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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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Drive-by shooting targets Jewish family’s Hanukkah display, police in California town say
(JTA) — A California home decorated for Hanukkah was targeted Friday night in a drive-by shooting, with police saying the assailants fired what appeared to be an airsoft gun from a car.
During the attack on the home, which had several inflatable Hanukkah decorations in its yard, the assailants drove by in a vehicle and allegedly unloaded 20 shots.
Later, the occupants of the vehicle allegedly shouted “F–ck the Jews” and “Free Palestine, N–ger,” according to an account of the incident posted to X by a resident of the home, Rodgir Cohen.
“Just as a reaction, people just, through ignorance and hate, respond with negativity and violence,” Cohen told CBS News. “For random acts of hate crimes, it’s scary to be in the midst of a victim and it’s scary.”
Cohen told a different local news outlet that he and his son had encountered the alleged assailants in person shortly before the shooting.
The City of Redlands said no injuries or damage was reported, and the weapon used was believed to be an airsoft gun after an investigation found no shell casings and the surveillance video of the incident showed no muzzle flash.
Local officials condemned the incident, which came during the same weekend as a major antisemitic attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, Australia.
“As our friends in the Jewish community begin their celebration of Hanukkah, several tragic incidents have occurred across the globe, targeting people simply because of their faith,” the City of Redlands wrote in a statement. “Unfortunately, Redlands is not immune to these hateful acts, as a local family was targeted because of their festive home decorations celebrating Hanukkah. ”
The incident is currently being investigated as a hate crime, and Redlands Police said they believed the family was targeted because of the Hanukkah decorations. They also said they would provide additional patrols in the area and around local places of worship.
The Los Angeles chapter of the Anti-Defamation League decried the incident. “Last night’s shooting into the home of a Jewish family on Shabbat in Redlands, CA is another dangerous and despicable act of violence impacting the Jewish community in Southern California,” David Englin, the group’s senior regional director, said in a statement. “This cannot be tolerated or accepted as normal.”
Last year, the ADL reported that California had 1,344 antisemitic incidents, the second-highest number of any state besides New York. Of those incidents, 1,000 were antisemitic harassment, while 311 were vandalism and 33 were assault.
Congregation Emanu El, a Reform synagogue in Redlands, wrote on Facebook Sunday that it was in communication with the family, who were past members, as well as with Redlands Police.
“Please know that the safety and well-being of our community remains our highest priority,” wrote Congregation Emanu El President Greg Weissman. “We will continue to stay in close contact with local authorities and share updates as appropriate. Thank you for your care for one another and for our community.”
Cohen is a lecturer in religion at Cal State Fullerton and a former political candidate in Redlands who ran on a tough-on-crime platform. His wife Heftsibah Cohen told a local news outside that she initially thought fireworks were going off before checking a surveillance tape.
“We always know there’s antisemitism and hate and racism out there. It’s always out there,” she said. “But when it comes by your house, it’s that reminder of how real it is.”
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Alyssa Katz Named Next Editor-in-Chief of the Forward
Alyssa Katz has been named Editor-in-Chief of the Forward, the nation’s most influential and widely-read Jewish publication. The appointment was announced today by Forward Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen. Katz will join the Forward in January 2026.
Katz is an award-winning journalist who has worked at THE CITY since 2019, first as Deputy Editor and currently as Executive Editor. In these roles, she has managed the investigative reporting team while guiding coverage of labor, housing, politics, government and social services. She has led interactive projects and data investigations, including collaborations with ProPublica and the Guardian. Prior to joining THE CITY, she served in editorial roles at the New York Daily News, The Village Voice and other publications.
Katz said, “I am thrilled and inspired to be joining the Forward to provide editorial leadership at this critical moment. In a world that continues to test Jewish safety, identity and values, the Forward celebrates what makes us who we are while taking a critical journalistic eye to our challenges.”
“We’re so proud to welcome Alyssa to the Forward as our next Editor-in-Chief,” said Fishman Feddersen. “She brings formidable journalistic expertise as an editor and reporter, as well as deep experience managing an ambitious nonprofit newsroom. She has produced groundbreaking work that demonstrates courage, accountability and integrity — the same values on which the Forward was founded 128 years ago and upholds today.”
Katz is the author of the 2015 book, The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate Capture of American Life (Spiegel & Grau) and 2009’s Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us (Bloomsbury). She has taught journalism at New York University, Hunter College and Brooklyn College, is a graduate of the University of Michigan and was selected for Columbia University’s Charles H. Revson Fellowship for New York City leaders.
Katz has spent many years as an active lay leader at the East Midwood Jewish Center, a historic synagogue and community center in Brooklyn, NY. She is also involved in research and advocacy for preservation of Jewish historic memory in Warsaw, Poland.
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Brown University students light first Hanukkah candle in the shadow of mass shooting
(JTA) — PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island — Dozens of Brown University students shielded their candles at a menorah lighting that doubled as a vigil on Sunday night as the Hanukkah arrived under a sheet of snow and a thick blanket of trauma, following a mass shooting in an economics class.
On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on a room where students had gathered to review for their final exam in Principles of Economics, Brown’s most popular class that is dominated by freshmen. He killed two students and injured nine others at the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building in Providence, Rhode Island.
The school went into lockdown for 12 hours and subsequently canceled all academic exercises for the rest of the semester. On Sunday night, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said a police investigation was ongoing and a person of interest detained earlier in the day was being released.
Yael Ranel Filus, a sophomore engineering student from Israel, goes daily to Barus and Holley and was at a nearby building when shots rang out. She said she had been in touch with fellow Israeli students, who like her were in disbelief.
“We were talking in the group channel, like, ‘Oh, we thought we left that at home. We thought we left those tragedies at home,’” Filus said. “I don’t think any of us thought we would encounter something like this here.”
Another tragedy loomed over the menorah lighting led by two rabbis, Josh Bolton and Mendel Laufer, the respective heads of Brown’s Hillel and Chabad, located on adjacent blocks at the heart of the school’s urban campus. Across the world on Sunday, at least 15 people were killed and dozens injured in a shooting attack on Jews who gathered to celebrate Hanukkah in Sydney.
Bolton said both shootings were on his mind during a speech to the crowd of students, professors and Hillel staff.
“The message of Hanukkah here is that we should increase the light,” he said. “Even in the midst of this very dark and difficult moment, together as a community, we come together and we give each other a little bit of light.”
Brown recently struck a $50 million settlement with the Trump administration over allegations of antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian protests during the war in Gaza. It drew particular criticism for allowing students to present a proposal to divest from Israel to the school’s board of overseers, who rejected it.
The school has a Jewish president, Christina Paxson, and the highest proportion of Jewish students in the Ivy League, with particular growth in recent years among its Orthodox student population. It recently hosted a major gathering to celebrate 130 years of Jewish life that attracted alumni from around the world as well as prominent figures including Robert Kraft, founder of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
The economics class that was attacked is taught by Rachel Friedberg, a Jewish faculty member who researches the intersection of economics and Jewish studies and who has worked extensively in Israel, though she was not in the classroom at the time. Police have not indicated any antisemitic motive behind the shooting. But they also have not identified the shooter, igniting unease on campus and speculation online, particularly in the wake of the Sydney attack.
Bolton said regardless of the motive, Brown was being forced to contend with a nationwide plague.
“Whether or not the shooter was antisemitic or anti-Muslim or anti-LGBTQ or whatever, the burden of our culture is lonely, disturbed, usually young men with guns, and you can add whatever other layers of ideological hatred to it,” he said.
The Brown community was ravaged by gun violence only two years ago, when a Brown student, Hisham Awartani, was among three Palestinian students were shot over Thanksgiving break in Burlington, Vermont. Awartani was hit in the spine and paralyzed from the waist down.
The shock that ripped through Brown this weekend was familiar to Zoe Weissman, a sophomore who has lived through two school shootings in her 20 years. As a 12 year-old in Parkland, Florida, she was outside her middle school when she heard gunshots and screams from the adjacent Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed in 2018. She said the shooting left her with post-traumatic stress disorder.
“I’m an example of how prevalent gun violence is becoming,” said Weissman. “If you look at the statistics of mass shootings, it should be physically impossible for this to have happened to me twice. And that’s a fact I used to use to comfort myself.”
Another Brown student, junior Mia Tretta, was shot in the abdomen during a 2019 attack on Saugus High School in California.
Weissman left Brown before the communal Hanukkah lighting, but she lit the first candle with a few friends at a house off-campus.
“It’s a tradition I’ve grown up with, so it’s something that makes me feel really comfortable,” she said. “It wasn’t something that I wanted to skip for the first time ever because of this.”
The shooting began in the last hour of Shabbat, when over 30 students were gathered at Hillel, many without their phones. They were ordered to shelter on the third floor with the lights off.
Bolton arrived about an hour later with water and food for the night. He wanted the group to mark havdalah, the ritual to note the end of Shabbat traditionally performed once three stars can be spotted in the sky. Bolton and the students did havdalah in a windowless room, whispering over candles in the dark.
Aaron Perrotta, a junior who was there, said that some jokes mixed in with the panic. “It was nice to have a little sense of normalcy and be able to close out Shabbat like that,” he said.
“I think a lot of us bonded and got closer together, just being in such a tight space upstairs,” said Max Zimmer, a sophomore.
Filus was blocks away from Barus and Holley at the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship on Saturday night. She and nine other students rotated sleeping shifts, as Brown’s Department of Public Safety advised having one person alert until the lockdown ended.
Filus went to the candle lighting on Olive Street after sitting with friends at the neighboring Hillel building.
“It’s a safe space,” she said. “I don’t really want to be alone right now. I don’t want to be in my room.”
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