Printer Friendly

Email to A Friend

Friday April 27, 2007

Shorts: Camps & kids

JCHS freshman enrollment doubles for fall

San Francisco’s Jewish Community High School of the Bay has more than doubled its freshmen class size with the incoming class of 2007-08.

Students are coming from 20 different schools around the Bay Area, including five different Jewish day schools and seven schools that are sending students to JCHS for the first time. Forty-nine students have enrolled, and more could be coming.

JCHS is a coeducational day school providing a college preparatory curriculum in general and Judaic studies. Its graduates have gone on to Vassar, Brandeis, the University of Chicago, U.C. Davis and other top schools.

Studies of Israeli women lagging

While an overwhelming majority (94 percent) of the respondents to a survey of educators at U.S. Hebrew schools and Jewish day schools said that children should learn about the role of women in modern Israeli history, few spend class time on women’s contributions to Israel. The third annual survey conducted by Na’amat USA went out to educators in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, Cleveland and Akron, Ohio.

The survey asked specifically about whether the school’s middle school curricula includes information about women in seven topic areas: politics, arts, sports, business, military, health care and pioneers.

Not all the areas were overlooked. Seventy percent of respondents reported that they teach about women pioneers such as Rahel Yanait Ben-Zvi, an educator and wife of Israel’s second president, and Hannah Senesh, who helped settle pre-state Israel. And about half the schools include information about influential women in politics such as Golda Meir.

The other categories were more disappointing. Less than 20 percent teach about any of the other six topics.

New additions to Encyclopedia Judaica

Three professors, one visiting professor and one doctoral student in the Department of Bible and Ancient Semitic Languages of the Jewish Theological Seminary have contributed articles to the new Encyclopedia Judaica.

The submissions include Alan Cooper to “The Book of Lamentations”; Sharon Keller to “Ancient Egypt” and “Egyptian Literature in the Bible” and David Marcus to “Ezra” and “The Books of Ezra and Nehemiah.”

Approximately 1,200 academics and world authorities worked on the 22-volume set over three years. The new publication has already received the 2007 Dartmouth Medal awarded by the American Library Association in recognition for distinguished achievement relating to the creation of works of reference of outstanding quality and significance.

Groups boost Jewish camping with grants

The Jewish Funders Network and Foundation for Jewish Camping have announced a matching grants initiative to increase the number of Jewish campers over the next four to five years.

At the JFN’s annual conference in Atlanta recently, JFN President Mark Charendoff announced the initiative, which will provide grants of $25,000 to $50,000 to communities to motivate first-time campers to attend overnight summer camps.

The matching-grant program is part of a larger initiative by the Foundation for Jewish Camping to triple the number of Jewish campers over the next four to five years. The Foundation received an anonymous $15 million gift to create matching programs to provide incentives for campers across the country. It is the largest single gift ever made for Jewish camping.

The foundation and JFN would also like to bring in up to $50 million to increase the size of the program, said Foundation for Jewish Camping executive director Jerry Silverman. There are now 63,000 Jewish children attending nonprofit Jewish overnight camps annually. — jta

Did you find this article interesting? Subscribe to our FREE newsletter and you'll be notified each week when "J." goes online. We'll tell you about the most important stories of the week and give you a link to each one.

This page contains a BETA version of Amazon contextual links. They are marked by the dashed underline.  Your purchases support our site. At times they point to items which are not related to the actual link. Please alert us by email if you discover objectionable links.