Hebrew studies get a makeover at North Shore Congregation Israel

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Experiential learning, sometimes done through scavenger hunts, art projects and dramatic skits, is the key for North Shore Congregation Israel's Hebrew studies. | Benjamin Woodard~For STM

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Updated: January 13, 2012 10:59AM

Educators at Glencoe’s North Shore Congregation Israel have thrown out the desks and blackboards, adopting more experiential teaching techniques — like a scavenger hunt through the synagogue for fresh-baked matzah.

“Raise up the matzah,” co-camp director Patty Mason said to the 40 or so rambunctious third- and fourth graders huddled in groups in large room on the congregations lake-side campus.

“We ate it,” they shouted back. For they did, in fact, eat the matzah, just before riffling through the rest of their scavenger hunt booty, like sheep’s wool (If you have it, Mason said, raise it up and go: “Baa Baa Baa Baa Baa”).

The scavenger hunt through the synagogue is just one way the North Shore congregation is reinventing how it teaches Hebrew studies. It’s part of a camp lasting all school year, a first time they’ve tried camp during the fall, winter and spring.

The other camp director, Roberta Goodman, said this new approach to teaching children age-old theology and Jewish history is exceeding expectations: So-called “Generation Z” children actually want to come to Sunday school.

Goodman said that her own experience of Hebrew school was much more regimented.

“All my teachers were men; they were orthodox,” she said. “I wanted to make sure that [school] wasn’t the father’s or mother’s religious school experience.”

The camp’s idea came from a new program called the Ideas Incubator, from the Northbrook-based Jewish organization The iCenter, a Israel education think-tank and resource organization tasked with creating innovative visions for Jewish education.

North Shore Congregation received a grant from the iCenter to pay for the camp. Goodman and Mason hired specialists, armed with extensive experience in experiential learning, to come in week after week to teach in their own ways.

“We would be able to teach it [without the iCenter’s help], but not this well,” Mason said.

The incubator program also helped Charlie Sherman, principal of Am Yisrael School of Jewish Studies in Northfield, buy interactive white boards, five iPads and an arsenal of laptops and digital cameras to help teach the curriculum.

Afternoon Hebrew school or Sunday school is how the majority of Jewish children learn about Judaism, said Natalie Blitt, the director of the Ideas Incubator program.

She said new ways of teaching, such as North Shore Congregation’s day camp and Am Yisrael’s tech-boosted curriculum, are the most effective places to engender strong Jewish learning.

It’s effective, she said, because “it’s a change from a traditional school that has desks and blackboards and teachers that go by ‘Ms. So-And-So.’ Instead of learning them through a book, let’s do it through drama and art.”

Rebecca Sykes, a freelance Jewish educator, was hired by North Shore Congregation to lead a six-week theater program for the students that attend one of two sessions on Sunday.

“Come close, come close, come close,” Sykes said to the children on her first day, as they surrounded Sykes and sat, listening intently. “Only people that know me from camp can call me Becca. Every one else has to call me Rebecca.”

Sykes has been going to Jewish summer camp since 1981, teaching children Jewish theology through drama and other experiential techniques. She liked the camp so much, she said, she married a camp director.

“It’s such a treat to be with the kids,” she said after the Sunday afternoon session, where she taught the students the story of Exodus — think Moses, Pharaoh, plagues, wilderness for 40 years — through a series of games and skits.

To say the least, the children were energetic and involved throughout “class.”

“It’s an incredible experience to hear of kids who want to come to Sunday school,” Goodman said. “I get notes from parent and comments about how their kids really want to come.”