07/03/2020
Dear Friends,
In light of recent Israeli government decisions closing schools, universities, museums, restaurants and a host of other public institutions and businesses, we wanted to update you about the four Schechter non-profits:
As of this week, the Schechter Rabbinical Seminary and the Schechter Institute Graduate School are now teaching all of their courses via Zoom and other internet platforms. Both the teachers and the students have adjusted rapidly to this new reality.
Now that all Israeli schools moved to teaching on-line, the TALI team is working hard to reconfigure, focusing on three priorities:
TALI pedagogic consultants are arranging e-meetings with all TALI schools to understand their individual needs, provide support for the principals and teachers and help them identify resources that will meet the needs of teaching via the internet. Based on these diagnostic conversations, the pedagogic consultants are creating a bank of educational resources to best address these needs. These units are being collected on a dynamic open digital platform on the TALI web platform.
While much of TALI material caters to schools, some resources are appropriate for family based activities, and TALI is offering them to the public, free of charge, via digital platforms and other channels. This includes material created by the TALI Early Childhood department as well as TALI games and the TALI Haggadah.
The four Halleli professional development groups for principals and teachers will freeze their meetings until after Passover. Shorter online meetings will be held with each cohort, providing a safe space to learn and talk about coping strategies from a Jewish perspective.
Neve Schechter in Tel Aviv is temporarily closed according to government directives, but the Torah Lishmah program continues to thrive via the internet.
The Midreshet Schechter Batei Midrash are in the process of being retooled for online learning.
Midreshet Yerushalayim Ukraine continues to run schools and synagogues throughout Ukraine, though each city had been affected in a different way by the corona virus.
We will continue to teach Torah in this time of crisis; we hope and pray that it will pass in the near future.
We wish health and safety to you, your families, your communities and the entire world.
In Solidarity,
The Schechter Institutes Family