The 18 "boards" that make up the Hebrew Wizards app cover Torah and Jewish holidays in a game form.

GREENWICH – Jane Slotin says that, for hundreds of thousands of American Jewish kids, the words “Hebrew school” and “ugh” are too easily uttered in the same breath. She is dedicating her professional career to detaching the two, scouring the country for innovative ideas to share among educators. She believes she has found an effective tool in Greenwich.
Slotin is executive director of PELIE, the Partnership for Effective Learning and Innovative Education, whose mission is to substantially improve supplemental Jewish education in the U.S., thereby transforming the field itself. PELIE searches out effective educational models to adapt and spread to other Jewish institutions.

Deborah Salomon rolled out an app that brings a curriculum of Torah and Jewish holidays to the touch screen

“When you’re talking about education, we’re in what I call the ‘pass-back generation,'” Slotin says. “When a family gets into the car, Mom or Dad will often pass back their iPhone, and the kids now know to hit that little icon and they can access an app to play a game or learn a song during the trip. Given that there’s a commute to any Jewish educational institution, how cool would it be to have an app related to Jewish education?”
And that’s exactly what Deborah Salomon was thinking as well. The founder and director of Hebrew Wizards, an innovative Hebrew school and Jewish congregation in Greenwich, Salomon rolled out an app earlier this year that brings a curriculum of Torah and Jewish holidays to the touch screen.
“The main reason I wanted to have an app is that I am an ex-Wall Street girl and believe in any Apple product whatsoever,” Salomon says. “I believe that the best way to disseminate information is through modern technology, so kids can do a homework assignment on computer in a really fun way.”
The 18 “boards” that make up the Hebrew Wizards app cover Torah and Jewish holidays in a game form. The player chooses an avatar (a graphical representation) from a list of Jewish heroes and heroines, studying the material – which is also presented in the classroom – and taking a quiz. When the student gets all the questions right, he or she receives a virtual gold coin, which can be exchanged for prizes at Hebrew Wizards.
The app also engages families, with each member choosing their own avatar and learning the material together, Salomon says, which is one of the cornerstones of Hebrew Wizards. “We first grew a Hebrew school and then we grew a congregation out of that,” she says.
The program has been downloaded by users throughout the English-speaking world and in Israel, and in surprising locations like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and Singapore.
Salomon’s father was a rabbi and both her parents were Jewish educators. She was working on Wall Street when her brother passed away 10 years ago.
“I left Wall Street to do something unique and offer something to my heritage,” she says. “Getting involved in Jewish education may not have offered the same kind of financial rewards, but has given me a far better return.”
After teaching at Temple Sholom in Greenwich for a decade, Salomon left to start Hebrew Wizards community. Her theory: first engage the kids; the rest of the family will follow. The school and congregation now involve some 80 active families, 100 children, and 30 teens who serve as teaching assistants. More than 60 Hebrew Wizards children have become b’nei-mitzvah.
“Most people in my community want to feel that they’re Jewish and raise their kids Jewish but don’t want to do so via the traditional techniques,” Salomon says. “So how to engage them in a different way so that they feel more bonded and into it?”
Slotin points to the Hebrew Wizards model as an example of a new bottom-up trend, as opposed to the traditional top-down direction of education.
“The field of Jewish education is relatively new,” she says. “We used to live a Jewish life and education was an integrated part of everyday life. But in the ‘40s and ‘50s, we created a structure called ‘Jewish education.’ It was a top-down system, like public education. Now you’re seeing families saying that they want Jewish engagement for their children, not just one day a week, and not Jewish dayschool, but more than one day a week. Hebrew Wizards speaks to that model.” And technology has the potential to re-weave Jewish education into everyday life.
Slotin and Salomon are discussing ways to use Hebrew Wizards and the app in other communities. The app is already attracting attention on its own, downloaded in countries as diverse as Saudi Arabia, England, and Singapore as well as North America and Israel.
“In the world of technology, we talk about ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants,'” Slotin says. “For today’s preschoolers and first- and second-graders, technology is like oxygen: it’s not something they learn; it just is. We older adults are ‘digital immigrants,’ just trying to learn and stay on top of the technology that comes naturally to our children. So in education, we leapfrog into the world of technology, and Deb wasn’t waiting on anybody – she knows that’s where her audience and families are, and she knows that technology is the language of the future. I look at a lot of models and Hebrew Wizards incorporates the best of best practices – creating Jewish engagement for our kids. Deb’s app is an A-1 model that has all the components – family engagement, assessing the student’s learning, differentiated learning. It meets the modern family where it is: if you can’t come on a Tuesday, you come on a Sunday, and you can engage in learning even when you’re not in the classroom. Deb has now passed technology forward.”