The Movement for Reform Judaism

The Leo Baeck Education Centre was founded in 1938 as a small kindergarten class for German-born Jewish children.

Under the leadership of Rabbi Dr. Meir Elk, it soon added an eight-year primary school with more than 250 children. It also established a secondary school, where Leo Baeck’s outstanding teachers imparted their knowledge of the sciences, humanities and Jewish studies to 300 highly motivated students.

During these early years, in a small apartment building on Hillel Street, Dr. Elk worked with unfailing energy and spirit to establish Leo Baeck as an institution that would strive to teach its young people, "tolerance, understanding and respect for any honest opinion that enhances humanism in the spirit of Rabbi Leo Baeck."

Another Reform Rabbi, Robert "Bob" Samuels, who was later to become headmaster and general manager of Leo Baeck, introduced innovative courses in Judaism. He also initiated prayer services by inviting staff and students to his home on Shabbat and by leading services at the school and on Shabbat retreats.

A Reform Movement initiative, the centre is a member of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, with a synagogue, Ohel Avraham – where more than 1,000 people worship - an early childhood education centre, as well as primary and secondary schools. It is home to more than 1,600 students. For its overwhelming success in so many divergent areas, the centre has been awarded The Israel Education Prize, a certificate of merit from the Ministry of Health for Health Promotion in the Workplace, the Haifa Education Prize for Outstanding Parent-Teacher Organization, the Jewish Agency Prize for Immigrant Absorption, and the Haifa Education Prize for Outstanding School.
More than 5,000 students have participated in its Lokey International Academy of Jewish Studies on educational programmes and teacher training courses.

Haifa is one of the most diverse cities in Israel, with Jews and Arabs living side-by-side. There are pockets of poverty, unemployment and social deprivation in the Wadi Salib neighbourhood, in the lower town, and Hampstead-like luxury in the Denya and French Carmel suburbs.

More than 2,500 Jews and Arabs from the culturally mixed neighbourhood of Ein Ha’yam were offered educational, cultural and social services at Leo Baeck’s Clore Neighbourhood Centre, and more than 120 Arab and Jewish children enjoy Leo Baeck’s annual Arab-Jewish Summer Camp.

Because it attracts such a diverse community, 76 hungry Leo Baeck middle and secondary school families receive special holiday food packages. The centre also caters for more than 80 “at risk” Jewish and Arab children at its afternoon centres throughout the Haifa area.

It also looks after special-needs children who are not part of the Leo Baeck community – more than 790 children from Haifa’s special education institutions have learned to swim at the centre’s swimming pool complex.
 
The swimming complex and high-tech sports centre attracts more than 5,000 men, women and children.

Rabbi Dr Tony Bayfield, the head of the Reform Movement in the UK, said: "The Leo Baeck Centre represents everything that is exciting and innovative in the work of Reform Judaism in Israel.  It offers a cradle to grave programme of quality Jewish education; it reaches out and responds to the needs of the surrounding constituency - secular Jews as well as Progressive; it provides models which it encourages Israeli Arab educators and schools to adopt."

For more information on the Leo Baeck Education Centre, click here

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