If the Board of Jewish Ministers of Northern California has its way, young Israel in the West will grow up better versed in Jewish religious and historical learning than any preceding generation.
And this essential step toward the strengthening of the Jewish cause will be brought about by providing better trained teachers of Jewish studies—and more of them. For the rabbis recognize that Jewish education, like the broader fields of academic studies, has been reduced to an exact science and, to be successful, requires careful and thorough training of those selected to disseminate learning.
The vehicle through which this is to be brought about is the School for Jewish Studies, fostered by the Board of Ministers, and now destined to undergo a great broadening in its scope of activity and usefulness. It is to be linked in a measure with University of California academic work so that Jewish young men and women, inspired by the enthusiasm of education, can be trained on the campus to become teachers of Jewish subjects.
To understand the importance of the latest step taken by the rabbis requires a brief review of what they have done to date. Some six years ago the Board of Jewish Ministers, under the presidency of the late Rabbi Jacob Nieto, founded the School for Jewish Studies. The purpose of the school was to train young men and women to become teachers of Jewish subjects, theological and historical, in religious schools and like institutions.
RABBIS COMPRISED FACULTY
The rabbis made up the faculty of the school with the addition of visiting educational leaders from afar who from time to time augmented the ranks of the teaching ministers.
Numbers of trained graduates were turned out and placed in the religious schools of the various congregations in Northern California and in the several Talmud Torahs.
That, in itself, was a big forward step. It meant a more exact, more thorough teaching in the religious schools of reform and conservative congregations for up to this time academically trained Jewish teachers were serving largely the orthodox group through the Talmud Torah maintained by the Jewish Educational Society of San Francisco.
In the past several years the school for teachers has grown, embracing each year a larger number of students who enjoyed at each semester a wider and more extensive source of study.
So valuable was this work found to be that the Boaed of Ministers, at its recent meeting, decided to take more definite steps to broaden its field of usefulness.
According to Rabbi Elliot M. Bur-
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