Jewish Educational Leadership: What do you see as the real value of shelihim?

Bini Krauss: Ivrit beIvrit has long been a central pillar of what we believe in. I know that there are fewer schools doing that today than there were twenty years ago, for sure, but it’s still something that’s very important to us. So the first thing is that if we want to do it properly, it’s probably good to have people who speak Ivrit as their native language. It’s not the only way to do it, but I believe that it is certainly the best way. Many years ago, I taught at the Yeshivah of Flatbush. I was not a native Hebrew speaker, but I think that I was pretty good. Nonetheless, it is much better for students to interact regularly with those for whom Hebrew is native. So, over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve brought in more and more shelihim.

We started a Hebrew immersion program in our Early Learning Center, you know, 3-year nursery, 4-year nursery, kindergarten. They’re all taught by Israelis, native Hebrew speakers.

Of course, on the administrative side, there is another advantage. It’s hard to find Jewish studies teachers at all, and shelihim expand the pool of potential candidates considerably. In fact, it’s probably the only area in which we consistently get multiple applicants for a position. This, and the Hebrew, makes shelihim an attractive option.

For how long do your shelihim usually stay?

Even though we really try to make sure that it’s a good fit, bringing people from another country is risky for both sides. So, our contracts are always for a single year, so neither side is obligated for more than that. That being said, we find the sweet spot is between two and four years. Two is actually too short, because it takes a year to really acclimate, to settle in with your family, to adjust to a new culture and a new way of doing things, and then you are just beginning to become really effective. So, we like to have them for more than that. Once you get past four years, while it is usually very good for us because it provides a real sense of stability, it can be very difficult for the shelihim and their families. Especially as their kids get older, it becomes more challenging for them to reintegrate into their lives in Israel. We‘ve had some shelihim stay for six years, and even one that stayed for ten. I felt like we were doing the opposite work of Nefesh B’Nefesh! But they do contribute a lot to our schools.

What do you mean by contribute to your schools? Is there something beyond the Hebrew?

Look, over the twenty years that I’ve been at SAR we’ve had quite a number of shelihim, and we feel truly enriched. It’s not just the Hebrew; their presence is an important part of the broader mission of the school—making our students feel part of the community of Israel. And it goes both ways. The relationships that develop are deep, and many involve relationships with the families of the shelihim too. Two years ago, I made a bat mitzvah for my daughter in Israel, and we had more than a dozen former shelihim join us. For many years, my oldest daughter’s best friends were the children of shelihim, which was very meaningful for her but also very difficult because at some point they went back to Israel. Those are some of the challenges.

Then there’s the side outside of school. Many shelihim have additional non-official positions in the community on Shabbat, where they develop deep bonds with people in the community. Many work in the camps during the summer, so that their lives become even more intertwined with the families and the kids. So that aside from the personal connections, which really help our students to feel personal connections with Israelis, there is a lot of cultural sharing and cultural literacy development which takes place. And most of it happens in informal ways.

What does the school do to help them settle in? After all, this is a really big move. For example, do you find them housing?

We haven’t really done this in a formal way, even though we do invest in making them feel welcome and comfortable, although we could probably do even better. Look, they’ve uprooted their lives to come to a place that is often really foreign to them. So, we’ll meet with them, formally and informally, we’ll take them to a professional basketball game (Brooklyn Nets vs Maccabi!) just to help them and their kids feel good.

Aside from that, we commit to be helpful on a practical level. We will do a lot of connecting, but we don’t want them to be dependent on us. So, we don’t find them a house, but we will recommend people for them to reach out to. There’s an active WhatsApp group with our current shelihim in which they can turn to the people already settled in to find out about communities and housing and shopping and banking and buying a car. There are even apartments that were previously rented by shelihim and they helped to arrange for the apartment to pass to the new family. As a school, however, we cannot be responsible or the middlemen for the relationships with landlords, etc., and we strive for a balance between being helpful and encouraging independence.

And despite all that, there is always an element of being shell-shocked. You can’t avoid that. I experienced that myself. I moved to Germany as a foreigner where I worked for a foundation, and I don’t really think that there are shortcuts. We recognize the challenges and have done different things over the years.

Aside from the technical side, there’s also the professional acclimatization. Look, SAR is not like most other schools. We have a unique environment, which most of these people have never seen before. It’s a much more dramatic adjustment than the move from a standard Israeli school to a standard American one. If there are a number of families coming then we’ll try to arrange for a full day of training in Israel, either with someone who was a shaliah and experienced it for themselves or with one of our former Principals living in Israel (Rabbi Yonah Fuld and Rabbi Joel Cohn), so that they can get a real sense of the school culture. If it is just one family then we’ll try to do that on Zoom, it depends on the year.

Once they arrive, we usually formalize some sort of mentorship for them, either on an individual basis, like we’ll do with any new teacher, or mentorship for them as a group, really depending on how big the group is. And of course, once they are here, we set them up with peer-mentoring, like we do for all new faculty.

Can we back up for a minute? How do you recruit the shelihim? What kind of process do you use to make sure that you have the right people? After all, they live six-thousand miles from you.

To start with, we advertise, not only online but in the Shabbat publications distributed throughout the country. We also contact former shelihim and ask them to spread the word amongst their friends and colleagues, which is often a great source of candidates. That’s how we build our pool of applicants, and it usually generates a lot of interest. We sift through the applications to find the applicants who we think are most appropriate. Then comes the hard part.

We really want to see these people face-to-face, and to see them teaching in their native environments. There’s only one real way to do that, and that is to physically come to Israel and visit them in their schools (or in other schools with which we have a relationship where they will let them teach a model lesson). For many years I was the one who made the trip, now it’s usually somebody else, and I will often come after that for a second round of interviewing.

It can be grueling, sometimes being in five different cities over the span of a few days. It’s a big investment of time and energy, but it’s really worth it. After all, both for them and for us, moving your family halfway around the world is a big decision, and we both want to make sure that it’s a good fit. If it works, as I said earlier, it can be really great. And if it doesn’t work, it can be awful, and we want to make sure that it’s going to be great for everyone.

We’re obviously looking for a certain teaching style. We’re not looking for someone who’s an excellent frontal teacher, because we don’t really believe in that much frontal teaching, so we’re looking for somebody who we think will fit into the more interactive and collaborative culture that we have in our school. We’re looking for the person who we think will be able to make that cultural shift. We’re looking for warmth. I’m looking for warmth.

To see those things, we need to see them in their environments. That’s why we come, whether it’s me or someone else on the team. We also do real check-ins with their references to get a real sense of how they function when we are not watching. We speak to former shelihim, who often know the candidates.

One of the things that I really see as important is the attitude that we are both going to learn from each other. The shelihim will learn from us and we will learn from them. We’re going to struggle with each other; we’re going to learn from each other. I think that that has been a great secret of our success—that quality of preparedness to learn is helpful for their adaptation and is one of the things that we look for in our shelihim.

Then there is the question of where they will fit best—first grade and middle school are very different jobs, so their own experience is really important. Then there are the other considerations. Are both members of the couple going to be teaching or just one? If it’s just one, what will the other one be doing? Do they want a job? Do they have a job? Have they taught before? This can be a serious issue, and can get very complicated.

How do you overcome the culture shock they experience coming to America, coming to a school like SAR with open classrooms?

We’ve been doing it for a long time and we hope for magic, but we’re also aware that we have no clue, and they have no clue. Here are a few examples that many people don’t even think about.

Taxes work differently here than they do in Israel. When they come to us, they ask how much they will be making. I can give them the gross pay, but I can’t tell them what their take-home will be because it is so complicated and is dependent on so many factors. And they just want to know how much they will be getting for real so that they can figure out their finances. I have this conversation all the time, and I understand their frustration. After all, they are uprooting their families and want to make sure that there will be enough for their family to live. And I want the same thing for them, but it can get complicated.

They don’t really know what tuition is. American tuition and Israeli tuition are in completely different universes. So, they think that America is the land of opportunity and then discover that it is expensive.

Health care is another big one. In Israel you just pay your taxes and you are part of kupat holim. It’s a very serious expense in America.

Schedules is another one. In Israel they are part of a union and there are only so many hours that they teach. We try to provide full-time jobs so that we can pay appropriately, but it often involves a lot more teaching than they are used to, and we expect them to be around and available even when they are not teaching.

In our case, the classrooms are different—most have never experienced anything like it. And then there’s the language. Even they are teaching in Hebrew, the social interactions with other teachers are in English. And then there are the students who don’t speak Hebrew at all, which creates an entirely different challenge.

Extra-curricular activities are another big difference. In Israeli schools, those things happen outside of the purview of the school, in hugim and youth groups. In America, the school is the hub for those activities, and teachers are often expected to be involved.

And then there are the ideological issues. In Israel, people are used to teachers with strong ideological (both religious and political) positions, and who do not have a hard time expressing them. That doesn’t work so well in many American schools, certainly not in ours. Shelihim sometimes have a hard time understanding how a school can be a Zionist school but still be open to a range of positions they consider intolerable. Our vision of what it means to be a religious role model is sometimes different from their visions, and those can lead to uncomfortable moments. We once took out an advertisement in one of those Shabbat bulletins which turned out to be published by an extremist group. We didn’t know and we got a number of applications from candidates who were not aligned with our religious philosophy. I don’t think it’s been a major source of tension, but it has definitely come up.

And here’s the other end of the difficulty. If they do come, and do adapt, and spend four great years with us, then it’s really hard for them to go back. They’ve been enriched by an experience unlike anything they had before, and have a hard time adjusting back to Israeli schools. In fact, many go back to very different kinds of jobs.

Some shelihim find it hard to go back to teaching in their previous environments, so much so that they leave the classroom altogether. Others work hard to find their place and manage to create completely new educational experiences in Israel, but it’s hard. Yossi Hershkovitz z”l, for example, was a shaliah at our school who went back after four years with us and became the principal of Pelech Banim, a boys’ high school. After he was killed in the Gaza war, I visited his school where they showed me some of what he tried to bring into the school and they thought that he was crazy—some open spaces, one room with walls made of glass, trying to move in the direction of open classrooms. He so much wanted to bring some of what he experienced into his new school and had to push the teachers and everyone else, and they are very proud of what he did, but the adjustment back is not easy.

If you could do something different with shelihim to make them more successful, what might that be?

On the technical side, I think we’ve come a long way. I would estimate that 90% of our shelihim have had wonderful experiences, and that means that we’ve had great experiences with them. We’ve grown a lot over the years, from the recruiting phase to the actual teaching in school, but I probably underestimate the effect that prep can do. We could certainly do a few more days of in-service before school starts including cultural adaptation. And there’s always more that we can do, on a communal level, to embrace them.