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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 Jewish couple fell in love with rural Oklahoma. Then they built a cemetery there.
Linda Fitzerman did not want her children making burial decisions through tears.
For years, she and her husband, Todd Boone Fitzerman, told each other they needed to settle the question. They were not interested in cremation. They wanted a traditional Jewish burial. And they did not want their children, someday, to face the cost and pressure of deciding where that burial should take place.
“They just need to show up and cry,” Linda said. “They don’t need the additional pain of having to make financial decisions.”
The answer, when it came, was not one they had expected. They created a small Jewish burial ground in Sulphur, Oklahoma, a city of about 5,000 people in the Bible Belt, near the ranch the Fitzermans bought during the pandemic and had come to love.
At Oak Lawn Cemetery, a city-owned burial ground with green grass, rolling terrain and ponds, the Fitzermans purchased a group of plots to create a circular family burial section. Four corner pillars crowned with Stars of David mark the site. Beneath the grass, the pillars are connected by buried rebar, creating a distinct boundary around the section. Linda designed the stainless steel Stars of David, which a friend welded into place.
Nearby, five young trees are taking root: two Chinese pistache trees and three Autumn Blaze maples. The Fitzermans planted them with the city’s permission and have been carefully tending them for the past year, using large water barrels to help them through the early seasons.
“We are babysitting them for at least two years,” Linda said.
The burial section was dedicated in 2025. Todd’s brother, Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman of Tulsa, advised them on how to create a designated Jewish space within a public cemetery. Psalms and other prayers were recited at the site. There was no minyan, Todd said, but “spiritually we are there.”
To the Fitzermans’ knowledge, no other Jew is buried in Oak Lawn Cemetery.
A pandemic, and a plan
The cemetery project grew out of a life they did not plan to build in Oklahoma. Todd, 67, and Linda, 65, are both from the Detroit area and were raised in Conservative families. They met in Dallas when their children were young and have been married for 24 years. Dallas remains home. The couple still runs a business there, Local Oven, a gluten-free baking company.
But during the long uncertainty of the COVID pandemic, they began thinking about land.
“We felt so bottled up, and we wanted to get out,” Linda said.
They first responded to an advertisement for 10 acres near water in Texas. The search widened. Todd’s son suggested that 50 acres would be enough room to shoot on the property. Eventually, Todd found 158 acres outside Davis, Oklahoma, about two hours north of Dallas. They began building a working ranch. Todd’s son keeps cattle there. The Fitzermans now divide their time between Dallas and Oklahoma, spending roughly half the week in each place.
“It is a beautiful ranch,” Linda said. “It’s very calming to be out here, really beautiful, nothing like the city.”
Todd described hearing coyotes at night, watching the cattle roam, and the pleasure of “playing cowboy” for part of the week. Linda said she had not known, when they bought the land in 2021, “how important Oklahoma was going to be.”
“It was never a plan,” she said. “It just sort of evolved.”
Their relationship with the area deepened through the people they met there. Todd and Linda said one local friend, who lives across from Oak Lawn Cemetery and owns a large construction company, helped introduce them around Sulphur when they were new. He had also acquired plots in the cemetery through a trade arrangement for excavation work. Seeing what he had done opened a possibility they had not considered.
For years, Linda said, they had found “nothing intriguing” in Dallas cemeteries. Many Jewish plots cost $7,000 or $8,000. One cemetery with a Jewish section had plots priced around $36,000.
“Why would I spend money like that?” Linda said.
In Sulphur, plots were $300 each. For $4,500 total, they could create a family burial place tailored to them.
“We finally had an opportunity that just presented itself,” Linda said.
The circle layout itself came from her memory. In Michigan, she said, part of her family is buried in an older Jewish cemetery arranged not in straight rows, but in a circular shape.
“I thought that was really nice,” she said. “I liked it.”
So Linda and Todd approached the city and asked whether they could create a Jewish cemetery section in Oak Lawn. The response, they said, was strikingly easy.
“We shared that with the city and they said, ‘Yeah, sure,’” Linda said. “I’ve never seen any place give me the green light on every question.”
The city’s one practical concern was that everything remain level enough for its crews to mow. It allowed the Fitzermans to select the location, a corner where two cemetery roads meet. It also permitted them to plant the trees on easement land beside the plots.
“The city is 100% accepting,” Linda said.
Todd put it similarly. “The city could not have been more accommodating,” he said.
The Fitzermans say their religion has never been a problem. “It is the Baptist Bible Belt,” Linda said. “Everyone here has been so willing to accept us. They are inquisitive and curious. Our religion has not been an issue for anyone.”
Todd said that not everyone in Sulphur knows they are Jewish, “but lots of people know we are Jews.” When Todd’s son held his Jewish wedding on the ranch, he said, many non-Jewish guests had never attended one before. Friends asked questions. Guests wore kippot or cowboy hats. Tallitot belonging to Todd, his father and his son’s other grandfather formed the wedding canopy.
“There were more Jews in Sulphur for my son’s wedding than ever before,” Todd said.
Peace of mind
For Linda, the cemetery’s Jewish symbols were important. She wanted the pillars to be easy to find. More than that, she wanted them to say plainly what the site was.
“When we see the pillars, they reflect what we are doing, which is our religion,” she said. “Nothing is more stately than the Jewish star.”
“Our little decor, to me, sends a really beautiful statement,” she added. “I’ve always been proud to be Jewish. I wouldn’t want to be buried any other way.”
The Fitzermans have tried to spare their children as much uncertainty as possible. They have assigned the burial titles to their children and their children’s partners, while making clear that use of the plots will remain their choice. They have also documented the practical steps to follow when the time comes, including where a body could be prepared for Jewish burial in Dallas or Oklahoma City.
“You don’t think about it until a family member is going through it,” Linda said.
She views the cemetery as a natural extension of family care. “You are always, always part of your family,” she said. “If you want these, they are there for you.”
Todd described the burial ground in similar terms. It offers “peace of mind,” he said: a final resting place in a community they love and want to be part of.
The trees, Linda noted, will eventually grow large. The Chinese pistache trees can grow to over 25 feet with age. The maples, she said, will be especially beautiful in the fall.
They hope it will be many years before the cemetery is needed.
But the question that had lingered for so long has now been answered. Their children will not have to find a plot, compare prices, choose a cemetery, or wonder whether their parents’ burial wishes were honored.
They will only have to come.
And cry.
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Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time
(JTA) — For many Orthodox Jews, a typical winter weekday begins early: head to synagogue, gather in a minyan for morning prayers, then rush off to work.
Orthodox Jewish groups say a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent could upend that routine by pushing winter sunrises — and the earliest permissible time for some prayers — an hour later.
Agudath Israel of America is among the groups urging the Senate to reject legislation that would make daylight saving time permanent nationwide, arguing that the change would create both public safety risks and significant challenges for Orthodox Jewish religious life.
The House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday by a wide bipartisan margin. In a statement issued after the vote, Agudath Israel said it understood the appeal of ending the twice-yearly clock changes but opposed making daylight saving time permanent.
The Orthodox advocacy organization warned that permanent daylight saving time would push winter sunrises past 9 a.m. in some parts of the country, forcing many children to travel to school before dawn. It also said the later sunrise would make it difficult for observant Jews to attend morning synagogue services and still arrive at work or school on time, because Jewish law prohibits reciting key morning prayers before prescribed times tied to sunrise.
“The extension of DST will create an extreme hardship on observant Jews,” the organization said. “It would be extraordinarily difficult — if not impossible — to arrive on time for a job and will affect the start time of our schools.”
The Orthodox Union and the Coalition for Jewish Values have also come out against the measure.
In a column for Chabad.org that didn’t take a position on the bill, Menachem Posner also wrote that the change would present a challenge in parts of the country for morning minyan, the 10-person prayer quorum. But he also noted an upside to the extension of daylight saving: a later start time for Shabbat on short winter Fridays.
Shabbat begins at sundown, which during the winter can fall before 4:00 p.m. in parts of the country. “With DST, however, this will be shifted one hour later, so that even on the darkest day of winter, Jews will have one more hour to prepare for Shabbat,” Posner wrote.
Orthodox parties in Israel have also made an issue of changes to the daylight saving calendar. In 2011, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously approved extending daylight saving time until the first Sunday after Oct. 1, despite objections from haredi parties. The change brought Israel’s clock closer to European practice while still acknowledging Orthodox concerns about morning prayer and a later start time to Yom Kippur that they argued would make the fast more difficult.
This week Agudath Israel also pointed to the brief U.S. experiment with year-round daylight saving time during the 1970s energy crisis, when Congress repealed the policy after widespread public dissatisfaction over dark winter mornings.
The organization said it hoped the Senate would weigh the broader consequences of permanent daylight saving time, including alternatives such as permanent standard time or retaining the current system of seasonal clock changes.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Why Orthodox Jews are pushing back against permanent daylight saving time appeared first on The Forward.
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Colombia and Slovenia recently recognized a Palestinian state. Now they’re moving their embassies to Jerusalem.
(JTA) — JERUSALEM — Colombia, the world’s second most populous Spanish-speaking nation after Mexico, has little in common with landlocked Slovenia, the second-smallest of the six republics that once comprised Yugoslavia.
But when it comes to their stance on Israel, the parallels are hard to ignore.
Within one month of each other, leftist, pro-Palestine governments in both countries were voted out of office and replaced by right-wing leaders who vowed not only to restore full diplomatic relations with Israel but also inaugurate embassies in Jerusalem.
In fact, Colombia’s next foreign minister, Omar Bola Escobar, promised exactly that Wednesday during a meeting in Washington, D.C., with his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Saar. That followed a declaration by President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella that Colombia would establish relations “like never before” with Israel once he takes the oath of office on Aug. 7.
In June 2024, the parliament of Slovenia — an Alpine republic of 2.1 million — voted to recognize a Palestinian state only a week after Spain, Ireland and Norway had done the same thing. But half a year later, it went further. Slovenian public broadcaster RTV, citing the ongoing war in Gaza, became the first in Europe to demand Israel’s exclusion from the 2025 Eurovision Song Contest.
Then last year, Slovenia under Prime Minister Robert Golob banned all imports from Jewish settlements in the West Bank as well as all weapons trade with Israel — the first member of the European Union to do so. And this past June, RTV not only boycotted Eurovision altogether but aired films about Palestine instead.
That anti-Israel campaign made life uncomfortable for the country’s 100 or so Jews, said Robert Waltl, president of the Ljubljana-based Liberal Jewish Community of Slovenia.
But on May 22, Janez Jansa — leader of the Slovenian Democratic Party and an admirer of U.S. President Donald Trump — formed a winning coalition with other right-wing parties following the country’s parliamentary elections, clearing the way for Jansa to replace Golob as prime minister.
In a striking about-face, Janza immediately announced that Slovenia would cancel its previous recognition of Palestine and move its embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. That would make it the first country in the 27-member EU to take that step (though not the first country in Europe: Kosovo already has an embassy in Jerusalem).
Likewise, Israel will open an embassy in Ljubljana for the first time.
“That’s an important and welcome milestone — and something many of us have hoped to see for a long time,” Waltl explained in an email. “That said, I still feel it’s too early for me to draw broader conclusions about what this will mean in practice for bilateral relations, or for the Jewish community. I’d rather judge by actions than by first impressions.”
Ernest Herzog, executive director for operations at the World Jewish Congress, said Slovenia’s new direction is a lot more than a foreign policy adjustment; it carries huge historic significance.
“Israel was among the first countries to recognize Slovenia’s independence in 1991” following the breakup of Yugoslavia, he said. Opening an embassy in Jerusalem “would send a clear signal that Slovenia views Israel not only as a key regional partner but also as an important ally in defending the rules-based democratic order at a time of growing geopolitical instability.”
In Colombia, the shift is even more dramatic. Famous for world-class coffee, salsa dancing, beautiful beaches and biodiversity, it’s home to maybe 5,000 Jews out of 54 million inhabitants.
President Gustavo Petro — Colombia’s first left-wing leader in recent memory — is a former M-19 guerrilla leader. He became mayor of Bogotá in 2011 and president in 2022. On May 2, 2024, in the midst of worsening conditions in Gaza, Petro severed diplomatic relations with Israel and stopped lucrative exports of coal to Israel, as well as all weapons deals.
Margarita Manjarrez, Colombia’s first female ambassador to Israel, stayed on until June 30 of that year, at which point she closed the embassy in Tel Aviv (though consular services remain open).
Petro, constitutionally limited to one term, backed Iván Cepeda as his successor. But Cepeda lost to right-wing businessman Abelardo de la Espriella by the narrowest margin in Colombian election history.
Widely supported by Colombia’s small but wealthy Jewish community, the new president will be sworn in Aug. 7. One of his first acts, he said, will be to open an embassy in Jerusalem. That would make it the ninth embassy in Israel’s capital, along with those of the United States, Guatemala, Honduras, Kosovo, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Fiji and Argentina.
Manjarrez, now Bogotá’s ambassador to Singapore, declined to comment. But Harry Toledo, the Israeli-based director of Fuente Latina — an NGO that provides pro-Israel Middle East coverage for Spanish-language media in the United States and Latin America — says he’s not surprised by any of this.
“I don’t think the issue was Israel,” said Toledo, who is originally from Medellín but has spent the last 24 years living in Tel Aviv. “As we’ve seen in recent years, all these governments are taking advantage of the situation here to distract from their problems at home. In Spain, we clearly saw that Sánchez is using the Palestinians to dispel criticism of his own government. Petro in Colombia did the same thing.”
Toledo, one of thousands of Colombians living in Israel, noted that the Trump administration revoked Petro’s U.S. visa last year, and then later added him, his wife, his son and his interior minister to its Specially Designated Nationals list due to their alleged illicit drug trafficking.
“Petro was a criminal and a genocidal guerrilla. He was a real antisemite who even posted ‘Heil Hitler’ online,” said Toledo. “It’s not like he was hiding his position against Jews.”
Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue — a D.C. think tank — noted that 12 of Latin America’s last 15 elections have been won by right-wing candidates. Voters in only Brazil, Mexico and Uruguay elected leftists.
Shifter said it’s not so much an ideological conservative turn that’s fueling this wave — but more a profound desire for change.
“The recent electoral swings are better understood as a reflection of widespread frustration with governments of different political stripes that have failed to address persistent economic, security and governance challenges,” he said.
Shifter is no stranger to the region. In the early 1980s, when the Dialogue was founded, Latin America’s biggest economies — Argentina, Brazil and Mexico — were cash-strapped, debt-ridden and beholden to the IMF. And the United States under President Ronald Reagan was actively supporting the government of El Salvador in its bloody war against leftist insurgents, while at the same time secretly funding contras hoping to overthrow Marxist Sandinistas in neighboring Nicaragua.
The only country doing well at the time was energy-rich Venezuela — which today is considered a failed state.
Mike Skol, a former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela who has extensive business ties in Colombia, said de la Espriella’s election is certainly part of that Latin rightward shift against socialism.
The question, he poses, is whether he’ll behave more like Argentina’s Javier Milei, a libertarian who is an outspoken supporter of Israel, or El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele — a hugely popular president of Palestinian origin who has on more than one occasion called himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”
“The White House is looking for outspoken allies — on Venezuela, on Cuba, on Israel, and on oil,” Skol said in an email. “Expect Colombia to be unequivocal in all. The payoff will be an important pillar of regime success.”
Ultimately, the real prize for Israel would be a full restoration of ties with oil-rich Venezuela, which were broken by Hugo Chávez in 2009 following an Israel incursion into Gaza that year. After Trump’s ousting of former president Nicolás Maduro last year and his tacit support for Maduro’s successor, Delcy Rodríguez, anything appears possible.
Just last week, Rodríguez was photographed in a once-unthinkable meeting with uniformed IDF brass overseeing Israeli rescue efforts in the wake of two powerful earthquakes that have devastated Venezuela’s coastal region. The 30-member team’s efforts mark a rare diplomatic thaw following years of official Venezuelan hostility toward Israel.
This raises the inevitable question: Could the Israeli flag one day flutter from an embassy in Caracas?
“Yes, I think it is very possible that Venezuela under Delcy will restore relations with Israel,” Skol said, noting that the U.S. secretary of state is seen as running the show in Venezuela since Maduro’s ouster. “All Marco Rubio has to do is ask.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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