B’hootz Children’s Jewish Nature Program
Bringing Torah to Life with the Seasons
Give your kids the opportunity to participate in Wilderness Torah’s children’s program with Jewish environmental educator Ariela Ronay-Jinich!
- Expands year-round programming to younger children
- Mitzvah service sessions doing restoration work at Redwood Regional Park
- Program launch day includes parallel learning for parents with Zelig Golden, co-founder of Wilderness Torah, on mentoring Jewish children through nature connection.
- Lays a broad foundation of nature connection and mentorship for B’Naiture, Wilderness Torah’s Bar and Bat Mitzvah program
- Empowers young adults to become effective nature-based Jewish educators and mentors through hands-on education apprenticeships
Register now for Spring Program!
Bring to life the lessons of the Jewish people wandering in the wilderness as we develop important community and wilderness survival skills in the forest, including foraging, tracking, shelter-building, fire-building, and lost-proofing. Our skill-building will be embedded in Torah stories as we travel through the Jewish calendar from Tu B’Shvat, the New Year of the Trees, toward Passover, the day of our liberation from slavery into wilderness!
Fees: $400, $350 sibling discount, scholarships available. Register Now!
Fall 2012
Breishit: In the Beginning/Creation
10-week session for 8-10 year-olds, meets at Redwood Regional Park.
Begin the Jewish New Year by experiencing the wonders of creation and our role as co-creators! Through story, nature exploration, and play, we will lay the groundwork for a Torah-based relationship between Adam, human, and Adamah, the earth. We will engage with Jewish blessings, prayer, and biblical stories. On the trail we will see them come to life through forest ecology, survival skills, and nature games.
Sundays, Dates TBD
If you have questions about the program, please contact Ariela.
More About B’hootz:
B’hootz is a nature-based Jewish learning program for children in the Bay Area of any denomination or observance level who seek to integrate and ground nature-based exploration and environmental action within Jewish spirituality, tradition, and ethics. Classes will meet at regional parks throughout the East Bay.
B’hootz is an opportunity for children to bring Torah to life through discovery of the natural world and an on-going, experiential conversation between what they learn in the sciences and what they learn through Jewish studies.
Skills developed through the program include Jewish ritual and text skills– blessings, prayers, texts and Chasidic lore, as well as skills that come from part of being a functional community in nature, including naturalist, survival, and leadership skills.
We hope children can have the opportunity to develop their relationship to creation within a tradition that is rich with insight and guidance in this regard. We also hope for Jewish children to have the opportunity to claim their own Jewish spirituality in a way that is personally meaningful, relevant, and absolutely experiential.
Ariela Ronay-Jinich, B’hootz Program Manager and Lead Educator is an alumn of the Teva Learning Center, an educational organization that implements Jewish environmental curriculum among hundreds of students, families, and Jewish insitututions on the East Coast. Beyond her work as a field educator with Teva in the Berkshire mountains, she has also worked as the Garden Coordinator for Camp Tawonga in California for several years. She spent a year in Israel learning Torah and other traditional texts, focusing on those relevant to ecology and earth-based Judaism through the Eco-Activist Beit Midrash in Jerusalem. She now works at Gan Shalom Preschool and Torat haLev, Chochmat HaLev’s new religious school program. She has dedicated years of Jewish text-based learning, pedagogical training, and free play in nature, toward creating the B’hootz curriculum.
This Program is Supported by the Save the Redwoods League.
