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Upcoming Events
November 28- December 5
PTA Book Fair
November 27- December 8
PTA Toy Drive
December 2
Motzaei Shabbat Learning
6:30-7:30pm
Book Fair Night
6:00-7:00pm
Wednesday December 6
70th Annual Scholarship Banquet
Early Dismissal!
The Beverly Hilton Hotel
Reserve at
See Flyer in Happenings
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Magazine Drive!
By popular demand, we are bringing back our online Magazine Sales and Renewals program to help us raise needed funds for the Hillel PTA. Your help is appreciated and will make a huge difference in our success! Click here to
shop online now
.
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Give your children the gift of healthy food. A fun and enjoyable treat! Fruit cart sign-up entitles your student to a bag of fresh fruit once a week during the entire school year. Fruit cart is available for Grades Pre-1 to 8 on Wednesday mornings. Sign up online here for the remainder of the year.
Co-Sponsor a Rosh Chodesh Breakfast for the teachers and staff in in honor of your child's bar mitzvah, birthday, or teacher; or in honor or memory of someone you love. The teachers
really appreciate
this gesture
! The next Rosh Chodesh teacher breakfast will be Monday, November 20th ,but you can sign up online in advance for any month. $100, or add multiple times to your cart to contribute $200 or $300 if desired.
Your birthday child will get to choose a new book for the library with a dedication to him or her inside, check it out first, and have their picture proudly on display in the library.
Kids love to see their names in the books!
Excess funds will be used for recreational supplies like games, balls, hula hoops and jump ropes.
The next birthday celebration will be Tuesday, December 26th.
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Parnas Hayom
Parnas
HaYom
is a beautiful way to honor a yarzheit, merit a refuah shelemah, or celebrate a simcha. Dedicating the Torah learning of students at Hillel to mark an occasion helps us to imbue both a love of learning and appreciation for the value of Torah scholarship.
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November 27
...is generously sponsored in
loving memory of
Rachel Avigail bat Iris.
She was a teacher for 10+ years at Ohr Eliyahu.
May the learning of Hillel's students be a zechut to her memory & may her neshama have an aliyah.
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November 28
...is generously sponsored, in honor of a refuah shelema for Mr. Ezra Sassoon Yakov Ben Lulu Azoori. Mr Ezra Sasson was founder and former principal at Hillel.He is the father of Florette Benhamou and Marlene Baruch both teachers in the school and grandfather of Dylan benhamou. May the learning of Hillel's students merit him a complete and speedy recovery.
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December 1
...
is generously sponsored by Elizabeth Glass in loving memory of her dear father, Aharon Eliezer ben David Yehuda Halevi
,on the occasion of his yartzeit. May the learning of Hillel's students be a zechut to his memory & may his neshama have an aliyah.
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ISSUE NO. 009
Parashat Vayishlach
5778
Friday, December 1, 2017
12 Kislev 5778
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Devar Vayishlach
Small Vessels Count Big!
By Rabbi Sufrin, Head of School
 Pursuing materialism and endangering a life to protect assets do not seem like things that Torah would endorse. However, these are precisely some of the values we uncover when reading a
Talmudic
interpretation of the episode of Yaakov meeting his brother Esav. This episode suggests that our forefather Yaakov put his own life at risk for the sake of protecting a few, small jars of seemingly minuscule
value. Why?
In this week's
parasha
of
Vayishlach,
Yaakov takes all precautions as he prepares for an encounter with his brother. In addition to sending Esav an advance party with gifts, he prays to G-d for protection. Yaakov also prepares for battle by moving the women and children to the other side of the river Yabbok, along with all of his material possessions. According to the Talmud
,
after leaving them there, he returns to collect some small jars he had left behind. He then encounters a person with whom he fights until morning. The story reveals that this person is an angel who then blesses Yaakov before Yaakov allows him to leave in the morning. Why did Yaakov return to pick up some small jars and stay to fight an unknown person for seemingly meaningless property? The Talmud (
Chullin
91a) uses this episode to teach us how material goods are more important to righteous people - in this case, Yaakov - than their own lives. This reinforces our original question: why did Yaakov value these possessions above his own life?
By way of explanation, Rav Hirsch elucidates that any property acquired honestly by a righteous person is sacred. He is not allowed to squander it, and he is held accountable for its appropriate use. This is because a part of our mission in this world is to sanctify everything around us. Time, property, and space are all G-dly creations. Human beings are charged with using all of these elements in a dignified and holy manner. A person should view even small items he or she owns as precious and worth protecting. Such stewardship is especially true when it comes to caring for our environment. G-d has given humankind the gift of a world that He expects us to protect with our very souls. This is why Yaakov fought so hard to keep what seem to be minuscule
vessels: These vessels were being used for dignified purposes and Yaakov valued their worth.
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Mazal Tov to Our Honorees
Dr. Jonathan and Danya Hoenig
Shmuel Barak and Felice Gottlieb
Last chance to RSVP to the
Hillel's
70th Annual Scholarship Banq
uet on
December 6, 2017 at 5:30pm
located at the Beverly Hilton.
This beautiful evening highlighting Hillel's past, present and future will be a night to remember.
Hope to see you there!
#israel70
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Volunteers Needed!!
If you are interested in volunteering for the Banquet we need volunteers in these areas:
Typesetting Journal Ads
Banquet Setup
Banquet Registration
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Student Choice Versus Student Autonomy
Andrea Baly, Kindergarten Teacher
Jason Ablin, General Studies Principal
 Technology seems as if it is providing us with a increasingly greater sense of human freedom. Those who choose NOT to have a smartphone or the latest computing device are the rare exceptions. We seem, more than ever, to be tethered to digital systems that might give us access to an endless range of choices, but we also seem to have ess and less freedom concerning
how
we make those decisions.
Thoughtful technology use in schools attempts to return students to a sense of autonomy, making smart decisions about when and under what circumstances devices are used in a classroom. How is this done? By making the decision, not about the technology, but about the way in which students wish to express their learning. Occasionally, students in Hillel classrooms use their iPads for simple note taking, though more often the experience is that students work on mobile whiteboards, writeable desktops or walls, construction paper or plain old paper and pens. Part of the lesson of technology is for students to learn what is best for them and under what circumstances the technology offers opportunities that cannot be reproduced in the visceral world. Perhaps most importantly, that the decision to use technology and in what way is actually a choice based on thoughtful reflection and experience.
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Google is Driving Differentiated Instruction
Samantha Pack, Humanities Department Chair
One of the perennial, million-dollar-questions in education is: How can teachers target instruction to give every student a personalized learning experience? Of course, there are myriad approaches to differentiated instruction. One way that technology is enhancing such individualized instruction in middle school English is through the use of Google Drive.
As an integral part of every writing assessment, students revise their written work. During the revision process, learners incorporate the teacher's written feedback about their writing and formulate revision goals. In this way, the students internalize their goals for writing and understand what they need to do to improve. One component of such improvement is referring to Ms. Pack's comments, which very often say, "Check out this mini-lesson in Google Drive!" Students are directed to their Google Drive, where I have shared a mini-lesson that targets the specific writing skill they are working on. Perhaps I have shared a mini-lesson on how to avoid run-on sentences, or a mini-lesson about analyzing textual evidence to best support their argument. The sharing process can be as personalized or as generalized as the teacher needs it to be; since each student has a personal Google Drive account, I can share mini-lessons with one student, several students, or the entire class. In this way, the teacher can "teach" several critical writing lessons simultaneously, depending on what each student should focus on in his or her writing! Thus, the technology enables teachers to "be" in several places at once, teaching multiple lessons that cater to students' individual needs.
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