School Structure

Grades 1-5 use the Chai curriculum, produced by the reform movement, which centers on the following teachings:

• Torah is an ongoing dialogue between the text and its students.
• Torah is real in our daily lives; it is with us wherever we are.
• Developing skills to study Torah is essential to integrating Torah into our lives.
• Avodah (Worship) is the work we do to find sacred connections to God, community, & self
• Engaging in the work of avodah can bring order, beauty, meaning & insight to our lives.
• We have a responsibility to perform acts of g'milut chasadim (loving kindness) to make the world a better, holier place.

In order to promote a more personal connection to Jewish learning, 6th and 7th graders choose between 3 tracks for their Judaics learning. The offerings, which rotate from year to year, include Judaism and the Visual Arts, Judaism and Music, Judaism in America, and Jewish Identity in Film. Each of these courses of study supports engagement with a broad spectrum of Jewish learning including texts, history, values, and culture, but the approach to these materials will vary from class to class. For example, children in the arts track might read a Torah story, talk about its ambiguities, examine some illuminated manuscripts, and then create their own; they might spend a week looking at photography from an Eastern European shtetl, talk about 19th and 20th century Jewish European history, and then go into Atlanta to take pictures that they believe reflect Jewish life as they know it; they might learn the rituals of havdalah, look at many different spice boxes, and then craft one that they believe captures, in some way, the essence of the ritual. Our hope is that by allowing older students a voice in how they engage Jewish learning, they will feel greater personal investment – and interest – in what they are learning.