Connecting Via the iCenter
Anne Lanski couldn't help but look on with pride and no small amount of amazement as more than 100 Jewish educators, gathered into small groups, chattered and buzzed in search of the next big idea in Jewish education - or maybe just something that would get the kids they teach excited about Israel.
They came from Chicago and the suburbs and represented day schools, congregational schools, Jewish Community Centers, camps, synagogues, Jewish agencies, youth groups and more. There were even a few parents -- not representing anything except their children and themselves -- in attendance.
In the tightly compartmentalized world of Jewish non-profits, such cross-fertilization is rare.
But doing what hasn't been done before is exactly the point of the iCenter, a two-year-old national, Northbrook-based organization dedicated to transforming education about Israel.
The recent event, held at the aptly named Catalyst Ranch, a colorful kind of playground for grownups in the West Loop, was the launch event for the iChallenge Ideas Incubator, and was focused on “activating creativity,” as the program put it. At the end, participants were invited to submit proposals for grants for “dynamic ideas in Jewish education.”
The idea is to fund five proposals to the tune of $30,000 each, but Lanski, the iCenter's executive director, hopes many more than five will be submitted for possible future consideration. And judging by the level of interest and excitement at the event, there might be hundreds.
The iCenter was founded in 2008 through the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation and the Jim Joseph Foundation. Its official description is a “non-profit educational organization aimed at developing and enhancing the field of Israel education.” That amorphous description could mean almost anything, but Lanski, who has been involved in Israel education for most of her professional life, fills in the outlines.
The goal of the center, she says, “is to develop and support the field of Jewish education with Israel as an integral component, as opposed to what it has been.” In the past, she says, “Israel has been treated more as a discrete subject. It wasn't infused in a deliberate way from the beginning. When you're in college, you go on Birthright,” and that, for many Jewish teens, is their first real introduction to the Jewish state, she says.
“Our way is more about identity development,” Lanski says. “The connection to Israel and the Jewish people is a strong component of Jewish identity. It shouldn't just be a semester course, but a vibrant and dynamic component of Jewish education all the way through. That's the reason the iCenter was founded.”
Lanski says Israel isn't usually integrated into Jewish education in a meaningful way. Even kids with a strong Jewish education don't fully grasp Israel until they go there, often as young adults.
“The goal of the iCenter is integrating Israel into every Jewish educational setting: camps, day schools, formal, informal, congregational schools, supplementary education in all forms - absolutely everything,” Lanski says.
Lanski added in an e-mail that “central to creating systemic change in Israel education is the training of high-caliber educators. A generation of dynamic well-trained young professionals working in the formative years of childhood and adolescence is a significant building block in a new era of Israel education.”
She was a natural to run such an organization. She's the founder and former executive director of Shorashim, an Israel education organization that is now the third largest provider of Birthright Israel trips in the world. Before that, she taught Hebrew at New Trier High School.
The iCenter has a staff of four and a group of consultants composed of distinguished educators from all over the country, including Lori Sagarin from Temple Beth Israel in Skokie.
Lanski says it was no accident that the center is located in the Chicago area. The locale is a hotbed of Hebrew education, with nine public high schools offering Hebrew language instruction and four times as many Birthright Israel participants as any other area, Lanski says.
“Chicago is in the forefront with Hebrew language instruction, with Birthright Israel, with many things in Jewish-Israel education,” she says. “A total of 3,000 students across the country take Hebrew in public high schools, and nearly 500 of those are in Chicago. The iCenter being based here is no coincidence. Paradigm after paradigm has been born out of the city, and we want to be at the forefront of the next wave of collaboration and creative 21st-century methodology.”
And about that name, which sounds like it could be a new Apple device: The “i” stands for Israel, of course, but also for “inspire, innovate, the individual,” Lanski says. “It's very 21st-century, the play on the iPad, iPod. Also integrate, infuse, imagine - all the words we use. The 'i' just worked for us.
What the iCenter is doing flows from what Lanski calls the “aleph-bets” of Israel education that the organization has identified. They include such guidelines for Israel education as “be a central component of Jewish identity”; “present Israel in dialogue with youth and young adults today”; “introduce Israel through diverse themes that speak to contemporary young people”; “be committed to modern Hebrew as a crucial force in personal identity development”; and “integrate Israel into the entire culture of Jewish educational settings.” It should also “include the first-hand experience of visiting Israel and relating to Israeli peers.”
Israel education should include areas of learning about contemporary Israeli arts and culture, according to the principles articulated by the iCenter. Those areas “reflect the heart, soul and vibrancy of Israeli society and have the power and potential to influence and meaningfully engage people.”
Other principles include: Israel education should “focus on Medinat Yisrael, Am Yisrael, and Eretz Yisrael. Israel education should focus on contemporary Israel and contemporary Jewish peoplehood, while remaining rooted in the Jewish people's historic connection to the land of Israel.”
Such education “requires educators to possess a combination of Israel knowledge and passion and education skills and artistry. Israel education requires educators who are both well trained and deeply committed, so as to be able to transmit a love of Israel to the next generation.”
“Effective Israel education is holistic and touches all parts of a child's being: the intellectual, the spiritual, the emotional and the behavioral, interwoven in such a way as to tie the child and the Jewish people in the deepest of ways. It is an important component of a larger vision of a meaningful Jewish education for 21st-century Jewish life,” the organization’s Web site (www.icenter.org) sums up.
What the iCenter has done so far to realize this vision falls mainly into three areas, Lanski says. First is “working toward developing a language and terminology for the field.” Lanski has recruited 10 experts from around the country; each will write about one core principle in a five-page document. This project is currently being completed.
The second area is professional development, which encompasses a broad range of opportunities. Currently the iCenter is launching a Masters Concentration in Israel Education. This collaboration among six academic institutions across the country, including Chicago's Spertus College, will draw upon a diverse community of students and faculty.
A 2009 program brought 120 educators from across the country together for a three-day learning session called Israel at the Center. At another gathering, the center invited public high school Hebrew teachers to Chicago to learn about each other's work. “Some of them thought they were the only ones,” Lanski says. They discussed “how to better integrate Israel into their Jewish education programming, how to integrate it more organically.”
The iCenter's third area of concentration involves “initiatives in educational resources and curricula,” Lanski says. “We're serving as an address for amazing initiatives and ideas.” They include connecting American students to their Israeli counterparts; connecting students to Israel through themes such as the environment and social justice; and developing curricula on modern Israeli history and current events in Israel.
At a gathering of heads of Hebrew schools, “we left realizing all the ways we could infuse our schools with Israel, making school more exciting by infusing it with Israel,” Lanski says. “We need new paradigms for this generation. It's not the same as it was. We see everything as a giant opportunity. It's overwhelming in a good way, the commitment in the field of Jewish education.” The possibilities for the future “leave me speechless,” she says.
Now the iCenter has thrown itself into the iChallenge, and to judge by the diversity and excitement of the participants at the event, most of Chicago's Jewish education community is following along.
The iChallenge is “an ideas incubator designed to help people with big ideas in Jewish education get the kind of support and development they need to make their ideas a reality,” according to Natalie Blitt, the center's director of community initiatives. Blitt came to the center from the PJ Library, a program designed to put Jewish children's books into Jewish homes, and also created her own non-profit called Sippurim: Israel Books for Kids.
The iChallenge launch event, she says, was “an experiment. So much of our goal was to gather a cross-section of Jewish educators in Chicago, formal and informal, to find ideas that can change things and shift paradigms. We weren't narrowly focused on one group or institution. We are focused on having big systemic change.
“We felt very empowered by the reaction from the Chicago Jewish community,” Blitt says. “We were shocked by the number of people who registered” -- more than 120, with a waiting list eventually having to be developed. “It was very inspiring, bringing communities together across denominations and organizations, crossing all the silos,” she says.
Participants came from nearly 25 synagogues, plus day schools, camps and community organizations, and such specialty groups as Limmud Chicago, Mummies and Masterpieces (a program designed to bring more members of the community into museums), Pushing the Envelope Farm, a Jewish farm project, Shorashim and Kfar Jewish Arts Center.
A sampling of comments from participants before the event began showed that many were not sure why they had come, but were expecting, at the least, an interesting morning. Not all were Jewish educators in a formal sense. Galit Greenfield is a pastry chef, Israeli born, who has been involved with Jewish education in a number of settings.
“I have a lot of ideas and a lot of Israeli information,” she says. “I've been saying for years that (Jewish education) needs to change.”
Rabbi Josh Feigelson, campus rabbi at the Fiedler Hillel at Northwestern University (and husband of Natalie Blitt) said that although the iCenter deals only with Israel education in grades K-12, not college, he still hoped to “get some creative ideas going. What could we be doing differently” in terms of Israel education.
Sam Rodin, youth director at Congregation B'nai Tikvah in Deerfield, probably spoke for most participants. “I'm here to learn about new ideas, to brainstorm with other people in the field and bring back fresh ideas -- and funding,” he said.
For several local Jewish educators, it wasn't simply the prospect of receiving funding for a favorite project that excited them about the iChallenge and the iCenter, but the way the conversation was being framed.
Participant Debbie Harris, technology coordinator for Solomon Schechter Day School's middle school, says she was initially impressed by the fact that “there is anybody right now who finds money to give away” but left the iChallenge event more delighted with the center's “out-of-the-box, kick-you-in-the-butt innovative thinking. The incubator was unique. It's one of the finest professional development experiences I've ever had,” she says.
“I hope this changes the conversation and people are not going to be coming up with the same-old same-old,” she says. “It's hard to educate on Israel these days. You have kids coming in hearing a lot of different things at home. You have kids saying, but what about the Gaza Strip, what about the settlements?”
The iCenter, she says, “really has a good handle on what's really going to appeal to youth, and that's rare. Everybody who works there is young, excited, not entrenched in how we've been doing it for the past 30 years. It terrifies me when agencies don't start to change.”
Lisa Sheridan, program coordinator for Camp Chi, the JCCs of Chicago's resident camp, has worked with the iCenter before on an Israel event and says she will take back some new ideas from the presenters and group discussions at the iChallenge event.
“There are a ton of people in the Chicago area who care about Jewish education formally and informally, yet there is no one in the Chicago area to bring them together,” she says. “Part of the reason we do what we do is that we love to think creatively, to think outside the box, to engage other people, and this allows for that.”
Using ideas from the iChallenge, she says she hopes to develop new programming that will “take Judaism and infuse it into everyday life, where the kids are living and breathing it, not like a class.”
At the event, she relates, she talked to several people, including her rabbi's wife, and scheduled a time to meet, talk about ideas and possibly apply for one of the grants. It's exactly the kind of cross-fertilization the iCenter is looking for, Blitt says.
In fact, she says, if several people or organizations come up with similar ideas for a grant, the iCenter will put them in touch with each other so they can work together on a proposal. (More information on the grants, which are for projects that would affect Jewish children in grades K-8, can be found on the iCenter Web site. There is a Feb. 5 deadline.)
Rabbi David Soloff, executive director of Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, has worked with the iCenter before and attended the iChallenge event, which he found “very exciting (to see) the full rainbow of educational institutions and initiatives across the city. One of the great successes was convening a forum for so many different people to be in the same location and share a thoughtful discussion in interesting surroundings,” he says.
He calls the iCenter “a resource for connecting folks to other folks in the area of Israel education -- cutting-edge folks and resources. They're good people with a fresh energy. It's a national foundation and it's great they are centered here in Chicago and nurturing relationships with homegrown institutions.” The iChallenge event, he says, allowed people to “step back from the day-to-day” and look at Jewish education with “very diverse lenses.”
Lanski says that the iChallenge “is an example of the methodology” the iCenter embraces -- “a child-centered approach, using 21st-century, relevant, meaningful lenses or frames for kids to engage and understand.” Methodology is important at the center because “how you do it is as important as what you do,” she says.
At the iChallenge event, “there were people in the room I worked with 30 years ago. I didn't know 50 percent of the people, and others I've known but I didn't have the opportunity to collaborate with when I was in my Shorashim world,” Lanski says referring to the diversity of the participants.
The purpose of the event went far beyond simply bringing people together to announce grant opportunities, she says. It involved inspiring them as well.
“When educators are inspired, the kids are going to be inspired,” Lanski says. “It's a gift to have that kind of time and space. We spark something, and we don't know all the different places the sparks are going to go. They go far beyond what we ever considered.”
Events like the iChallenge launch and other iCenter gatherings “say, here's an opportunity, bottom up, grass roots, to bring people together, put their energies together and facilitate inspired collaboration and creativity,” she says. “People can do the things they usually don't have time for. The school year goes by and they don't have time for these things.”
Lanski says she is planning and looking forward to other such events with different groupings of educators. “We are trying to open the door to a new era of leveraging the talent, commitment, experience and creativity we're so rich in in this community,” she says. “The field deserves that. The kids deserve it.”
