Tractorwashing, no doubt.

While there are many disagreements about the future of the Jewish community, the direction which it is taking and the ways that it may change, one issue  seems to be agreed upon by all sides — the importance of Jewish education as a way of imparting a strong Jewish identity to the next generation.

There are numerous Jewish organizations and institutions which devote themselves exclusively to Jewish education. Many of these groups identify with a particular stream of Judaism while others promote specific educational projects, educational frameworks or modes of Jewish learning.

The importance of a quality Jewish education in the lives of future Jewish leaders and dedicated and involved community members is not in dispute. The centrality of the educator as a major force for a high-quality Jewish educational experience is, however, often overlooked.

Several leaders have created awards for Jewish educators which aim to recognize excellence in the field of Jewish education. These leaders are committed to promoting a strong future Jewish community by acknowledging exceptional teachers who have committed their lives to educating the next generation of North American Jews.

Grinspoon-Steinhardt Awards

The Grinspoon-Steinhardt Awards for Excellence in Jewish Education partners with the JESNA organization in its effort to recognize classroom-based teachers who work in formal Jewish educational settings. Nominations are made by a principal or school administrator and submitted to the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Foundation through local Federations or through the local Board of Jewish Education.

Grinspoon-Steinhardt awardees are honored for demonstrating exceptional educational achievement and serving as a role model for their students. Nominees must teach in day schools or congregational schools ranging in ages from pre-school through 12th grade. Local communities may include their own eligibility criteria for nomination. The committee presents 55 awards annually, with a maximum of one nominee per city (outside of New York).

Each Grinspoon-Steinhardt recipient receives $2,000, $1000 of which he/she must use for his or her professional development and the other $1,000 at his/her discretion.

Covenant Awards

The Covenant Award was first presented in 1991 and since then it has been awarded annually to three exceptional Jewish educators who have made an impact on Jewish life through innovative educational models and practices. Covenant awardees are honored for having distinguished themselves in classroom teaching, the arts, adult education, Tikkun Olam, family education, storytelling, curriculum design, professional development, leadership and other areas of Jewish education.

Covenant honorees receive $36,000 and their home institution receives an additional $5,000. The goal of the award is to recognize the great Jewish educators and their work.

Milken Jewish Educator Awards

The Milken Jewish Educator Award is a project of the Milken Family Foundation which established the Award to acknowledge the work of outstanding Jewish educators from across the country. The Award was launched in 1994 and is presented annually to a select group of Jewish educators as a way of honoring them for their professional leadership, their efforts in support of their schools’ students, their community involvement and their relationship to the families and communities that rely on their skills and dedication.

Lowell Milken a known philanthropist, helped create the Jewish Educator Award as an expression of his philosophy that a Jewish Day School education will encourage a child to develop strong Jewish values, remain faithful to his Jewish heritage and nourish the child’s Jewish identity. MFF created the Award to reward excellence in teaching and strengthen the Jewish Day School movement. Educators are honored for their efforts to create an exciting and engaging educational experience for their students and making Judaism vibrant and meaningful.

The Jewish Educators Award is based on a teacher’s classroom performance as well as with his/her relationship with the community and connections with the school’s community and families. The MFF Award committee reviews each nominee’s leadership skills to determine how the teacher influences the school community and its families. The committee also examines the originality of the nominee’s educational methods.

Recipients of the MFF Jewish Educator’s Award include teachers, specialists and administrators who are engaged in all facets of Jewish education. Since 1994 the Milken Family Foundation has presented the Award to Jewish educators who represent almost 40 Jewish Day Schools throughout the United States.  The Award recognizes educators as “role models deserving of emulation for their intelligence, scholarship, creativity and compassion.”

Four educators are named as recipients each year. Nominees must teach in a school that is affiliated with the local Board of Jewish Education at the K-12 level. Each recipient receives $15,000.

Always with good news, Good News from Israel has recently published a winner blog post.

For BDS, there is so much more than Israeli cell phone technology.

I liked this one enough to ask permission to repost here at IsraellyCool:

Dear BDS member.

By boycotting Israeli treatments and research you will cause the deaths of millions of children from Hepatitis B because they couldn’t have SciGen’s Sci-B-Vac only third-generation Hep B virus vaccine.  You would have to destroy the research by Hadassah Medical Organization that located the gene that causes recurrent life-threatening infections and bone marrow failure in children.  The babies born deformed and blind from ectodermal dysplasia cannot touch the gene therapy that Israel’s Technion has developed.  Children paralysed by the genetic brain disease Peripheral Neuropathy will just have to whistle for the medication developed by doctors at Hadassah Medical Center – except of course that they can’t whistle.

BDS members obviously have no wish to cure cancer.

From the mailbag:

OK, not quite, Israel’s not about to start growing this kind of Bones.

We’ve always said at Israellycool that anyone who supports BDS campaigns against Israel is spineless. Well here’s another amazing medical advance they’ll have to live without so I guess no spine transplants for them.

From the Times of Israel:

Scientists at the Haifa facility there will manufacture bones for use in bone grafts, and they’ll do so using a new technique — taking live fat cells from patients by liposuction –which, according to its inventor, Dr. Shai Meretzki, will significantly change the way doctors relate to orthopedic problems and bone repairs.

And once his company, Bonus BioGroup, has perfected its method of growing bones in a test tube, Meretzki said, it will also move on to developing joint replacements, which could help billions of older people regain their lost freedom of movement.

“Our bone-regeneration methodology is a powerful tool for treating a variety of bone and joint diseases without the risk of tissue rejection and surgery failure, as with current methods of bone replacement and implants,” Meretzki claimed.

Read the rest.

Although this year’s official Holocaust Memorial Day has passed, remembrance events and activities continue to take place on a regular basis including the Irena Sendler presentation.

Irena Sendler has been called the female Oskar Schindler, evoking the story of the German factory owner who saved over one thousand Jews during the Second World War. Sendler, however, is credited with saving almost 3000 people, most of whom were children.

When the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 Sendler began to help Jews escape from the Nazi dragnet. It is estimated that during those first months she helped as many as 500 Jews evade the Nazis and go into hiding. Sendler then joined the Zagota, a Polish underground which was devoted to helping Jewish children. She obtained false papers that identified her as a nurse and allowed her to enter the Warsaw ghetto where she brought food and medicines.

Sendler quickly identified ways in which she could smuggle children out of the ghetto and she began to do so, often drugging the children as she hid them in suitcases, toolboxes and coffins to bring them out. One ruse involved placing a sedated child in a bag with a barking dog on top of the sack. Many of the children had been orphaned in the ghetto and had no parents or guardians but Sendler also approached ghetto parents to convince them to allow her to remove their children and give them a chance of survival. As Sendler later described it, “I talked the mothers out of their children.”

In addition to the children she personally smuggled out of the ghetto, Sendler also worked with her comrades in the Zagota to remove children through underground passages, sewer pipes and via the abandoned courthouse on the ghetto’s edge. All in all it is estimated that Sendler was responsible for taking 2500 children out of the ghetto.

Sendler identified safe hiding places where the smuggled children could be placed. Most children were placed in convents, Catholic orphanages or with Polish families. Sendler recorded the children’s names and hiding places on strips of tissue paper which she then enclosed in jars and buried in her friend’s garden. She hoped that after the war, she would be able to reunite the children with their families or, if not, at least with the Jewish community.

In 1943 Sendler was picked up by the Gestapo and imprisoned. The Nazis tortured her and broke her feet but she did not reveal anything about “her children”. Zagota comrades succeeded in bribing a prison guard to release Sendler and she spent the rest of the war in hiding.

After the war Sendler dug up her jars and tried to facilitate reunifications between the children and surviving family members but in almost all cases, no family members were left and the children were either adopted into their Polish families or sent to Israel.

The Irena Sendler story was uncovered in 1999 by a group of schoolgirls who with the help of a Jewish businessman turned it into a play that is, today, performed throughout the world. In addition the story has been retold in book form and appears on a project website.

Not quite “Take that, Barry!”

He carries the tune..to the grave.

let us take a minute to remember some of the newly fallen

from Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012.

They were not soldiers on a traditional battlefield as in days of old,

but a family sitting in their living room when

Hamas fired a rocket straight at them from Gaza.

The new front line of the war of terror against Israel – the family sofa in Kiryat Malakhi.

A family was destroyed.

A  home ruined.

It seems all one can do in such a place is to sadly recite a prayer

and wonder how does one deal with such a cowardly enemy,

who over and over again aims at innocents…

adding to the list of dead and creating new mourners

for another Yom Hazikaron.

I protested–I did not attend or to try to take photos.

I did a whole photo essay on the last Free Pollard rally on the eve of Barak Obama’s visit here on IsraellyCool.

Natan Sharansky spoke at that Free Pollard rally.

There were cute, smiling girls.

Protest signs written in English.

A crowd so large that streets were closed. Buses and all traffic were diverted.

News worthy enough to miss a good party with free food and important networking?

Nope, seems I was wrong, very wrong.

In Israel, where these days it seems that news is determined by and on Facebook pages,

I made a really big mistake, by the numbers, for example:

A photo of the street sign for Kaf Tet November Street has a viral # of 2,500.

This photo is of the Knesset Building in the sandstorm that grounded Barak Obama’s helicopter and caused traffic nightmares on the day he left Jerusalem.

On Facebook, it has a viral # of 2000.

Ok, Brian of London in his electric car is not as high a viral number,

but photos of Free Jonathan Pollard rally posted on Facebook were viral = 0

zero, zip, nada, nothing!

Even the Prime Minister’s favorite ice cream photos did better than that!

Maybe that shows why Jonathan Pollard is now serving day 10,001.