H eadlines
Makom to Hold Second Annual Conference
L OCA L
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE STAFF
MAKOM COMMUNITY, a
Jewish enrichment center for
children, will host its second
annual conference from Aug.

8-10 to lead training in their
pedagogy of Jewish placemaking.

Fifty to 70 attendees from
more than 20 educational and
religious organizations will
attend the virtual conference,
funded in part by two grants
from the Jewish Federation of
Greater Philadelphia, in hopes
of finding ways to apply Jewish
placemaking to their religious
and after-school programs.

Makom Community
provides after-school programs,
b’nai mitzvah training and
summer camps to children
from pre-kindergarten through
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM Beverly Socher-Lerner (center) is Makom Community’s founding
director and conference co-organizer.
Courtesy of Makom Community
seventh grade in Center City
Philadelphia through the
lens of this pedagogy, which
emphasizes the application of
Jewish texts to how children
move through their lives and
interact with others.

“It brings our engagement
with Jewish wisdom and with
Jewish texts into our physical
space,” said Beverly Socher-
Lerner, Makom’s founding
JEWISH EXPONENT
director and conference
co-organizer. “It gives kids
and families lots of agency
to be interpreters of Jewish
tradition.” Among the conference
attendees is Beth Tikvah-
B’nai Jeshurun in Erdenheim.

According to synagogue Rabbi
Roni Handler, the confer-
ence will help inform how
the synagogue’s after-school
religious school program
can instill even more joyful
engagement in Jewish learning.

The religious school transitions
from an online to an in-person
format next year.

“We all needed to take a step
back over the last 18 months or
so and really look at what we’re
doing and why we’re doing it,”
Handler said. “As we start to
put the pieces back together, I
don’t want to just go back to
what was because that’s what
we’ve always done.”
The conference, which will
take place three hours per day
over three days, differs from its
first iteration last summer.

Though both confer-
ences are remote over Zoom,
last year, Jewish educational
organizations shared how they
were navigating programming
over the pandemic year, and
the conference wasn’t centered
around Jewish placemaking
consistently. This year, Makom will
provide the conference’s entire
curriculum and program,
focusing on applying the
pedagogy to
in-person teaching and learning. Makom
Community also hopes to learn
from this year’s conference
See Makom, Page 11
AUGUST 5, 2021
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