SAR Academy in Riverdale, New York, is a school without walls. It was architecturally designed as a model learning space built upon trust and respect for children as learners, with a welcoming atmosphere emerging from the open space. The architecture, though, is only one facet of what has made SAR a legendary school. For many graduates, who often regard their schooling with fondness, gratitude, and “a gleam in their eye,” the wall-lessness is not nearly as significant as the presence of Rabbi Yonah Fuld, who served as the principal and educational guide of SAR for twenty-five years.

“SAR is a magnificent place,” Rabbi Fuld recalls, sitting in his office in the Lookstein Center at Bar Ilan University, where he now works after making aliyah 15 years ago. “I spent many years loving it there. It’s a place that genuinely cares about children and helps them to grow in the modern world.” For Rabbi Fuld, it’s about a whole different approach to education. “Education is not a battle. It’s helping children to develop; it's accepting differences, encouraging interests in talents, trying not to put them into a square box but rather seeing them as individuals – interested and curious about life.”

Rabbi Fuld was largely responsible for making active learning a key component of the experience – though he may have used different terminology at the time. For Rabbi Fuld, active learning is rooted in his firm belief that children deserve to be happy in the present moment. “Every day is a learning experience, and a growing experience – and it should be a happy experience,” he explained. “It’s not that first grade is preparation for second grade, and second grade it preparation for third grade, and elementary school is a preparation for high school and high school is preparation for college. But rather, children are living and they should live every day and enjoy living every day and be curious and learn as they develop, rather than be focused on the constant striving for marks and tests and worries. They should live and learn and grow. And I think that has, thank God, proven itself by every standard.”

This tremendous love of children guides Rabbi Fuld’s approach towards a childhood of appreciating the present without obsessing about the future – an approach with powerful echoes of the epic work of Janusz Korczak - and translates into detailed intricacies of pedagogic creativity. He encouraged staff to build their classes around children’s diversity and natural curiosity, and supported collegiality and teamwork in the process of ensuring that students enjoy their schooling, and thus acquire a love of learning. “Once upon a time, a book report meant that after you read a book, you wrote a report that was graded and marked as an essay,” he explains. “But if one is trying to encourage book reading, what is important is that the book gets read and the book gets enjoyed. There are many ways that a book can get reported on, it's just a matter of imagination. There can be art projects or oral reports, which obviously encourage other skills. There can be music written, poetry written, blurbs – we can think of thirty or forty ways that a student can be asked to report what they read. They can also choose what book to read, according to their own interests. Choices and trust are important. But the point is that if you’re trying to encourage reading, then getting a poor mark on an essay isn’t helpful. If our vision is clear that we want kids to enjoy reading, and we want them to report on what they read, then we should give them an opportunity to read and report in a way that they find enjoyable.”

Rabbi Fuld is overflowing with examples of active, creative learning in every area of life, from ecology to civics to history. But what perhaps made SAR stand out is the application of active learning to Jewish studies. “Every single mitzvah,” Rabbi Fuld says, “should be learned by doing.” Just as kids need to practice what they learn in computers, sports, or science, they need to practice in Judaism as well. “You can’t teach a kid to swim from a book,” he said. “You can’t teach driving from a course, or computers from a manual. When you want someone to really master something, whether manual or abstract, these all have to be learned by doing. So we tried to make the mitzvot real, so that kids became active and engaged and took the Torah into their hearts.”

One of Rabbi Fuld’s favorite approaches is the classroom debate, a technique which he applied across the curriculum – even when it was controversial. “When you want to teach the Holocaust, for example,” he explained, “you can read facts out of a book. But if you want kids to really internalize what it was, they have to grapple with issues.” He would open up rabbinic responsa from the Holocaust era and ask students to come up with alternative answers. “For instance, we would read a question from an 18-year old girl who wanted to surgically remove her tattoo in order to date, even though such surgery may be prohibited halakhically. Kids would have to answer the question, what would they do? We weren’t afraid to have kids encounter sadness and tragedy. We wanted them to engage. More than being told the answer, we wanted them to actively participate in the learning process, to internalize.”

Another vital element for Rabbi Fuld was to actively teach about interpersonal commandments, such as caring for those who need help, and respect for parents. He instituted programs in which eighth grade students tutored fourth grade students in reading Rashi. “You’re learning kindness, you’re building community, you’re learning Rashi, and you’re helping teachers get their job done more efficiently and with individual attention,” he said. In another example, he would have students walk around serving cake to their parents and teachers during parent-teacher conferences. Moreover, in one of the most powerful illustrations, Rabbi Fuld would have students write letters of apology to their parents on Yom Kippur eve. “This is about respecting parents, and respecting teachers – but really it’s about love of God, because your parents are partners with God in your creation.”

Rabbi Fuld also built creative interdisciplinary models of active learning that used ingenious combinations of secular and religious studies. On ecology trips, for example, “we learned about the blessings made on nature, and the Hebrew vocabulary of nature. We also explored a multitude of mitzvot regarding treatment of animals – such as not to abuse animals, not to mix shaatnez, not to use muzzles, not to destroy trees, and so forth. On the Appalachian trail, you can learn these mitzvot naturally.” He would also schedule many school trips on Sukkot in order to give kids an opportunity to find different Sukkot around New York. “We would be visiting Wall Street to learn about the stock market, and stop for lunch to find a sukkah. That’s learning by doing.”

Still, one of the greatest challenges is actively learning about democracy. “How do you teach democracy in school when school is the most undemocratic place there is?” he asks. “How do you teach a person that his or her voice is heard and important in a place where the message regularly projected is that they have nothing to say. How do you teach everyone that they are worthwhile, that they are a somebody?

To try and deal with this challenge, he drew inspiration from his teacher, the late Nechama Leibowitz, whose class he attended weekly for six years. “When she would ask a question, every single person had to write down an answer on a paper and send it up to her,” he recalled. “The message is so powerful – because usually only the fastest or smartest or most aggressive person would answer. But here, everyone actually counts, everyone answers, everyone exists in the room, and everyone has an equal chance to be active in the room.” This method inspired a whole slew of techniques to encourage equality and democracy in school. “What I learned from Nechama is that in order to get more people to contribute, you needed to work in pairs or groups, or debates or case studies or role playing. It’s about giving everyone in the room an equal chance to be heard.”

Rabbi Fuld has recently turned his attention to the subject of Israel. Troubled by emerging studies about American kids’ detachment from Israel, Fuld embarked on a curriculum project for the Lookstein Center, supported by Dr. Shmuel and Evelyn Katz from Florida, to systematically teach what he calls “Love of Zion” to students from grades one through eight. “We know that there are difficult reports about the young generation and their attachment to Israel and we would like to make our contribution in that area, and in a pleasant way show kids what Israel is about,” he explained.

The curriculum offers a series of creative and active lesson plans centered around four holidays – Israel Independence Day, Jerusalem Day, Tu BiShevat and Asara BeTevet – that teach Israel through a continuum of topics over eight years. The first unit, around Independence Day, is currently being field-tested in America in eight different schools from different denominations and communities. First grade, for example, addresses “symbols of Israel” – such as the Israeli flag, the Hatikva, the menorah and olive branch; second grade, deals with the pioneers from the thirties and forties; third grade deals with the War of Independence; seventh grade is about “a Jewish democracy”; eighth grade is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Each unit contains activities, assignments, stories, illustrations, and more.

The curriculum has at its heart teacher creativity, and encourages teachers to build their own active lessons. “We made it clear to educators that this is the raw material,” he says.“We cannot design a curriculum that will fit in with every school’s political or religious outlook. For example, a school in which every morning the entire school sings ‘My Country ‘tis of Thee’ followed by Hatikva will use the curriculum one way, whereas in a school where a child maybe heard the Hatikva once or twice in his or her lifetime it will be a very different kind of teaching. We emphasize with the teachers that we are giving them very beautiful raw material – the teachers are empowered to customize it and shape it appropriately for their school's and their class'academic, religious and political sensitivities.”

Rabbi Fuld was born and raised in New York City to German refugee parents who escaped from Germany right after Kristalnacht, penniless, with only the clothes on their back. In New York, even though they had been middle class Jews in Germany, “they hired themselves out as a maid and butler with the provision that they could cook for themselves on a burner and have one day off a week, on Shabbat. They stuck to that all their lives, and that’s how they built their lives.”

For Rabbi Fuld, his interest in creative Israel education is thus part of the fulfillment of a lifelong dream that brings him full circle within the story of the Jewish people. “All my life I’ve been involved with Ahavat Zion,” he says nostalgically. “I love every minute of living in Israel. It’s the future, it’s the destiny of our people, and it’s what we’re all about. This is where it’s at, and it’s just by accident of birth that all of us were born elsewhere. We were one time thrown out, and now it’s time to come home. It’s been my life’s dream. I did wonderful and happy things in America, but my heart was always here, and thank God I was able to actualize that dream.”

The fact that his five sons live in Israel, and that four of them served in the IDF, brings enormous significance to this life dream. “Coming from two parents who narrowly escaped the Holocaust, this is what is really most important to me,” he says. “I never met my grandparents. I have a picture of a grandfather in a uniform, a chest full of medals, something that anyone would be very proud of, and he fought for Germany in World War I. He has no gravesite, no yahrzeit – that was his end. So to think about my sons’ induction into the IDF, with that perspective, knowing my past, and knowing that I have a son who can put on an IDF uniform, it’s a very, very strong message and a great thrill. When my 24-year old son was inducted as an officer it brought tears to our eyes. He went to his rebbe and asked if he could say sheheheyanu when he put on his dress uniform. It was very moving, and especially given my history. It’s a great thrill for me to be the bridge between what was,with its tragic ending, and this glorious future.

This love of Israel tied to his own family history imbues not only the pilot Israel curriculum, but ultimately his entire work. His goal for the young generation is “to be educated to love yiddishkeit and love Israel and love their learning, and everything that’s about the great Torah that was given to us.”

Rabbi Fuld’s goal is engender interdependence and mutual care. “To be independent is not such a great thing,” he says. “Nobody has all the knowledge. It’s about learning to be interdependent, learning to use our minds along with the creativity and imagination of the other. When you break a class into groups, I think it becomes much more a lesson of preparation for life than a single person imparting knowledge into 35 kids as if they are each a tabula rasa. It’s more important to learn to interact with other people. It’s not the amount of information a child receives. It’s about learning to interact and work with others.”

In this, Rabbi Fuld ultimately believes that teachers can have the most profound impact on people’s lives. “With age and distance I found out how powerful an educator is. I joke that I would have been dangerous had I known how powerful I was. But from the letters, e-mails and conversations that I have with students, I realize how much of an influence teachers have for developing loving, caring, happy, nurturing students. That’s the mission.” In fact, this love of students is Fuld’s way of emulating God. “One of the great descriptions of God is Hamelamed Torah LeAmo Yisrael – the Teacher of Torah to His people, Israel. What greater mission is there in life than to be a melamed!”