Since 2010, the Aleph Society has spearheaded the organization of a “Global Day of Jewish Learning” to “bring the Jewish people together once a year to celebrate our shared Jewish texts through community-based learning,” according to the project’s website.
The Milwaukee Jewish community has been invited to participate in it previously. But it did not because the community for 15 years had its own annual Day of Discovery, said Steven Baruch, Ph.D.
Baruch is the director of the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and one of the community groups that ran the Day of Discovery.
This year, Baruch told The Chronicle, there will not be a Day of Discovery. “There was a feeling that the event had become a little stale” and “participation was not what it used to be,” he said.
Instead, the Milwaukee community for its first time will participate in the Global Day of Jewish Learning along with Jews in some 40 countries and 400 communities around the world.
“This seems like a slightly different approach” to adult Jewish learning, and it “allows us to be part of something going on in a lot of different places,” Baruch said.
This event will take place on Sunday, Nov. 16, 1 to 6 p.m., at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center, 6255 N. Santa Monica Blvd.
The opening two hours will be devoted to two live interactive broadcasts. The first will feature Ruth Calderon, Ph.D., a member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) and a scholar and teacher active in encouraging secular Israelis to learn traditional Jewish texts.
The second will feature the world-renowned Talmud translator/commentator Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, who Baruch said is “the driving force” behind the Global Day.
In fact, the Aleph Society, according to its website, was founded in 1988 “to support [Steinsaltz’s] worldwide network of institutions, educational programs and publishing projects.”
The society’s New York office organizes the Global Day, but it has operations in Israel, Russia and United Kingdom as well.
The remaining three hours will offer learning sessions led by local people: Judaic educators Sherry Blumberg, Ph.D., and Jody Hirsh of the JCC; Rabbi Wes Kalmar of Anshe Sfard Kehillat Torah; Jerry Kaye, director of the Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute; and Marc Tasman, senior lecturer in Journalism, Advertising and Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Each Global Day of Jewish Learning is devoted to a specific theme. This year’s is “Heroes, Villains, Saints and Fools: The People of the Book.”
Baruch said the Aleph Society provides a curriculum for this theme, but “our speakers are going to pick their own approaches.”
Participating in the Global Day of Jewish Learning is not the only innovation that CJL will be trying this year.
Also in November, CJL plans to release the first issue of “Vistas in Adult Jewish Education,” and to keep publishing it every three months.
It will list adult Jewish educational opportunities throughout the Milwaukee area. “We will encourage people to attend each other’s events, to go outside of their normal place of learning and to study together,” Baruch said.
Baruch said it is not certain whether Milwaukee participation in the Global Day will become an annual event. That could happen, or “we may rotate several events” or “try something else, or go back to the Day of Discovery.”
“We’re in an experimental mode,” he said.
Milwaukee’s Global Day of Jewish Learning is co-sponsored by the CJL, the JCC and the Wisconsin Council of Rabbis. Admission to it is free.
For more information, visit JCCMilwaukee.org/TheGlobalDay or call 414-967-8249.
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