Cheri Ellowitz received her B.A. in Drama from the University of Texas at Austin, a Masters in Jewish Education from Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, and a Masters in Education from the University of Southern California. She has served as a synagogue educator in Texas, California and Ohio for the last thirty years and is the author of the URJ Press Mitkadem Hebrew program. Presently she is the Director of Education at The Temple-Tifereth Israel in Beachwood, Ohio.

Since September 2006 the power of the arts has transformed The Temple-Tifereth Israel (TTTI) in Beachwood, Ohio. Our planned, focused, and vision-driven approach impacts learners of all ages, offers opportunities to people from the broader community, and has most clearly enhanced our religious school program.

In 2004, under the leadership of Senior Rabbi, Richard Block, TTTI received a generous, multi-year grant from the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland (JECC) to partner with them and the Laura and Alvin Siegal College of Judaic Studies in an endeavor entitled, Building Leadership Capacity for Educational Excellence and Congregational Transformation. When Phase 2 (The Task Force) was completed, a Temple Learning Council, whose first chair was Bruce Goodman, had been established to implement The Temple’s new Vision for Learning and to oversee the educational programs of TTTI. One of two areas of immediate concern that they chose to address was Arts Education (the second was Adolescent Education). The Temple Learning Council established a Working Group comprised of both lay and professional members with varied experiences in Judaism, education and the arts. Their charge was to imagine what Jewish arts education at The Temple could and should look like and to develop a proposal.

The Arts Education Working Group, chaired by Jane Joseph, spent their initial months learning and reading about Jewish education and Arts education. They experienced different methodologies themselves, and they had many impactful discussions about religion and art. The first significant outcome of their work came in the form of Enduring Understandings regarding Jewish Arts Education:

• Jewish arts education inspires the integration of Judaism into daily life.
• Jewish arts education is a means to transform Jewish ideas, images, and feelings into an art form.
• Jewish arts education redefines a participant’s awareness of the aesthetic qualities in art and embraces the concept of hiddur mitzvah (making a mitzvah beautiful).
• Jewish arts education is a means to explore spirituality and connection to God.
• Jewish arts education engages multiple learners through diverse modalities.
• Jewish arts education is joyful and gratifying.
• Jewish arts education engages multigenerational learners throughout a lifetime.

This work paved the way for the Working Group to conceive of their ultimate vision for the future of arts education at The Temple. The main focus short term was a Jewish Arts Festival for The Temple community that would be participatory, individuals and families joining workshops learning about Judaism through different artistic media (plastic arts, music, drama, dance, movies, etc.). A description of this event envisioned in the proposal is,

…This is not a showcase of individual talent, but rather a collective experience that emphasizes process over product, participation over indifference, effort over talent.
Congregants who attend the Arts Festival will not recognize their environment. Walls will be rejuvenated by vibrant paintings. Silent hallways will burst with music. Children will run to their classrooms, parents in tow, desperate to show their work. For one week, The Temple will be transformed and transfixed by the power of Judaism through the arts: the power to uplift, the power to educate, and the power to inspire a new commitment to our Jewish community at The Temple-Tifereth Israel.

The long term vision included transforming the formal educational program through professional development:

The second prong of our long-term Arts Initiative will be to establish arts education professional development that provides and promotes ongoing instruction to our professional staff in the area of arts integration education. Gradual curricular change will occur at the Religious School in a manner that is educationally sound; arts will be integrated in the educational program to underscore the lessons, not replace them.Holistic educational reform, such as is contemplated here, cannot happen only through artist residencies. It can only happen when teachers are trained to use the arts as effective and unique teaching tools. This professional development program should be led by experts in arts and Jewish education and teachers must be paid for their time.

As soon as the Working Group’s proposal was accepted by the Learning Council, a committee was established to execute plans for the Arts Festival which would become known as FestAviv, The Temple’s Spring Festival. Currently in planning for the fourth FestAviv, the program has surpassed the vision of its creators. More than a thousand participants of all ages attend workshops and presentations where Judaism is experienced and explored through the arts, from singing to orchestra presentations, to sidewalk chalk art, to paper cutting, to cooking, to movie viewing and discussion, to dance interpretation, to clay, to silk painting, and on and on. Each workshop is led by an artist who blends teaching of Jewish text and learning into the expression of their art. The Director of Education at The Temple works with each artist to assist in the creation of the lesson and sometimes to offer a partner to teach the Jewish content (usually a religious school teacher). This program is only possible because of the collaboration of devoted lay volunteers and of all of The Temple departments (clergy, administration, education, maintenance). Each year FestAviv centers on a different theme, allowing for focused learning and new workshops. Our themes have been: L’Dor V’Dor, Israel’s 60th Birthday, Eco-FestAviv: Sharing and Caring for the Earth, and The Art of Tikkun Olam. (To see a video of FestAviv 2007 and photos of FestAviv 2008 go to http://festaviv.blogspot.com/.)

As envisioned, the immediate execution of professional development in arts education for all teachers (religious school and pre-school) at The Temple would be key to implementing this vision. The first year, teachers were charged with developing a class project that could be displayed at FestAviv. The project was to be process, not product, oriented (as per the Working Group proposal), and it was to be derived from their class curriculum, not the FestAviv theme, so as to allow teachers to view “arts education” as a new approach and not as an “add on.” For most teachers this presented a challenge, as “teaching through the arts” – and for some, even “art” – was not in their repertoire.

We developed a two-year professional development program for the teachers that ultimately changed the way our Judaic Studies class rooms look and function today. By bringing in Debbie Krivoy of Avoda Arts for the first workshop, we set the philosophical groundwork. In her five-hour session Debbie clearly defined the difference between “teaching and doing art” and “teaching Judaism through the arts.” While there is definitely a place for both in Jewish education, to enhance learning at The Temple our initiative sought to expand our teachers’ abilities to explore Judaism creatively, in this case by using artistic methodologies. Once the faculty understood this most important concept, we were able to follow with practical, skills-based workshops, such as storytelling, puppetry, using objects (ritual objects, photos, etc.) to teach history, cooking, drama, and art midrash. We also presented sessions that stressed pedagogy. In one such session the teachers experienced three models of teaching-Advanced Organizer, Synectics, and Storahtelling. With each model the same Torah text was presented followed by some sort of artistic expression of the text, using the particular model of teaching. It has been essential to our vision for professional development to impart the ideals of flexibility, creativity, and experimentation.

Today, the contributions of the Arts Education Initiative are evident throughout The Temple in subtle and obvious ways. We added a part time Arts Program Coordinator, Rob Ross, who works under the Director of Education. His responsibilities are synagogue wide and concern a variety of educational and informal opportunities, such as:

• The Jewish Learning Through the Arts Committee – a lay committee charged with implementing the original Arts Education Proposal accepted by the Temple Learning Council. They monitor the status of existing programs and continue to develop new ones.
• FestAviv – now a biennial program, each event includes between 22-39 workshops, with approximately 20-30 artists/teachers and more than a thousand participants over two days.
• Klezmer U – a teen klezmer band for students in grades 7-12. Learning about Klezmer music and its origins is part of the program. They perform several times a year at The Temple and at other venues, such as the Jewish Home for the Aged.
• TGIS (Thank God It’s Shabbat) – a new, informal Shabbat service, featuring contemporary music and open discussion on the parasha.
• Smart Sundays – Classes for teens and adults that are arts-based taking place during Sunday school.

Collaboration among departments within The Temple has been a wonderful benefit of this initiative. Clergy have taken great interest in expanding their teaching range to include arts based programs, participating as Smart Sundays’ and FestAviv teachers. We are privileged to have The Temple Museum of Religious Art, a department of The Temple with three spaces for displaying the collection, including a gallery at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. Previous to the Arts Initiative, The Temple’s Museum Director, Susan Koletsky, had minimal contact with students and families through a couple of family programs a year. Today the museum, its galleries, collection, and Director, are highly integrated into many aspects of our arts education and schools’ programs-from preschool through high school, from class room activities to family education programs. Much of our learning would feel incomplete without access to the rich ritual and artistic resources that we have in The Temple’s historic collection and vibrant opportunities that new exhibits bring.

Our formal classrooms substantiate real outcomes from the Arts Education Initiative. Each year, FestAviv or not, we have a display of class “art” that is evidence of learning of at least one aspect of their curriculum. We developed a form for teachers to complete at the beginning of the school year asking:

• What part of your curriculum will your arts program address?
• What is the “Big Idea” (Enduring Understanding) that is inspiring your project? What’s the main concept or idea that you want your students to learn from the curriculum?
• What will your students be able to do or express through or after the learning? Students will be able to:
• List three different ways that this learning can be expressed in an artistic form (painting, sculpting, dance, drama, puppets, gardening, etc.):

As we work individually with teachers, they improve each year in their understanding of the concepts of Big Ideas and ability to design artistic exploration that is an integral part of the curriculum, not an art project that can be completed in two weeks. Through our yearly documentation, we have evidence of teacher learning and definitive progress toward our vision of learning through the arts.

Naturally our teachers’ new skills and attitudes affect all of their teaching, not just the “project” that we ask them to do, so a new vitality is apparent in our classrooms. Worksheets have virtually disappeared. Working together on an undertaking such as FestAviv also brought the faculty together more closely as a group. Grade level teachers work collectively on group projects; the entire school has a deadline for an “all community event” in which they play a central role.

Today there are newer parents and faculty who tell us that they think of us as the Arts Synagogue, because that is the way that they have known The Temple-Tifereth Israel. For those of us who have been at the synagogue for more than five years that is an amazing statement, because Jewish Learning Through the Arts was launched in spring of 2007 with the first FestAviv. We have been fortunate to receive continual support from the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland through the ongoing advocacy and guidance of Maury Greenberg of the JECC and funding from their Fund for the Jewish Future. Other significant grants that have sustained this work come from the Leonard Kreiger Fund of the Cleveland Foundation and the Meisel Family Artistic Fund.

While The Temple-Tifereth Israel has had many benefits in developing its vision and program of Jewish Learning Through the Arts, such as grants and an in-house Jewish museum, most of the goals we set and programs we accomplished are achievable in most synagogue settings. The concept of teaching Judaism through the arts rather than doing art projects is paramount. Using the lens of the arts, whether to expand one’s ritual experience, to invite a student to experience another time period, to invest one’s emotions in a piece of text, this is the aspiration of teaching through the arts. We don’t need a museum to have beautiful ritual objects, photographs, and pictures at our disposal, and we oftentimes don’t need to bring people from out of town to find experts in fields of professional development. What we do need is a vision of what we want to accomplish and a plan of how to get there. We also need to recognize that the vision takes nurturing over time. With patience and a plan, it’s amazing how soon people think it was always how you meant it to be!