Mandel graduate Mohammad Kundos, principal of the Yad B’Yad School in Kfar Saba, speaks with fellows in the Educational Leadership program.
How do we prepare Jewish educational leaders for the challenges of Jewish education in a post-October 7 world? In the words of Israel education researcher Sivan Zakai, since October 7 “every Jewish educator is an Israel educator.” In a webinar hosted by Brandeis University’s Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, Zakai emphasized that, while educators may have entered the field due to a passion for Torah learning, Hebrew language instruction, or something else, within a week of October 7, the most profound questions students bring with them are about Israel. How do we equip our educational leaders for this reality?
The Educational Leadership Program’s March seminar in Israel offers a possible response to this question. While recognizing the importance of history, sociology, and geopolitics, our program explores the diversity and complexity of Israeli society through face-to-face engagement with the people shaping the future of the country: its educators. Our aspiration is to bring our fellows beyond the headlines and into real conversation with educators from the rich tapestry of Israeli society—to experience Israel as the pluralistic, textured, complex place that it is.
During our seminar, we visited eight different schools and educational organizations representing the diversity of Israeli society. We sat in on classes, explored the physical spaces, heard musical performances and admired student artwork. We spoke with principals, teachers and students, inquiring about their approaches to teaching and learning and their aspirations for the future. In our conversations with school leaders, we were particularly interested in the relationships between education and society. We asked: What kind of society and citizen is this school or program trying to cultivate? What is the intervention it seeks to make in Israeli society or in the particular community it serves? The responses to these questions were illuminating, yielding a wide range of understandings of Israeli society and aspirations for its future.
Through these multifaceted experiences and probing conversations, a picture of Israeli society as seen through the eyes of educators and students, began to emerge. The visit to the Rogozin School in South Tel Aviv, where the student body is comprised of asylum seekers and the children of foreign workers, opened fellows’ eyes to the realities of migrants in Israeli society. At Himmelfarb, a National Religious high school, fellows watched student-produced films about the impact of the ongoing war on their lives and spoke with teacher Jeremy Stavisky about his efforts to cultivate a sense of service and responsibility in his students. At Sindiana, an elite high school and youth village for Arab students, principal Andeera Beidasa spoke about the pain of the ongoing war, and her efforts to develop young leaders who can build a better future for Arab/Palestinian Israelis. Visits to Bina: The Home for Israeli Judaism and Netzach Yisrael, a Haredi school in Beit Shemesh, were equally revealing.
In selecting the schools we visited, we endeavored to engage with a wide spectrum of Israeli society, but also to choose sites with inspiring leaders and compelling educational visions that would enrich our fellows’ educational thinking. After our visits, fellows reflected on the ideas and models of leadership they encountered, such as Principal Beidasa’s conviction that students with solid identities are more open to learning about the identities of others, or the belief of Hoshea Ben-Fridman, co-founder of the Beit Yisrael Pre-Army Preparatory Program, the educators should strive to be like gardeners, not like sculptors.
Fellows also met with fellows from the Mandel School for Educational Leadership and the Mandel Social Leadership Program for Principals in the North, sharing their visions for the field and the leadership challenges they face. These conversations helped both Israeli and North American fellows better understand the context and challenges of their counterparts and sparked new educational ideas.
Our hope is that our fellows emerged from the seminar with a deeper, more nuanced understanding of Israeli society, the real human beings that comprise it, and the varied competing visions for its future, all through an educational lens. This grounding in Israel’s humanity and complexity, we believe, lays a strong foundation for the deep, thoughtful Israel education that our current moment demands.
-Jethro Berkman: Program Director, Educational Leadership Program
FELLOW REFLECTION
Face-to-face encounters with Israeli educators of all backgrounds made my recent trip to Israel with the Mandel Foundation unlike any other previous one. Even though I’ve committed my career to Jewish education, which at Ramah camps also includes significant Israel education, I never had an opportunity to see firsthand how education works in Israel for Israelis. I had read about the structure of the school system and how its divisions mirrored those of Israeli society writ large. But I had never actually spoken with teachers, principals, and students about their day-to-day experiences of teaching and learning.
While I came in primarily seeking to learn from our many school observation visits, and I sure learned a lot, I also appreciated moments when we could engage in dialogue with Israeli counterparts, and share some of our own educational concerns in this challenging moment for Israel, for the Jewish people, and for the world.
We had two such opportunities with Israeli Mandel Fellows. One took place in the north, with the Mandel Principals program at Oranim College. I sat around a table with three principals, all citizens of Israel: Hila, who was Jewish Israeli; Alia, who was Druze; and Eman, who was Arab-Palestinian.
Eman asked us Americans what relationships were like these days between Arab and Jewish communities in the States. I answered honestly and painfully that October 7th and its aftermath have expanded rifts between our communities. While there were previous moments of solidarity, like after the Tree of Life and Christchurch, NZ attacks, post-10/7 relations have instead been characterized by distrust and difficulty communicating how deeply and differently these times have affected us. These principals, much more proximate to the actual war, manage to sit in dialogue and educational exchange every single week. When will we be able to build such bridges across gaping divides here?
The other opportunity to meet with Israeli Mandel Fellows happened at the beautiful Mandel building in Jerusalem. There, I sat across from Nadav, a seasoned high school principal. I told him about the confusion I feel these days about the place of American Jews in our society, with political forces instrumentalizing our vulnerabilities and fears for their own purposes. Responding to my concerns, Nadav pointed me toward a speech by the influential labor Zionist and educational thinker Berl Katznelson, a key figure in Nadav’s own professional development.
Once I got home, I explored the Katznelson speech Nadav recommended, titled “In Favor of Perplexity Against Whitewashing.” Delivered in June 1940—as France capitulated to the Nazis and the Hitler-Stalin pact remained operative—it addressed the young socialist educators navigating that stark reality in pre-state Israel. Katznelson validated their perplexity; he cautioned forcefully against demands for simplistic faith and the dishonesty inherent in “whitewashing” traumatic events.
This ‘perplexity’ that Katznelson identified resonated with my own confusion today. His educational guidance for navigating this emotional state compelled me. Even though he was secular, he believed that developing resilience required immersion with Jewish history and sources, especially the Tanach. He argued that authentic leadership was not located in feigned ideological certainty, but in unwavering ethical principles, like the foundational Jewish idea that all human beings are created in the divine image.
Katznelson’s words lit up another aspect of our time in Israel: our visit to a Yad B’Yad bilingual school. Located on the campus of Beit Berl College—named for Katznelson himself—this school brought coexistence education vividly to life. Colorful courtyard decorations vibrantly wove together Hebrew and Arabic descriptions of recent Purim celebrations and ongoing Ramadan observances.
The school’s principal, Mohammed Kundos, a Mandel alum, articulated a profound truth when he spoke to us: authentic learning, much like playing music, requires navigating tension. He later played the oud for our group; his performance transcended the notes—it embodied connection across differences, all grounded in the ethical respect for every person that Katznelson described back in 1940. To witness such powerful educational spaces endure and strive against the backdrop of pervasive conflict offers us both a model and a challenge for figuring out how to bridge real divides at home.
I offer immense gratitude to the Mandel Foundation for bringing us to such places to inspire such questions, and for investing in us as educational leaders so we can bring our own visions closer to reality.
-Daniel Olson: Cohort II, Educational Leadership Program