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Makom to Hold Annual Conference
SASHA ROGELBERG | JE
STAFF M
akom Community, a
Jewish enrichment
center for children,
will host its second annual con-
ference 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
8 mitzvah training and summer
camps to children from
pre-kindergarten through
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
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-
AUGUST 26, 2021 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
COURTESY OF MAKOM COMMUNITY
Beverly Socher-Lerner (center) is Makom Community’s founding director and conference co-organizer.




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Gaby Marantz (right), Makom Community’s Jewish enrichment
lead educator, co-organized the conference with Socher-Lerner.

B’nai Jeshurun in Erdenheim.

According to synagogue Rabbi
Roni Handler, the conference
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, diff ers from
its fi rst iteration last summer.

Though both conferences
are remote over Zoom, last
year, Jewish educational orga-
nizations shared how they
were navigating programming
over the pandemic year, and
the conference wasn’t cen-
tered around Jewish place-
making consistently.

This year, Makom will pro-
vide the conference’s entire
curriculum and program,
focusing on applying the ped-
agogy to in-person teaching
and learning. Makom Commu-
nity also hopes to learn from
this year’s conference cohort
Clients able to invest a
minimum of $500,000 are likely
to best utilize our services.

We always
approach our
educational interactions as
just that — as an
interaction —
and less like a
top-down funnel.”
GABY MARANTZ
what challenges and success-
es they have encountered
when designing and execut-
ing educational programming.

In this way, Makom hopes to
learn from its attendees and
mirror the bi-directional learn-
ing environment it hopes to
instill in its students.

“We always approach our
educational interactions as
just that — as an interaction .

The conference begins in
conjunction with the opening
of Makom’s new South
Philadelphia location, which
opens next week at 1505 S.

13th St. Makom serves almost
50 children between its after-
school programs and b’nai
mitzvah training at its Sansom
Street location. Already more
than a dozen families are
enrolled in programming at
the new location. l
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