Makor Chaim has embarked on an ambitious plan to bring our methods and skills to educators around the world. Please see the following videos featuring overseas guests at Makor Chaim:

1) Voyage to the Heart – the  Fuchs Mizrachi Seminar

2) British Educators Visit Makor Chaim

3) Community Leaders from Malaysia & Singapore Visit

Here is the latest event in this exciting program:

Makor Chaim and Herzog College were excited to hold an innovative seminar in Gush Etzion May 27-June 3 hosting the staff of Fuchs Mizrachi School in Cleveland and Rabbi Jay Goldmintz from Maayanot in New Jersey.

The seminar is based on the “Lifnie V’Lifnim” alternate educators’ MA program run together by Makor Chaim and Herzog College. This program has been in existence for about 20 years and brings with it a tradition of “hands-on” practical experience together with an approach of renewal and originality in the field of formal and informal education in Israel. It was developed based on the widely lauded achievements of the Makor Chaim Yeshiva High School over the past 33 years under the leadership of Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Dov Zinger and our founder and president Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz.

Most of the sessions were held in Yeshivat Makor Chaim, Kfar Etzion with Rabbi Dov Zinger and the staff of our “alternate” MA educators program Lifnie V’Lifnim and the Beit Midrash L’Hitchadshut.

Workshop topics include:

1. From Teacher to Mentor: Developing tools for internal reflection as a person and as an educator. Developing skills in group facilitation.

2. The Holistic Approach: Mapping a class or school as a holistic organism (“Partzuf HaKitah”) and developing interpersonal and team abilities. Developing the ability to transform individual students into a group, acquiring the skills needed to produce a safe and creative classroom space for students and teacher as well as the “Third Partner” (Hashem).

3. Dialogue Skills: Developing learning and personal guidance skills which opens a window between the students and the text.

Vision:

The seminar seeks to develop educators who are in a constant process of spiritual growth and renewal, with an emphasis on the art of the encounter, on an authentic, non-cynical connection between students and teachers, between students and the text being studied and between the individual, the group and their Creator.

Participants are invited in order to learn and teach, but also to experience a transformation, undergoing an internal process individually and collectively, in recognition of the fact that in order to effect change in others, one has to undergo a process within himself.

The seminar combines frontal study as well as workshops where participants are invited to bring themselves, their world view and their own real time experience. In these workshops, educational and teaching staff experience various educational and learning events.

Goals:

• Personal and professional development of educators’ communication skills who wish to deepen and broaden their education and teaching skills and develop their personal and interpersonal capabilities.

• Development of self-awareness together with exposure to theoretical sources from the fields of psycho-therapeutic and Chassidic thought and their adaptation to the educational field.

• Providing participants with meaningful personal training and experiential learning. We believe that “Personal experience is the source of learning.”

• Developing the ability to connect and conceptualize between theoretical studies and personal experience.