Good Friday morning!

Chabad emissaries are known for moving to far-flung locales to build a Jewish community, and this month, a young rabbi and his family did just that — setting up a homestead on an island that’s reachable only by plane or boat, and that many people feel is difficult to access.

But shed no tears for the rabbi: The name of the island is Martha’s Vineyard, the upscale Massachusetts vacation destination that attracts the likes of Bill Gates and Barack and Michelle Obama.

“People know a lot of things about Martha’s Vineyard, but they might not realize that it’s a very personable place,” Rabbi Tzvi Alperowitz, 25, the first-ever Chabad emissary on the Vineyard, told eJewishPhilanthropy. “It has a very friendly feel… That really spoke to us and that’s very much what we’re creating with Chabad — community.”

Alperowitz and his wife, Hadassah, were introduced to the island via his uncle, Yekusiel Alperowitz, a Chabad rabbi on the nearby Cape Cod. They began the process of moving to the Vineyard last year and recently purchased a house with the help of local benefactors. The median price of a home on the island has skyrocketed during the pandemic, from $875,000 in 2019 to more than $1.3 million this year.

Although the Alperowitzes plan to focus on year-round and seasonal residents, as opposed to weekend vacationers, the rabbi is very aware that he may soon be rubbing elbows with A-listers and billionaires, including the island’s long list of Jewish public figures. (To cite one example, Alan Dershowitz and Larry David got into a fight last year at a local store).

He isn’t daunted by the prospect. “You have celebrities and very important people, but I think what people like about Martha’s Vineyard is that it’s a very casual lifestyle,” he said. “It’s a place where everybody dresses the same, everybody drives the same cars. You can’t tell people apart.”

If Chabad makes it into the gossip pages, he said, he hopes it’s because two feuding celebrities are seen at Shabbat dinner together. The Chabad center’s housewarming event on Wednesday evening featured a buffet dinner and a bar with cocktails. Long-term, Alperowitz hopes to focus on holding community events.

Alperowitz grew up in the U.K. as the son of Chabad emissaries, and is not the first Chabadnik to set up shop among the rich and famous. He said emissaries in other destinations told him something he’s also seen for himself in his new home — his neighbors, whatever their status, want community.

“People are looking for connection much more than you think,” he said. “People are waiting for you to reach out and people want to be part of a Jewish community,” he said. One might think that “celebrities obviously have 100 people reaching out to them, they don’t want to hear from you, [but] it’s not true… People want to be reached out to.”

Read the full story here.

VIRTUAL EDUCATION

As homeschooling boomed during the pandemic, two Orthodox Jewish studies courses found an audience

Courtesy of Reuven Spolter

When Suri Kinzbrunner decided to homeschool her children in 2020, she still craved one piece of their old curriculum: Jewish education. That August, she discovered an online program called Kitah in a Facebook post. The program’s asynchronous learning model, in which lessons could be done on a child’s own time at their own pace for an affordable price, was exactly what Kinzbrunner was looking for. Her kids are some of at least 100 who signed up for Jewish education geared toward homeschooling during the pandemic, Daniela Cohen reports for eJewishPhilanthropy.

A pandemic boom: The national homeschooling rate doubled during the 2020-2021 school year, amid quarantines and school closures. Kitah, Hebrew for classroom, serves students from fifth to eighth grade. Another program, Gesher, Hebrew for bridge, is for kindergarten through sixth grade. Together they enrolled roughly 100 students last year.

Different modes of learning: “In general, homeschooled kids like learning for the sake of learning, and they’re generally more patient with the class,” said Chanie Kirschner, the creator of Gesher. “I have a couple homeschoolers where this is their only formal education… so they’re excited to come to Gesher and have a class. They’re really excited to take notes.”

Read the full story here.

PARSHA PHIL: SH’LACH

Returning to places we’ve never been: Rethinking the ‘mission trip’

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“There are lands many of us used to call home — lands contested over many centuries, witnesses to great migrations for both natural and human causes, lands where we had powerful friends and, all too often, even more powerful enemies. For those of us born in exile, these lands exist only in our parents’ and grandparents’ memories, tinged by nostalgia and regret, success and suffering. The prospect of entering the land and encountering the people living there now — making the imaginary real — after so many years away and so much intervening history, brings up complex emotions,” write Shawn Landres, Zuzana Riemer Landres and Gosia Szymanska Weiss, in this week’s Parsha Phil column for eJewishPhilanthropy, which was written during a community trip to Central Europe.

A different kind of trip: “That is the situation at the opening of this week’s parsha, Sh’lach, about what comes to be called a land of ‘milk and honey.’ It also aptly describes how many people feel about visiting Central and Eastern Europe, as members of IKAR will do over the next two weeks. We three — two of us born in socialist Poland and Czechoslovakia, respectively, and the third only a generation away and a bilingual dual citizen in his own right — have spent the last 18 months designing what we hope will be a different kind of “mission trip” for our community to Germany, Poland, Slovakia and Hungary. As it happens, the conceptual arc of Sh’lach points the way to our understanding of why our journey matters.”

Spies in disarray: “The parshah opens with conflict and division. The spies ordered to scope out the lands of Canaan are in disarray: some spin tales of giants (both food and people) while others obsess about the (un)likelihood of a successful conquest. The text is full of binaries, not only “us vs. them” but indeed us against ourselves. Few, maybe even no memories at all have survived intergenerational transmission during centuries of slavery; all they have with them, in fulfilment of a promise made in a distant past, are Joseph’s silent remains. By the middle of the parshah, however, the text shifts.”

Read the whole piece here.

STRONGER TODAY

The power of Jewish education

Chang Duong / Unsplash

“At my very core I believe that Jewish education has the capacity to make people better versions of themselves, to make the communities in which we live stronger, and indeed to make the world a better place,” writes David Bryfman, CEO of The Jewish Education Project, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

The glass is still half full: “The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated many preexisting conditions in Jewish education. There is a major Jewish educator shortage, Jewish education is too expensive, we are years behind technological trends, there is a mental health crisis, there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors, our kids don’t know how to confront antisemitism and a new generation of youth are more distant from Israel than previous generations… I could go on. We, as a community must acknowledge these challenges and rise now to meet them… And yet, despite all of these challenges and more, the glass is still half full.”

Read the whole piece here.

Worthy Reads

“At my very core I believe that Jewish education has the capacity to make people better versions of themselves, to make the communities in which we live stronger, and indeed to make the world a better place,” writes David Bryfman, CEO of The Jewish Education Project, in an opinion piece for eJewishPhilanthropy.

The glass is still half full: “The pandemic has exposed and exacerbated many preexisting conditions in Jewish education. There is a major Jewish educator shortage, Jewish education is too expensive, we are years behind technological trends, there is a mental health crisis, there are fewer and fewer Holocaust survivors, our kids don’t know how to confront antisemitism and a new generation of youth are more distant from Israel than previous generations… I could go on. We, as a community must acknowledge these challenges and rise now to meet them… And yet, despite all of these challenges and more, the glass is still half full.”

Read the whole piece here.

Pic of the Day

Chai Ben-Ami Solomon/Second Nurture

Volunteers — including actor Rebecca Pidgeon, seen here greeting foster parent Gail Lerner and Second Nurture founder Rabbi Susan Silverman (left) — packed travel cases with necessities, books and comfort items for children who are waiting for foster and adoptive families. The event was organized by Second Nurture, an organization that partners with communities to prioritize foster care and adoption.