Gan Torah Children’s Jewish Nature Program
Bringing Torah to Life with the Seasons
Give your 4th to 6th grader the opportunity to participate in Wilderness Torah’s new children’s program with Jewish environmental educator Ariela Ronay-Jinich!
Gan Torah is a weekly outdoor experience that teaches children to learn and experience Torah and Jewish life in tune with nature and seasonal cycles. Children will discover and experience their own Jewish spirituality through nature awareness, ecological understanding, and the opportunity to enact personal power and responsibility.
Fall: Register Now
Adam/Human and Adamah/The Earth
6-week fall session for 4th-6th graders, meets at Redwood Regional Park in Oakland.
Sundays 10-12pm, October 3rd- November 7th. $150 for all 6 sessions.
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.
Late Winter
BaMidbar: In the Wilderness
6-week session for 4th-6th graders, meets at Redwood Regional Park.
We’ll learn about wandering in the wilderness as a people. Stay tuned for details.
Spring
L’Ovda u L’Shomra: To Till and To Tend
8-week session for 4th-6th graders, meets at local community garden/farm.
In the garden, we learn about our powerful role as co-creators and stewards of the land. Stay tuned for details.
If you have questions about the program, please contact Ariela. To hear more about Gan Torah, sign up for Wilderness Torah’s email newsletter.
More About Gan Torah (Garden of Torah):
Gan Torah is a nature-based Jewish learning program for children grades 4-6 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 and in a community garden.
Gan Torah 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, organic gardening, 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, Gan Torah 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 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 Gan Torah curriculum.
