Traffic Affects Jewish Education

by Jeremy Davis, Lubavitch.com

With more than 1000 new cars on the road every day, Brazil ranks among the worst traffic cities in the world. It’s so bad, many will do whatever they can to avoid spinning their wheels on Sao Paulo’s congested roads.

According to Rabbi Yossi Alpern, Director of Beit Chabad do Brasil, that’s partly to blame for why many Jewish families in some of Sao Paulo’s rural areas won’t send their children to Jewish schools.

“The traffic here is unbearable,” said Alpern. “People are looking for alternatives to get what they need without driving.”

Alpern is planning to unveil an alternative day school that he believes will radically alter the Jewish education experience for Brazilian Jews. Now in the process of developing an online Hebrew School that will bring Jewish studies into their homes, he expects to reach Brazil’s population of Jewish students who live outside of the main Jewish population centers of Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro.

The Jewish Online School of Beit Chabad will reach out to Jewish families in 223 cities and towns in Brazil that have no Jewish schools. Alpern hopes to sign up at least 50 Portuguese-speaking students between ages 10 to 12 for the initial digital course, scheduled to launch in March 2012. The multimedia experience will, he expects, ultimately attract a large portion of Brazil’s population of about 120,000 Jews.

The initial course, an intensive 12-week digital and multimedia experience, will teach students about the Jewish calendar and holidays using an imaginative mix of videos, multimedia games, and interactive activities, as well as online reading materials. Students will explore a new topic every week with video, audio, and reading components produced specifically for this course.

The Jewish Online School will also allow students the opportunity to earn awards for completing each activity, through a method similar to the “badges” earned on the popular location-based social networking website Foursquare.

The curriculum for this program was developed by Carlos Seabra and Michel Metzger, two Brazilian innovators of educational software. Seabra is editorial coordinator at TV Cultura and Metzger is president of the council of Cidade Escola Aprendiz and coordinator of pedagogic computer science at Iavne School.

They worked together previously while developing the multimedia educational program at Sao Paulo University’s Escola do Futuro, the “School of the Future.”

Alpern has a flair for working with creative individuals like Seabra and Metzger to develop innovative programs for the Beit Chabad. As the son of a rabbi and a schoolteacher who moved to Rio de Janeiro from New York in the early 1960s, he learned at a young age to get along with many different kinds of people.

Sticker Collection

In 1980, when Alpern was a an elementary school student, his dad, Rabbi Shabsi Alpern, tapped into the sticker craze so popular with young kids at the time. Alpern’s fond memory of this activity, shared by many of his former classmates thirty years later, now inspired him to create a new sticker album for Jewish school students.

The idea, he explains, is that instead of trading in stickers produced by Disney or other entertainment companies, they’ll get busy trading stickers with Jewish content and compete with each other to complete their albums.

Beit Chabad will print 312,000 of the new stickers, created by a team of designers led by a local Brazilian designer named Vitor Elman, and will distribute them to Jewish schools and community organizations that will then use them as prizes or incentives.

Each page of the 28-page album will have 10 stickers with messages about Jewish values or topics such as “Torah,” “Moses,” “Love Your Fellow,” and “Make the World A Better Place.”

It’s another way of reaching kids through their own games and activities with meaningful content and good Jewish information.