Educator Impact:
Rabbi Jeremy Ruberg

“My first engagement with The Jewish Education Project was in early 2019, just as I started as the Rabbi for Lifelong Learning at Temple Emanu-El of Closter. Soon after, 2019 turned into 2020—and then Covid started. 

At the time, my wife was working for this great organization. She was regularly on Zoom—I didn’t even know what Zoom was, but I learned quickly. The Jewish Education Project helped guide me as I took charge of a religious school at a large Conservative synagogue. We were 720 members strong with 170 kids in the school, and we had to start teaching online overnight. I attended a fantastic webinar, and that’s when my relationship with The Jewish Education Project started, and it has since bloomed into the role of rabbi for Lifelong Learning. 

I've also had the opportunity to engage in using the Jewish Educator Portal, which is one of my go-to resources, especially when I need to teach a lesson or respond to a tragedy in Israel, which, unfortunately, happens too often. I use it more regularly now as part of Project Bet-A, which offers collaboration and cooperation among educators in other schools I don’t normally get the chance to work with. Project Bet-A brings educators together as a forum for us to learn from each other, and hear each other's challenges and successes. 

Together, we engage with the great educators at The Jewish Education Project, learning about best practices and how we can elevate our thinking around Jewish education from what I call the mundane to the holy. Instead of just focusing on logistics like photocopies and payroll, we’re asking: What are we really doing here and why? 

Since Covid, we’ve grown significantly. Northern New Jersey saw an influx of young families from New York—about 100 joined us quickly—and we had to rethink our entire model. We went from an intimate school to asking: How do we teach more kids and still keep it good? Working with The Jewish Education Project helped us think about what our core values are. What are the things that truly matter to us, and how do we translate that on a regular basis?  

My Aspirations Playbook (MAP), the educational framework that The Jewish Education Project offers to help educators think about what direction they're moving in and how they articulate the outcomes that they're hoping to achieve, has helped us refocus our core values. 

For instance, we have this large influx of families and we think we're teaching Israel great. We think we're Zionists and we have signs up that say we're Zionists, but were we really teaching Zionism? MAP illustrated to us as we asked the question: Does Zionism matter to you and your people and are you talking about the complexity of Israel in all of its facets? The answer was no, we weren't doing that. So we took a hard look at what we were doing thanks to The Jewish Education Project, and now we've brought it in regularly into our curriculum and to our family programming. 

Another huge help has been their access to Jewish educational models around the world. Through videos they shared, we saw inspiring examples, like one from a Reconstructionist synagogue in Cleveland. We’re not replicating it, but its classrooms were so lively and beautiful that got me thinking: Why are my classrooms boring? It was important that we saw what can be done, so we're going to try to spruce up our classrooms, make them living Jewish laboratories as opposed to static spaces. And that was the product of the videos that we saw.”