Community schools have become a leading force in North American Jewish education. With a growing number of institutes across the continent and an increasingly expanding target population, community schools are providing young adults of all denominations with possibilities for a quality Jewish education. Yet in order to maximize their potential impact on students, these schools need to do more than provide a basic Jewish education; they need to guide teens from all denominational backgrounds in building positive Jewish identities through which to sustain a meaningful Jewish life. This complex goal cannot be realized by conventional educational resources; it requires inspired educators, engaging curriculum, and schools equipped to realize a powerful vision.   TICHON is a comprehensive program that serves as a planning and resource center for leading community schools in North America. Addressing the challenge of Jewish education in the Diaspora, TICHON works with the three primary building blocks of education – teachers, principals and curriculum – to enhance the quality of the Jewish education across the continent systematically.   Structure     Faculty   TICHON is directed by master teacher Noam Zion. Its faculty includes Shalom Hartman Institute’s renowned senior scholars, such as Rabbi Prof. David Hartman and Rabbi Dr. Donniel Hartman, as well as promising junior scholars such as Dr. Micha Goodman and Dr. Melila Hellner-Eshed.    Contact   For more information, contact Noam Zion or Marlene Houri.   Target Population   With 150 graduates to date, TICHON has worked with more than 30 leading community schools in North America, and served more than 70 educators in the past year.   Reflections   “TICHON has become the very center of my life and identity, taking my work in Jewish education to places I hadn’t dreamed might exist. I come to teaching with a freshness, a willingness to experiment, and a desire to challenge myself, my students and my colleagues.” - Rabbi Yosi Gordon, senior educator, Talmud Torah Day School, St. Paul, Minnesota   “Studying at the Hartman Institute is a gift – a gift of Torah, collegiality and a unique experience of Israel. It is a gift because teaching can be a solitary occupation. As a veteran and master teacher, people visit my classroom to learn how to become better teachers – be they graduate students, new teachers or members of my department – but they don’t come to share feedback necessary for me to grow as a teacher. They don’t offer advice about how my lessons could have incorporated text in a deeper way, how the questions I posed might have allowed my students to experience hevruta more significantly, or how the students might have grown had I included art or commentaries or a new technique into our discussion of the Tanach. Since I have been blessed (and yes it is a blessing) to study at Hartman, I have never again felt the loneliness of being in the classroom. Studying at Hartman has introduced me to world renown scholars, has stimulated me to think in new ways about what I am teaching and how I am teaching it, has given me the opportunity to interact with and learn from top-notch colleagues in North America, and has inspired me to make study a regular part of my personal practice and my department’s practice. It has also allowed me to be in Israel to experience all that Israel is and means to the Jewish people and to me, as well as feel some of the struggles Israelis contend with on a daily basis." – Rabbi Leah Kroll, Rabbinic Director Milken Community Middle School   Educator Enrichment Program   This two-track program provides veteran Jewish studies teachers with a vital opportunity to expand their knowledge, replenish their energies, and deepen their connection to Judaism and the State of Israel to help elevate the quality of Jewish education and combat teacher burnout. The program’s first track – an intensive 25-month fellowship –  provides 15 outstanding teachers an intensive enrichment framework comprising three two-week summer seminars in Jerusalem, two two-day winter seminars in North America, two years of ongoing study, and a supervised curriculum writing project. The program’s second track, open to all Jewish studies educators, consists of an annual two-week summer seminar in Israel and annual two-day winter seminar in North America. These two tracks address key issues facing Jewish education in the modern world to help sustain and enhance teachers’ passion for their profession, while developing and producing new curricular units for use in the classroom. Examples of curricular units produced to date include, "Abortion Dilemmas," "Culture of Controversy; Shabbat and the Human Experience of Labor," "Shma - Decoding the Key to Jewish Spirituality," "The Dynamics of Tzedakah - From Dependence to Dignity," and "The First Jew – A Journey Begun with a Fateful Choice."