewish leaders, who have criticized the mayor over his views on Israel and his previous defense of the phrase “globalize the intifada,” another common pro-Palestinian slogan viewed by some as a call to violence against Jews.
In the wake of Mamdani’s election, some Jewish business leaders, including Dave Portnoy, the Jewish founder of Barstool Sports, said that they planned to leave the city altogether, citing the mayor’s fiscal policies and concerns about antisemitism under his leadership.
In a statement responding to Roth’s comments, Mamdani’s office said that he wanted all New Yorkers to succeed, including “business owners and entrepreneurs who create good-paying jobs and make this city the economic engine of America.”
“That does not negate the fact, however, that our tax system is fundamentally broken. It rewards extreme wealth while working people are pushed to the brink,” the statement continued. “The status quo is unsustainable and unjust. If we want this city to become a place that working people can afford, we need meaningful tax reform that includes the wealthiest New Yorkers contributing their fair share.”
The post Jewish real estate magnate Steven Roth likens Mamdani’s ‘tax the rich’ rhetoric to ‘from the river to the sea’ appeared first on The Forward.