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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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Grok said Hebrew translation was disabled on X — but it’s not
Despite what you may have heard, Hebrew translation still works on X. But allegations that the platform had disabled translation for Hebrew went viral after Grok, the AI chatbot built into the platform, said Hebrew was disabled because posts in the language were likely to encourage violence. As it turns out, the AI was hallucinating — the real question is why.
The rumor seems to have started because a Hebrew post advertising a pop group’s new single, “I, Butterfly,” was not working with the translation tools on the site. An account with the name “Red Pill Media” — though the bio for the account only says “America First,” and does not link to any media site — took a screenshot of an error message pop-up saying that Hebrew was not supported “for this translation.” They then shared the photo with a caption alleging that Hebrew translation was gone because “Jews were calling for genocide on this app without getting suspended.”
In the comments of this post, someone tagged Grok to ask why Hebrew wasn’t available. “Translation from Hebrew was disabled because it often amplified inflammatory or policy-violating content, like calls for violence, to a global audience via inaccurate or literal renditions,” the bot replied. “It’s about platform integrity amid documented spikes in Hebrew hate speech.”
Many people took this as an official confirmation from X that Hebrew translation had been turned off.
But while engineers, and the platform’s owner, Elon Musk, often tinker with the AI’s responses — for example, Musk made Grok more right-wing, and programmed it to flatter him — it largely consumes responses on X itself as its training material, which means that it is easy to mislead it. This is particularly the case on new, viral topics that its programmers have not had time to put up safeguards around.
In the comments on the original post, users speculated as to why the translation wasn’t working, quickly coming up with nefarious explanations. One user posited, or joked, that there was a Mein Kampf excerpt in the caption. Others guessed that it was an effort to “protect hate speech” in Hebrew so that English speakers can’t condemn it or use it to criticize Israel.
The original post that Grok could not translate contained no hate speech at all. It simply lists the song’s composers and the members of the band. (The translation issue may have stemmed from the fact that the song’s title was in English, and mixing characters from different alphabets confused the translation software.) But that didn’t stop false ideas about what it said from circulating. This is likely how Grok came to its conclusion — by consuming and regurgitating the conspiracy theories that users had themselves generated.
Chatbots and AIs are prone to hallucinations like this because of the way that they are trained; they tend to use human-generated input as their main source of information, which means that they are easily influenced by people’s own thoughts, incorrect beliefs and conspiracy theories. (This is also why they are prone to spouting neo-Nazi talking points without safeguards; there’s a lot of those floating around on the internet that the programs learned from.)
In fact, the error message in the screenshot saying that Hebrew was not available for that translation was not actually part of X; it was a pop-up from Apple Translation, the iPhone’s built-in translation tool, which was probably also confused by the mixed alphabets. And Grok has elsewhere confirmed that Hebrew can be translated on X, and that mixed alphabets cause a glitch. Still, theories continue to swirl that Grok may be refusing to translate Hebrew posts that include hate speech as part of an effort to reduce outcry against Israel.
But whether or not it’s good for the Jews, it’s still perfectly possible to translate plenty of racist statements in Hebrew, and any other language.
The post Grok said Hebrew translation was disabled on X — but it’s not appeared first on The Forward.
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French Court Cuts Sentence for Teen in Antisemitic Gang Rape of 12-Year-Old Jewish Girl
France, Paris, 20/06/2024. Gathering at place de la Bastille after the anti Semitic rape of a 12 year old girl in Courbevoie. Photography by Myriam Tirler / Hans Lucas.
More than a year after the brutal gang rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl, a French court has dramatically reduced the sentence of one of the two teenagers convicted in the attack, citing his “need to prepare for future reintegration.”
On Tuesday, the Versailles Court of Appeal retried one of the convicted boys — the only one to challenge his sentence — behind closed doors, ultimately reducing his term from nine to seven years and imposing an educational measure, the French news outlet Le Parisien reported.
“The court took into account the entire case as provided for by law: the facts, their seriousness, but also the personality of the minor and the need to prepare for future reintegration,” the boy’s lawyer Melody Blanc said in a statement.
The original sentences, handed down in June, gave the two boys — who were 13 years old at the time of the incident — seven and nine years in prison, respectively, after they were convicted on charges of group rape, physical violence, and death threats aggravated by antisemitic hatred.
The third boy involved in the attack, the girl’s ex-boyfriend, was accused of threatening her and orchestrating the attack, also motivated by racist prejudice.
Because the girl’s ex-boyfriend was under 13 at the time of the attack, he did not face prison and was instead sentenced to five years in an educational facility.
The lawyers of the victim, Muriel Ouaknine-Melki and Oudy Bloch, praised “the courage of [their] client” for confronting her attackers and ensuring that two of them were imprisoned.
According to police reports from the time, the two French boys cornered the girl on June 15, 2024, inside an empty building in Courbevoie, a northwestern suburb of Paris, questioned her about her Jewish identity, and then physically assaulted and raped her.
The assailants who were Muslim also allegedly called the victim a “dirty Jew” and uttered other antisemitic remarks during the brutal gang-rape.
Under threat of death, she was forced to perform penetrative and oral sex on two of the boys, while her ex-boyfriend threatened to burn her cheek with a lighter and attempted to make her sit on her handbag, which he had set ablaze.
Local reports indicate that part of the assault was recorded, and at least one assailant allegedly demanded 200 euros from the girl to withhold the footage, which was eventually circulated.
The ex-boyfriend sent footage of the assault to a boy the girl had gone out with that afternoon, with the message “Look at your chick,” according to law enforcement. After receiving such a message, the boy informed the girl’s family, who found her an hour after the attack.
“Before letting her leave, they made her swear on Allah not to say anything and that she should not tell anyone, neither her parents nor the police,” the girl’s mother told Le Parisien at the time.
The three-day trial, held behind closed doors, took place in a regional juvenile court in Nanterre, a suburb west of Paris.
During the proceedings, the judge explained that the severity of the sentence came “in view of their concerning personality traits and the immense social disturbance.”
“There is no doubt that [the victim] would not have been assaulted or raped if she had not been Jewish,” the judge said at the time.
The brutal crime sparked outrage throughout France and among the Jewish community, unfolding against the backdrop of a disturbing surge in antisemitism that has gripped the country since the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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Miami Dolphins QB Tua Tagovailoa says he wants to play an NFL game in Jerusalem
(JTA) — The phrase “Next year in Jerusalem” is customarily spoken at the end of the Passover seder. But this past weekend its sentiment was conveyed at the end of a different kind of gathering: a low-scoring NFL game between the Miami Dolphins and Washington Commanders.
“Shoot, it’d be pretty cool to go play in Jerusalem,” Dolphins quarterback Tua Tagovailoa said postgame.
The game — which the Dolphins won 16-13 in overtime — was the NFL’s first in Spain, as part of a growing international series that’s seen contests played in England, Germany, Brazil, Ireland and Mexico.
Tagovailoa, a Christian, was asked where else he’d like to play after experiencing Madrid and previously Frankfurt, Germany. And his answer caught the eye of a high-ranking diplomat: Mike Huckabee, the United States Ambassador to Israel.
“Tua is right,” Huckabee wrote on X. “Bringing an NFL game to Israel is a great idea. Next year in Jerusalem…I like the sound of that.”
The suggestion comes amid an increasingly contested role for Israel as a host in global sporting events. EuroLeague basketball is supposed to return next month, and officials from the league are in Israel now to assess conditions before finalizing the plan.
Soccer, too, has been a fraught space for Israeli participation. The Union of European Football Associations had been set to vote on suspending Israel but paused the process after the ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza that began last month. Some want the organization to return to the deliberations, with Ireland’s soccer federation submitting a motion earlier this month to ban Israel from all UEFA competition for “organising clubs in occupied Palestinian territories without the consent of the Palestinian FA” and “the alleged failure of the IFA [Israel Football Association] to enforce an effective anti-racism policy.”
Tagovailoa’s comments on playing in Israel did not mark the first time speaking about the country during a postgame media availability. Following a home game on Oct. 15, 2023, Tagovailoa paused the press conference to talk about Hamas’ attack on Israel, which had taken place just over a week earlier.
“I didn’t really realize how bad things were in Israel,” Tagovailoa said. “And just wanted to bring to the attention for those who don’t necessarily understand things that are going on, that it really is bad.”
He added, “I don’t know what we’ve come to, but just my thoughts, my prayers are out with those people in Israel,” continuing on to note that there is “also the Ukraine and Russia war still going on as well.”
There has been no indication from the NFL about a potential game in Israel, though Robert Kraft — the American billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, who is Jewish and founded the Blue Square Alliance against Hate, formerly called the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism — sponsored the construction of the Kraft Family Sports Campus in Jerusalem, which includes an American football field. The adjacent park, Gan Sacher, is routinely home to informal football and flag football games.
Meanwhile, the capacity of Jerusalem’s largest stadium, Teddy Stadium, is just 31,000. Attendance at the NFL’s international games have ranged from upwards of 86,000 to, at their lowest, 47,000.
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