About Our School

Congregation B'nai Yisrael is a Reform religious community. Our religious school is designed to prepare students in partnership with parents, to face the present and future as literate and sensitive Jews.

We aim to foster a tradition of respect for individual worth and to create an educational environment in which every facet of your children's world is used to help them experience their own Jewishness.

Our curriculum has been based on the URJ program “To See the World Through Jewish Eyes.” This curriculum creates an atmosphere for enhancing the process of life-long learning and respecting the special quality of the spiritual community.
Classes for Grades 1 through Grade 10 are held weekly after school, evenings, and on Sunday mornings. TOT and Kindergarten programs meet monthly, with parents. The religious school calendar generally follows that of the public school. Bar and Bat Mitzvah and Confirmation are part of our program.

The staff includes trained teachers as well as the Rabbis and Cantor of our congregation.

Our Religious School has become a living opportunity to fulfill these objectives by engaging in a series of religious experiences.

Our young people learn how to feel and be Jewish as did our ancestors, by belonging, behaving and doing what is Jewish.

Our 7th and 8th grade students meet on Wednesday evenings for dinner, followed by a varied “Junior High” program.

Our 9th and 10th grades meet over dinner youth group style and study with the Rabbis. And for our 11th and 12th grade students, we are developing a program-oriented series of get-togethers.

Those students who have progressed beyond Confirmation have historically maintained very close ties with the temple. College students often call the Rabbis from school. When they return home for vacation, they meet for lunch with the Rabbis so they can strengthen their ties to the community during these critical years when they are contemplating career choices and planning their futures.

One final note. The bond between the Rabbis and students during the high school years is also very significant. It provides many students with an invaluable outlet for discussing personal matters which may be difficult to discuss with their own families.

ABOUT OUR GOALS

The goal of our religious school is to provide a program of Jewish education that enables our youth to become Jews who:

• Respect themselves, their families and their community.
• Understand their history, rituals, and traditions, and celebrate occasions in their lives, the Sabbath, Holy Days and Festivals.
• Enhance the cause of justice, freedom and peace by demanding of themselves, their people, and their society, high ethical standards.
• Read and attain rudimentary understanding of the Hebrew language.
• Understand their historical bond to Eretz Yisrael, land of the Jewish people.
• Are concerned about other Jewish communities.
• Are concerned about less fortunate people throughout the world.

ABOUT OUR CURRICULUM

Our Religious School at Congregation B'nai Yisrael is not really a 'school' at all. We have an identity-building program. Our children come to share experiences, to learn Jewish ideas, concepts and values, and to feel the rhythm of Jewish life. An important component of our program at every stage is the involvement of parents. Our parental involvement takes different forms when children are different ages, but it is always central to our conception of Jewish education: parents are the primary Jewish educators.

In order to help us as parents better educate our children Jewishly, we have a wide range of Adult Education opportunities here at the temple, where we offer classes that both augment the children's curriculum, and those that go beyond it.

Our entire Religious School feeds into the Confirmation Program, where, as Ninth and Tenth graders, our children spend two years of intense and focused study with the rabbis. It is at this stage of adolescent development that our young people truly begin to grapple with the important issues of our faith, and of the way in which our tradition influences our modern lives. All of our educational programs from preschool on serve to help prepare our children for this fundamental Jewish learning experience.

We begin with the “Teaching Our Torah” or TOT pre-school program one Sunday of every month, and our Kindergarten program the first Sunday of every month. In both of these groups parents accompany the children and actually do the hands-on teaching. They participate with the kids in songs, crafts and activities. The children begin learning holidays and Bible stories, life cycle events and synagogue practice right away.

The First and Second grades meet every Sunday morning. All Sunday sessions begin with a breakfast gathering of parents and children and teachers all preparing and sharing Sunday breakfast before school. Parents are then invited to join the kids in music--a sing-along beginning to the day.

Our Third through Sixth grades meet on weekday afternoons. Each class has music first, then 50 minutes of Hebrew instruction and 50 minutes of Jewish culture studies. Here the involvement of the parents is primarily at home, but that participation is absolutely essential to the success of our program. In addition to making certain that children do their homework, many of our projects are family-based: family trees, family histories, inquiries into family practices in regard to holidays and life-cycle events. In addition, children attend services with their families on Friday nights. During part of the service, children participate in “Parallel Education” while adults remain in the sanctuary with our Rabbis and Cantor.

Our Seventh and Eighth graders attend CBY Junior High on Wednesday evenings, during which they rotate through a series of classes including Modern Hebrew phrases, cooking and crafts, Israel Experience, ethics, current events, and Holocaust studies. They meet first for pizza with their friends; because socializing is an important part of coming to temple, we build it into our program. Each of the 'modules' of our program has a mitzvah component, so families are instrumental in helping to collect items for Midnight Run, making sure letters to Israelis get written on time, helping collect and deliver food to the needy, etc. We also have special presentation evenings to which parents are invited during the year.

Confirmation is celebrated at the end of two years of study with the rabbis. In Ninth grade, students study Jewish responses to contemporary issues such as abortion, capital punishment, intimacy, privacy, eating disorders, and self respect. The Ninth graders also prepare a Shabbat evening service for the congregation, during which they share their opinions on these and other subjects. The Tenth grade curriculum is built around a close study of Jewish values such as honor, the study of Torah, our obligations to others, and many more. The Confirmation Program culminates in a special service on the Festival of Shavuot, when we commemorate receiving the Torah at Mt. Sinai. The entire service experience is created by our Tenth graders, and they have the opportunity to share their commitment to Jewish values with the congregation. This service is not only especially meaningful for the families of our Confirmands, but is also a wonderful opportunity for our younger people to see the end goal towards which they are working in Religious School.

Our main goal at Congregation B'nai Yisrael is to help families nurture a positive Jewish identity. To that end we provide an environment full of laughter, song and activity in the firm belief that if children want to be here, they will continue to come to temple--throughout their lives.

WE WELCOME YOU

For inquiries please contact our office, 273-2220.