In the last issue of the ESRA Magazine, #150, several pages were devoted to the 30th ESRA Annual General Meeting (AGM).With the closing of the business meeting and the elections, however, the participants of the AGM settled back in their chairs to listen to and learn from our special guest of the evening, Lisa Levy.  She shared with her audience a new approach to educating children, an approach which attempts to bridge the separation between “religious” and “secular” which she sees as being perpetuated via a system of state religious and state secular schools. 

Lisa Levy is the principal of the Yachad Experimental Elementary School in Modiin.  She and the Yachad movement challenge the current divisive approach in Israeli education and are dedicated to promoting Jewish dialogue and education in an environment that integrates children from different Jewish backgrounds.

Yachad Modiin’s diverse school community includes over 580 families with different Jewish identities (orthodox, conservative, reform, secular, traditional, mixed) as well as from a range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds.  The school embraces over 1,000 children including those with special needs and reaches outside the community to help those in need. 

A visit to the school showed boys and girls, some children wearing kippot and others not, actively playing and learning together under the guidance of enthusiastic teachers.  Secular and religious students grow up together and their families meet in an accepting environment that acknowledges differences in others and focuses on the centrality of building a Jewish society with a common Jewish language in the State of Israel.

Lisa Levy speaks clearly and passionately about her educational philosophy, and under her capable leadership Yachad Modiin has served as a model for the opening of a new pluralistic stream of schools in Israel.  In 2008 the State of Israel enacted a law recognizing a third stream of education, state pluralistic schools, and the Yahad Modiin elementary school was one of the two schools examined as a prototype for this law.  It is now one of the first eight “third stream” schools in Israel.

Lisa Levy studied law at Tel Aviv University and practiced for 10 years as a corporate lawyer and partner in a Tel Aviv law firm.  Changing professional direction, she became a Fellow in the Mandel School for Educational Leadership, taught for three years in the SAR Academy in New York where she also completed an M.A. in politics and education from Teachers’ College at Columbia University.  She has been at the Yachad school in Modiin since 2005.