A Blueprint for Other Jewish Communities: CAJE & Spertus Institute’s Certificate in Israel Leadership
Posted on 06/26/2026 @ 06:30 AM
Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash
By Audrey Maman Bansoussan, Director of Day School Programs and Services
As someone who grew up in Montreal and attended Concordia University, known as a hotbed of pro-Palestinian activism, I saw firsthand how quickly conversations about Israel could become divisive and emotionally charged, particularly in academic settings.
Today, as a parent with children in Jewish day schools, those experiences feel even more relevant and personal.
They reinforce for me the importance of preparing students not only with knowledge, but with the emotional resilience, critical thinking skills and sense of Jewish identity needed to navigate difficult conversations with confidence and nuance.
In a post-Oct. 7 environment, Jewish students are encountering conversations about Israel earlier and more intensely than ever before.
They are navigating a difficult social media environment, rising antisemitism, anti-Israel peer pressure on campuses and increasingly divisive public discourse.
Too often, schools feel forced into one of two inadequate responses: avoidance or advocacy. Neither serves students well because they both skip the hard part.
Image by Rosy / Bad Homburg / Germany from Pixabay
Avoidance leaves students unprepared — they’ll encounter these conversations in the real world regardless, and silence from trusted institutions gives them no tools, frameworks or grounded identity to draw on when it matters.
Advocacy shortcuts the thinking process — it hands students conclusions instead of building their capacity to reason through complexity themselves, leaving them brittle when actually challenged.
Students need something deeper: an honest, developmentally appropriate and research-informed Israel education that embraces complexity while strengthening Jewish identity and connection, not just to avoid or assert.
That belief led the Center for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE), in partnership with the Spertus Institute, to launch the Certificate in Israel Leadership, a multi-phase leadership initiative designed to strengthen how Jewish day schools approach Israel education at every level of institutional life.
We believe this initiative offers a promising model for communities across North America.
Phase 1: Building leadership capacity
Throughout a series of in-person sessions taught and led by Spertus Institute, participants explored leadership frameworks, institutional alignment, stakeholder communication, conflict navigation and approaches to teaching complexity.
Spertus’ deep experience with both leadership training and Israel created an experience that not only provided rich Israel learning but also actionable leadership skills that could be applied in each school setting.
Perhaps most importantly, they built trust across institutions.
At a time when disagreement often fractures communities, these sessions demonstrated that leaders with differing viewpoints can engage difficult issues seriously and respectfully while remaining committed to shared communal goals.
Phase 1 brought together 23 participants from seven Miami-area Jewish schools, including heads of school, senior administrators, rabbis and board members.
The participating schools — The Innovative School of Temple Beth Sholom, Lehrman Community Day School, Pardes Day School, Posnack Day School, Scheck Hillel Community School, Rambam Day School and Yeshiva Elementary School — represented a broad range of denominational affiliations, educational philosophies and student populations.
This diversity was intentional. Israel education does not happen in a vacuum.
Each school has its own mission, culture, constituency and boundaries. Effective communal strategy must honor those differences while creating shared capacity.
The sequencing of this initiative matters.
Research by Keren Fraiman, vice president and chief academic officer of Spertus Institute, has shown that one of the greatest barriers to nuanced Israel education is not lack of curriculum, but educator concern about backlash from parents, students or administrators.
For that reason, Miami chose to begin with leadership.
Before asking teachers to navigate complexity in classrooms, institutions first needed aligned leadership, thoughtful strategy and supportive governance structures. That groundwork is what Phase 1 has accomplished.
Participant reflections revealed several key takeaways from the initiative.
School leaders reported gaining practical frameworks for navigating the complexity of Israel education, including tools for identifying and communicating effectively with diverse stakeholders such as students, parents, faculty, and board members.
Many emphasized the importance of approaching difficult conversations with both clarity and empathy, recognizing that meaningful dialogue requires creating space for multiple perspectives while maintaining a strong educational vision.
Participants also highlighted the unique value of learning alongside lay leaders, noting that dedicated time for joint reflection and strategic planning strengthened relationships and fostered greater alignment around school goals.
Others came away with a deeper appreciation for conflict education as a vehicle for developing perspective-taking, critical thinking, problem-solving and intellectual flexibility.
Across the cohort, leaders described gaining new insights into complex Israel-related issues, learning practical strategies for guiding discussions within their school communities and developing greater confidence in their ability to lead.
Collectively, these reflections point to something larger: Jewish schools are seeking not only content and resources, but also the frameworks, leadership skills, and communal partnerships necessary to navigate one of the most challenging and consequential educational issues of our time.
Phase 2: Supporting educators
With leadership foundations now in place, we are hoping to launch Phase 2, which will focus on educators in these same schools.
Teachers will receive training, resources and support to bring nuanced, age-appropriate and mission-aligned Israel education into their classrooms with greater confidence.
This next phase will move the work from boardroom to classroom while maintaining the institutional alignment necessary for long-term success.
A communal lesson
There is a broader takeaway here for Jewish philanthropy and communal leadership.
When communities invest in leadership development, cross-school collaboration and strategic educational capacity, they create multiplier effects.
One initiative can strengthen multiple institutions simultaneously. One cohort can influence hundreds of educators and thousands of students.
The Jewish community often seeks scalable solutions to urgent challenges.
This is one.
We cannot control the world our students will enter. But we can prepare them for it.
If we want young Jews to engage Israel with knowledge, resilience and pride, then we must invest not only in what students learn, but in how leaders lead.
Our experience in Miami suggests that when communities do so together, meaningful change becomes possible.
