CAJE Blog

Miami’s Diller Teen Fellows Cohort 9 experienced their first Jewish Identity Shabbaton last weekend where they were able to reflect upon who they are and begin the process of becoming a strong, cohesive group.

This week, as the “virtual curtain” fell on our final Torahtron performance, the co-creators of Words From Our Hearts: A Prayer Exploration for Early Childhood, Evelyn Goldfinger and Joy Schandler, had an opportunity to reflect on what they learned throughout the yearlong program.

As the authors from Rosov Consulting described in a white paper published by CASJE in 2020 “Beginning with the work of Bellah and his colleagues, in their landmark study Habits of the Heart, sociologists have distinguished people’s relationships to their work as jobs, careers and callings.”

Our Jewish community, and others around North America, are experiencing a crisis in teacher recruitment and retention. To education veterans and Jewish communal professionals, this is, of course, nothing new. What is new is that this summer the first systematic effort in more than 10 years to collect data about the Jewish education workforce was published based on a four-part research study led by Rosov Consulting and the Greenberg Team.

After having to halt its programming due to COVID, CAJE’s Miami Jewish Day School Robotics Program is back. We received an overwhelming amount of emails and phone calls from various schools in Miami-Dade and Broward counties asking us to try to restart it this year.

Our Melton & More faculty shape the lives of our learners by creating powerful spaces for inquiry, discovery and connection. They design courses using centuries old sacred texts and teachings and transform them into relevant wisdom that serves as inspiration to help navigate our modern world. We encourage you to get to know them and join them for a powerful experience of Jewish learning.

Want to help a teenager but not sure how or where to begin? Are you concerned about a young person and not sure what to say? One of the important messages that Dear Evan Hansen teaches us is we need to have more and better conversations with our teens.

The word “retreat” has several meanings. One, of course, refers to withdrawing from a difficult, dangerous or disagreeable situation. However, in professional and private life, we often refer to “retreat” in two other ways: “a place of privacy or safety” and “a period of group withdrawal for prayer, meditation, study, or instruction under a director.”