Temple B'nai Chaim has a full religious school curriculum, from pre-school ("Junior Chai") to grades 9/10.
For more information, please call Judy Klamka at (203) 544-8695, extension # 12.
Goals for religious education from “For our Children” by Leonard J. Berman:
“We want our children to be at home in their Jewishness, to have that comfortable sense of belonging which is such a rarity among us.
We want our children to sense their bond of union with the Jewish people and with all the children of men.
We want our children to appreciate the beauty and the richness of our customs and ceremonies and to observe them, not out of a sense of guilt, not out of a belief in their magical quality, but rather as an expression of their own recognition that a symbol or a ceremony is a technique of concretizing certain values.
We want our children to have a religious attitude toward life, to have a reverence for all that enhances life: to have a feeling for beauty and all that issues from being a part of this earth and this life. We want life and the religious understanding of it to be a joyous thing.
We want them to look upon religion as something to be discovered (not just inherited).”
Whole-person learning for a lifetime not only takes into account individual styles (how we learn), but also recognizes the importance of acquiring knowledge, believing, understanding, living/doing and belonging for creating and maintaining positive Jewish identity.