Teachers from HALB Middle School, SKA, and DRS attended Day One of the Civic Spirit Educators Institute earlier this week. At the Institute, teachers from all three schools worked with neighboring schools to gain the tools to cultivate student connection to our country’s founding values and institutions, to empower them to become influential in their communal landscape, and to increase knowledge of foundational American texts and ideas.

This past week, Rabbi Ahron Bookson, assistant menahel, came into Rabbi Engelberg’s second grade class at Yeshiva Tiferes Moshe to give them an oral farher upon completion of perek yud-tes. Random questions and m’farshim went flying around the room, with children intuitively answering on the mark. They read p’sukim while highlighting the storyline, chapter and verse. The farher was quite successful and revealing, with every child being rewarded with scrumptious chocolate milk that afternoon for lunch. Perek kaf, here we come!

The middle school students at the Bnos Malka Academy had the privilege of meeting Rabbi Yosef Mendelevitch and hearing his remarkable story. The former Jewish refusenik in the former Soviet Union spent 11 years in the Gulag before gaining his “Chanukah miracle” release in 1981.

It is a truly amazing phenomenon that a person who went through so much personal pain and tragedy can be in a position to offer chizuk to others, but that encapsulates who Rabbi Leo Dee is, and how he is coping with tremendous personal loss. MTA talmidim were privileged to be able to attend Rabbi Dee’s lecture to YU students on Monday afternoon in MTA’s own beis midrash. The room was packed with talmidim from grades 9-12, YU students, and rebbeim as well. It was standing room only, as everyone realized how much they could benefit from Rabbi’s Dee’s moving words.