HOME | Teach Their Chapter

If you teach Bar and Bat Mitzvah students in Europe, or aspire to, please join us this spring for an inaugural online 16-week course.

Rabbi Nathan Alfred, will teach, partnering with the National Library of Israel, alongside expert guest lecturers. Rabbi Nathan Alfred has more than two decades of experience teaching and leading Bnei Mitzvah, The program concludes with an in-person weekend in Jerusalem.

Our goal is to help European Jewish communities meet the huge challenge of teaching the next generation.

In communities without full-time rabbis (and often even when there is one), the task of teaching Bar/Bat Mitzvah students falls to lay leaders. This course helps to train them to prepare their children for this key life-changing event.

While taught from a Progressive, gender equal perspective, the course is open to all. Topics covered will include Torah and Haftarah, Prayer, History of Bar and Bat Mitzvah, Cantillation, Overcoming Pedagogical Challenges, Homiletics and other contemporary Jewish issues.

The 2023 course has finished, but if you are interested in joining us in a future program - please email us at admin@teachingtheirchapter.org

"We are now entering the third year of our Progressive Bnei Mitzvah education program (named Mitsva Power, by the students). The program has grown quickly but with its growth, we have struggled greatly with the individualized tutoring that Bnei Mitzvah students need. While we teach prayer, Hebrew, and Jewish studies, there is a real lack of in resource well-qualified tutors."

Avital Shein

Education and Ritual Director,

Progressive Judaism in Stockholm

"We regularly struggle to find people to teach those classes. There is both a lack of teaching material(or awareness of where to find it), but even more people able to teach it, and in the appropriate language."

Community Leaders tell us they need this course

Viljamas Žitkauskas
Chairman,

Beit Maskilim community
Vilnius, Lithuania

David Weis

President of the Liberal Jewish Community of Luxembourg

"As a newborn congregation leader, without a full-time rabbi, we need a teacher we can inspire our children to become an adult in the eyes of God, Torah, family."