Drisha minyan refocused, revitalized
The one-year-old Drisha minyan, which was created to engage students in activities other than mandatory prayer, is operating this year on a new schedule requiring students to participate in conventional prayer once every three days.

Students will now rotate activities based on the school’s block schedule, a change from last year’s five-day rotation schedule in which students prayed only every fifth day.
Jewish Texts teacher Paul Blank, who leads the prayers, hopes to provide students with different types of services.

“I want to try to make [the service] as interesting as possible,” he said. “I want to make the prayer experience as diverse as possible.”

Interim Principal Roslyn Landy hopes that the new format will give the program more focus.

“When there was a rotation based on the days of the week, the Drisha minyan leaders felt that there was little continuity and some minyans met far fewer times than others,” Landy said.

The change in format means that students will not be exposed to all the possible Drisha activities in one year.

This will allow minyan leaders to re-use curricula in future years—an advantage of the change, according to Landy.
J

udaics Director Rabbi Avi Weinstein hopes to build a three-year curriculum for the Drisha minyan program, which is currently two leaders short of the 12 needed to run a three-year cycle.

Sept. 11 assembly evokes emotion
Three years and two days after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, students gathered in the theater for a commemorative assembly, the focus of which was to memorialize the day’s events.

Students making jokes and talking with their classmates in the hall immediately stopped as they entered the theater and were greeted by a projection of Ground Zero on the stage.

After everyone had taken their seats, the lights were shut off and the American and Israeli national anthems were sung.

Junior Jonathan Sachs then spoke about the “duty of our generation to ‘always remember’ being afraid…[and] our feelings of disbelief that airplanes could be used as weapons against our seemingly impenetrable and indestructible homeland.”

Sachs likened the attacks to those on Pearl Harbor in 1941, emphasizing the ability of Americans to “rise up to combat aggressors and defend their country…and to always remember.”

A short recap of the Sept. 11 attacks immediately followed the speech, as junior Nathaniel Zuk played John Lennon’s Imagine on the piano in the background.

Following the recap, junior Jacob Berman read the Mourner’s Kaddish which preceded a moment of silence. Then, the song Higher by Creed was played and a slide-show of images from the day of the attacks concluded the ceremony.

According to sophomore Zoe Fox, Creed’s song was a poor choice for an assembly that was so meaningful.

“It took away the meaning that was originally there in the assembly and left me with a catchy song in my head which was not appropriate,” she said.

According to junior Jacob Lerner, he and many students surrounding him were teary-eyed in response to the touching ceremony. “Three years later it evokes the emotions much more powerfully than it did on that day,” Lerner said.

The assembly was set up by the five members of an assembly-planning committee: Sachs, Berman, and juniors Ezra Deutsch-Feldman, Daniel Maughan and Daniel Green.

According to Sachs, the committee was disappointed that there was no assembly last year. Sachs reiterated that he truly believed in what he said in his speech, stressing the importance of remembering the attacks for many generations.

It was good that we remember three years later, “but it is about 20 years and 25 years later” that we should remember and teach our children, he said.

In addition to the assembly, seniors who attended the grade Shabbaton over the weekend of Sept. 11 held a memorial ceremony in which students and teachers sat around a campfire and recalled personal memories of the morning of the attacks.

Most students were within the halls of JDS that morning, and many had memories shared with others in the group. The remembrance, which lasted almost two unscripted hours, was a new way for many students to remember the tragedy.

According to senior Sybil Ottenstein, who attended the Shabbaton, “everyone found the memorial meaningful and was very moved by the ceremony.”

Board president to focus on community
Taking over Amy Goott’s position as Board of Directors President, parent and active volunteer Nancy Hamburger will be serving as president for the next two years.

This year, Hamburger aims to continue to increase fund raising and non-tuition revenue by kicking off the endowment campaign.

“Increasing the endowment is just one way the parents of today and the Board of today can work to ensure the stability of the school for years to come,” she said.

Another one of her goals is to develop a stronger sense of community as the school grows in size.

“We are working together with the PTA and the administration to create communities within the community. So we will be having programs, lectures and other occasions for people to get together,” she said.

These programs include Lehrhouse, chaired by Leesa Fields, an evening that serves as an opportunity for the faculty to teach and educate parents.

In addition, there was a committee created for the sole purpose of sustaining the feel of community, called the Community Building Committee, chaired by Elizabeth Oser and Elizabeth Smith.

Hamburger added that her past tenure as PTA president will especially help in building a sense of community as she felt enhancing the community sense of the school was a major part of that job.

Hamburger has been very active within the JDS volunteer community over the past many years, serving as PTA vice president, co-president and president, chairman of the Nediv Lev campaign, board vice president, and chairman of recruitment and retention.

According to Hamburger, she enjoyed working on recruitment and retention the most as the committee is focused on admissions, and she felt that it was very rewarding to see new JDS families become familiar with the school and its community.

Looking back on her term as Board President, Goott thinks that “the major accomplishment was focusing the board on the importance of fund-raising development work and having everyone feel that they had a role in helping.”

She is very proud that people began to understand that “it was a number one priority for the school to get to a higher level in the [fund-raising] development work,” she said.

Hamburger was selected following a process which began with the Nominations Committee proposing a slate of 11 candidates, who were then elected at the next meeting through a written ballot.

A candidate must receive more “yes” votes than “no” votes in order to become president.
The new co-vice presidents this year are Elizabeth Schrayer and Anne Mayerson, along with Secretary Jerry Pasternak and Treasurer Donald Kaplan, all of whom were included in the slate of 11 candidates and elected to office.

Changes to ninth-, tenth-grade Judaics
A number of non-elective Judaics classes were added to freshman and sophomore curricula this year. It was the first revision of the one-year-old Judaics elective program, which was originally implemented to give students more course choices.

With the revision, freshmen can choose between two Bible courses: Spirituality and Statehood or Parashat HaShavuah, but must take two Rabbinics courses: Cradle to Grave and Ethical Dilemmas, and a Jewish History class, Major Themes in Jewish History I.

Sophomores must take Major Themes in Jewish History II, a course that was not required last year.

Last year, students were required to take a Bible course, Major Themes in Jewish History I, and two Rabbinics courses at some point over the two years.

Administration and faculty decided to make the change in order to provide students with a stronger foundation of Judaics knowledge.

After an elective system was phased in over the past semesters, the administration and teachers were worried that with complete freedom in their schedules, students were not getting some of the background essential to their education.

“It would be better for freshmen to complete their requirements in ninth grade,” said Interim Principal Roslyn Landy. “It would give them a stronger base of knowledge.”

Some students expressed dismay at having fewer choices regarding which Judaics courses they could take.

“The administration shouldn’t make more mandatory classes because they brought this new system of electives so we could choose what we wanted to do,” said sophomore Zaqui Misri.

“Now we can take only a few of the classes we wanted to take,” he said.
Freshman Ron Birnkrant, whose class had fewer Judaics electives than the previous freshman class, was not bothered by having fewer choices.

“Because I never experienced the course experiences that [the class of 2007] took I’m fine with the course choices now,” he said.

Other students were pleased with the addition of the mandatory classes.

“While we have less choice than we did last year, I think I would still choose Major Themes II, for example,” sophomore Alex Gruhin said.

“It gives me a background to what we are discussing and studying in other classes.”