Sollie Award

I was honored to join Judy and Lester Goldman at the United Synagogue Kallah last week in San Diego to accept our two Sollie awards. B'nai Amoona won an award in the area of inclusion for the great work our synagogue is doing to make sure that all members of our community feel included and welcome. Lester wrote the award mainly discussing the efforts the synagogue underwent this summer to redesign our bima as well as the work we do in all areas of our synagogue to make sure we are inclusive of all types of people. And I wrote an award discussing the on-going partnership we have developed with Gaeway180, mainly our MLK day of service last year and Purim carnival. I was honored that our program were one of ten chosen to present at the conference. We were in a class with many other inspiring and exciting programs happening in Conservative synagogues across the country.

I am still in awe that our design to add a tikkun olam component to the Washington DC trip has led to a better understanding in our community, specifically amongst the youth, about the poor in St Louis, has created a meaningful partnership between two good organizations which continues to grow and expand and exposes kids in St Louis to Judaism in a positive and powerful light.

When you reach out to do good in the world, you never know how far your reach is going to go. Yeshir koach to all the B'nai Amoona staff and youth who dreamed, encouraged, and made this all happen.

Jewish Websites

What is your favorite Jewish website?  There are so many great ones out there. There are technically useful ones like www.hebcal.com for when you need information about the Jewish calendar. There are educational ones like www.myjewishlearning.com for when you need some factual information. There are videos for the parsha on www.g-dcast.com. There is www.kveller.com, a twist on Jewish parenting. There is www.punktorah.org a website of Independent Jewish spiritual culture for those of us who are a bit more adventurous and cutting edge.  There are so many great Jewish websites.

I would love to hear about the websites you frequent, or wish you had time to frequent. It’s about time we updated our list of websites to the right. So share your resources either on the blog or on our facebook page http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=602586159 and ask your kids what their favorite Jewish websites are - they may visit some real gems!

Joyful Noise

In my September bulletin article I spoke about Joyful Noise. 

"I love the image joyful noise conjures, people joining together in a vibrant, loving, welcoming community to pray in a joyful, happy, noisy manner. I started to wonder what Joyful Noise during prayer would look like and sound like at B’nai Amoona?"

This Shabbat we are going to find out! This Saturday, Nov. 5th we are having a special Family Shabbat Service. There is no Pardes on Sunday so we are asking all families to join us. Rabbi Kaiman and I will be leading a special family service from 10:30-11:30 in the chapel which will be followed by the Consecration Ceremony in the main sanctuary to welcome our new students into their Jewish Educational Journey. 

Join us this Shabbat  &  make some Joyful noise!

Our students keep coming back!

Now that we are in week three of our school year, I am beginning to get a handle on the number of students we have in our school. The first few weeks that number is like a moving target. But I am excited to share that we have 247 students in 13 grades this year!

I am super excited to share that in K-6th grade we had 100% retention from last year (with the exception of two students who moved out of state and one who switched to day school.) And in 7th-11th we are averaging an 83% retention rate. This number is something we should all be proud of. It speaks very highly of our Pardes program, our fabulous teachers, our synagogue community and our families. Together, we are showing that life long Jewish learning is a priority in our community. 

In many religious schools, students leave after their Bar/Bat Mitzvah. I am thrilled to say that we have 25 students in our 8th grade class. And so far they are loving it, thanks to Morah Jan (who doesn't love Morah Jan) and an exciting and meaningful, hands-on curriculum based on Tikkun Olam (making the world a better place.) 

Pardes Tishrei Video Contest

Announcing the first ever Pardes 

Tishrei video contest

Grab your family, or some friends and make a video about the upcoming holidays. Then enter it into the first Pardes Tishrei video contest. All videos will be shared on the B'nai Amoona Youtube channel and the winner will get a special prize. 

Here are all the details for the contest:

1. Videos can come from individuals, groups, families, classes - anyone who want to participate as long as the person who enters the video is a B'nai Amoona member.

2. All videos must be between 30 seconds and 5 minutes in length

3. Each video must be digitally sent to Jennifer@bnaiamoona.com or Jessica@bnaiamoona.com

4. The video must be related to the Tishrei holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot or Simchat Torah

5. All videos must be electronically submitted no later than Monday, October 3rd

6. All videos will be posted to the B'nai Amoona Youtube channel.

7. The winner will be announced Tuesday, Oct. 11th

I can't wait to watch all the videos!!!!

Welcome back to Pardes

Welcome back to Pardes. The summer is over and we started this past Tuesday with a great first day. At our opening ceremony, the chapel was packed with students and parents. Rabbi Kaiman led us in Havdalah to symbolize our transition from the summer to the school year and Jennifer Newfeld told us a story reminding us that people grow from the inside out. Rabbi Kaiman, Jennifer and Jessica Rosenblit, our new Assistant Principal, shared blessings with the students for the year.  We sang some songs and then all the students excitedly went off to their new classrooms to start soaking up Judaism. For snack, students ate traditional first day of school, big chocolate chip cookies so that we can all have a sweet, gooey, fun new year.

 My prayer for you is to grow from the inside. Be the best person you can be: to yourself, your friends, your family, your classmates and your community. Always strive to be a good person. Let others see your inner beauty shining thought. Embrace your Judaism and be opening to all that this wonderful tradition has to offer you. Come to Pardes with an open heart and an open mind. And have a wonderful year of learning and growing. 

Jennifer Newfeld

Havdalah and Siddur Ceremony

This week we had three great ceremonies. Our Kitah Bet (2nd grade) had their Havdalah Ceremony, Kitah Gimmel (3rd grade) received their first siddur during the Siddur Ceremony and tonight we are confirming 17 tenth graders in a special Friday night which includes presentations, Shabbat service and dinner.

I love the end of the year when we are able to display and honor all the great learning our students have accomplished!!

Here are a few highlights, see many more pictures on Flicker. Confirmation picutres will go up early next week.

Families and Students at our Siddur Ceremony

Kitah Gimmel receives their Siddurim

Kitah Bet Havdalah Ceremony

Kitah Bet did an awesome job!

Youth Groups

This week BAUSY, B'nai Amoona's chapter of United Synagogue Youth elected their 2011-2012 leadership board. 

BAUSY is one of our three award winning youth groups. B’nai Amoona youth groups are a wonderful opportunity for our child to hang out with their B’nai Amoona friends, participate in fun activities and live Jewish values. We have three wonderful youth groups. Atid Amoona is for students entering 4^th & 5^th grade and meets approximately monthly. Kadima meets monthly for our 6^th-8^th graders. USY for our 9^th -12^th graders has a variety of weekly events, Shabbat experiences and weekend regional conventions.

This past year we had some exciting new programs, such as the overnight at the zoo, traditional favorites such as USY Shabbat dinners, and record attendanceat our Atid Amoon and Kadima events.

Come join the bunch – it’s a fun and important part of our Jewish education.

Mazel Tov!

 

Pesach 5771

Here we are, days before Passover. Everyone doing the mad dash to buy Passover food and clean out our homes. When was the last time that you cleaned out your closets or took all the books off the bookshelves to wipe them down? And in fact, how does all that dirt find its way under all those books? I think we all have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. There never seems to be enough time to get it all done. I could live without the allergy attacks from all the dust. And I certainly do not enjoy cleaning out my oven, in fact if it weren't for passover, I wonder if I would ever do it. However, I do love once Passover comes and I walk into a super clean and minimalist kitchen. I love having only 2 cups and 2 bowls to wash and I enjoy empty counter tops. I actually even enjoy the change in food. It reminds me how we can live our lives more simply, how we can do with less and still be happy.

I wish you and your family a wonderful Passover this year.

Here is some information that might be helpful:

                            

April 17               No Pardes, Passover Preparation Time

April 18                First Passover Seder

April 19               No Pardes, Second Passover Seder                      

April 24               Pardes has classes

April 26               No Pardes, Passover

April 26               Passover ends at 8:18pm – go eat some carbs!

Do you have Last Minute Pesach Questions? Need to know what time you have to stop eating bagels? Are you looking for the form to sell your Chametz? Don’t know if your natural unprocessed Peanut Butter is okay to eat? For answers to all your questions, go to https://www.bnaiamoona.com/files/final_passover_packet.pdf



B'nai Mitzvah Family Workshops

During 6th grade, the pre-B'nai Mitzvah year, all of our families, both day school and religious school, join together for at least six family workshops to learn about various important subjects such as T'fillin, Tallit, and having an Aliyah. They create a vision board of what they want their B'nai Mitzvah experience to look like and mean to their family. This year we added in three additional oppertunitites to study text with Rabbi Rose. Sunday, we had our final workshop of the year, Tallit making. This is always a favorite. After spending time studying about the mitzvah of Tallit with Rabbi Rose, our families each made a personalized tallit for their upcoming Bar/Bat Mitzvah.

The class will be displaying their new Tallitot during services on May 21st. I hope you will come and share in the experience as our 2011-2012 B'nai Mitzvah class begins to experience the mitzvah of putting on a Tallit.

Confirmation Trip to Washington DC

On Thursday, March 24th, thirteen 10th graders, Jennifer Newfeld, Andy Schwebel, and Ari Kaimen descended on Washington DC for four incredible days of bonding, learning and experiencing. We visited the Newseum, saw an exhibit called, "Choosing to Participate" which looked at moments in history where individuals or groups choose to participate and the difference they made, hung out in Georgetown, visited GW Hillel and met Jewish college students, walked a lot, rode the subway, bonded as a group, celebrated two birthdays, prayed as a community, visited a Conservative synagogue, listened to head of the Public Relations Team for the Clinton Administration and the next nominated U.S.ambassador to Israel, worked with the JCC on homeless issues, visited the Capital, Monuments, White House and the Smithsonians.

We did a TON in four days, and it was an incredible experience.  Some of the best parts were....

• "The Holocaust Museum really opened my eyes."
• "Doing Havdalah outside the Kennedy Center as one group together really made me feel like we were one big family."
• "I really enjoyed the Kabalat Shabbat service at Hillel because everyone was there because they wanted to be."
• "The best part of the trip was experiencing DC while at the same time getting to know my classmates."
• "Walking to Shul in the morning with Rabbi Ari which mixed our Judaism with a walking tour of the streets of D.C."

Purim

Purim was awesome at Pardes this year. We had Circus Harmony, Sushan celebrations, lots of Megillah reading, all sorts of costumes, thundersticks,  hamantashen and lots and lots of smiles. We boo-ed Haman, gave away a bike and ate tons of sugar. Hope you had fun with us!

 

Check out the great pictures to the right.(Click on the thumbnail photos to see more)

Sherut Luemi

Once a month our "Israeli girls" come to Pardes and spend the morning bringing Israel to our K-5th grade students. Sara and Tova are spending one year of their Israeli National Service living in St Louis and working in Jewish education, connecting students to Israel. Tova and Sara always bring a fun and educational activity to our students. Last month they made Chocolate Balls, an Israeli cooking classic and this month, while teaching about water issues Israel faces they had our students acting out the story of Honi Hamagel (Honi the circle maker) in Hebrew and playing a water relay game. Our students really enjoy the Sundays when a little bit of Israel visits them.

Attention for our Blog!

A few weeks ago I attended a conference on technology in Jewish Education. One exciting part of the conference was the attention the Pardes Treehouse received. Our blog was highlighted during a pre-conference technology boot camp as a model of how a religious school can engage families in classroom learning. Later in the conference our blog was also featured in a technology showcase, where participants could come, see our blog, learn about how we created it and how we maintain it. Educators from across the country were impressed not only with our blog but also with the content of our school! Several educators asked me if they could start following our blog to learn about new educational ideas for their school. This was personally very gratifying; the blog has been one of my pet projects this past year. I would love to hear from you what you think of our blog. After each posting there is a place for comments. I invite you to comment. Myself, as well as all the teachers who blog, would love to hear from those of you who are following us.

Mini-Minyan

Have you heard about Mini-Minyan? It's our new hit monthly Shabbat Children's service. Mini-Minyan meets the second Shabbat of each month (except in March it will be the third) at 10:30am. It's perfect for Religious School and Day School students in K-3rd grades. We've had a total of 30 participants in our first 5 months. and many of those return month after month and make up our core of Minyanairs. During Mini-Minyan, we read stories, create a pray community, share what's happening in our lives, act a bit silly and a bit serious, pretend we are trees and generally expereince a wonderful Shabbat service together. It has quickly become my favorite Saturday morning of the month. Join us, next Mini-Minyan is March 20th.

World Wide Wrap

This morning, Kitah Dalet (4^th grade) joined the morning minyan wearing the mock T’fillin that created with the help of our Men’s Club. It was great to walk into the Chapel this morning and see not only our fourth graders all wrapped up, but so many of their parents participating as well. What a beautiful introduction for our students to this mitzvah. Several of our 7^th and 10^th graders joined as well making me think that maybe we need to make this an annual activity for the school, not just for the fourth grade. So once each class builds their T’fillin in fourth grade, the students and their parents would be invited back each year to “rewrap.” Thank you to the men’s club for making this morning possible, thank you to Claire Hack, our wonderful Kitah Dalet teacher and thank you to all the parents and students who joined us for this special morning. Want to see B’nai Amoona on the on the World Wide Wrap page, click http://www.worldwidewrap.org/reported.html

See you for the next wrap on Feb. 5, 2012.  

Our Madrichim are amazing. We have 19 working in Pardes this year and they are simply fabulous. Madrichim are the teenage assistants who work in our classes, shadow our students and assist in our office and resource room. They work one on one and with small groups, lead classroom activities and are amazing dugmaot, role models.


Our madrichim program keeps our teens connected, involved and role modeling. It provides them with job skills that they can take to college and a refresher of their Jewish knowledge. It provides our students a whole group of “cool” teenagers for them to look up to and learn from, and it allows our student-teacher ratio in our K-7th grade classrooms to be around one to five.


A parent recently commented to me that their children love the Madrichim who have been in their classes. The parent then asked, “How do you manage to get teens here that early, 8:30am, on a Sunday morning.”

How do we do it? Interesting, we had more teens apply to be Madrichim then we actually had positions for this year (although since it is such a great experience, we quickly created valuable positions for everyone who was interested.) Another little known secret, we teach our Madrichim that if they want to be dugmaot they must be continuing learners themselves. Therefore all of our Madrichim are enrolled in some form of Jewish education. We love our Madrichim!

Tikkun Olan Project

On MLK Sunday we took 85 students to Gateway180, the largest emergency shelter in Missouri. It was an amazing day on so many levels. Our day school and religious school students joined together to participate in this Tikkun Olam project. As we were leaving for the morning, Andy Schwebel reminded us how important it is for us to be engaged in this work, especially on Martin Luther King weekend, because we are commanded by our Jewish tradition to help others whenever we can. At the shelter we learned that the average age of a homeless person in St Louis is nine and we discuss what it might feel like for the 60+ children in the shelter to be picked up each morning by the school bus while standing in front of a sign reading homeless shelter. Gateway180 allows women and children to stay for up to 30 days, their goal being to help these families do a

180 degree turn and get them back into a home. While we were there our students painted the dining room, packed 100 lunches, cleaned up the food pantry and played with the kids in staying at Gateway180. It was a great morning of service. My favorite part was watching our kids play with the children there. Some of our older students took younger children under their wing while our 5^thth graders to play with on the playgroup and teach each other games they could all play. At the end of the morning, when the 7^th & 8^th grade boys thanked me for taking them as they walked off the bus, I knew that we ha graders simply found other 5d done an amazing thing this morning for everyone involved.