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Abstract
This article describes an effort of a Hebrew school and its Jewish community to facilitate interaction among parents, teachers, and teenagers. The interaction aimed at helping the community confront communal Jewish trends in order to generate new thoughts and solutions. Prior research has shown that when people are encouraged to think and speak about their future, their thoughts become more positive and solution-oriented. In the curriculum of this Hebrew school we have implemented a procedure to improve participants' ability to enact change and to develop future-images. This article describes the curricular procedure and the images that emerged.
INTRODUCTION
In recent years, the American Jewish community has been vigorously evaluating social and religious trends shaping its evolving communal and ethnic look. Many of the studies published pointed to alarming changes in the structure and religious character of the American Jewish community (Feldstein 1984; Nussbaum Cohen 1991; and others). These studies used forecasting methodologies aimed mainly at observing trends. To my knowledge no study has been published describing a curriculum exercise that would help participants invent the future-not just anticipate it. The purpose of this article is to report such an exercise. The curriculum exercise aimed at helping a Jewish community generate images of an improved future. The phrase "images of the future" represents a fundamental concept advanced by research into the future. It represents people's perceptions, insights, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and intuitions about the future.
Our problem was how to use knowledge accumulated in various American Jewish future studies to educate for better communal Jewish life. The results indicate that the curriculum developed in this study provided an emergence experience for the majority of participants. On the basis of both the number of the future-images generated by participants, and the quality of their recommendations, it appears that this curriculum and its procedure shifted the participants' conceptual approach to the future to active, highly organized, clearly focused, and value-oriented solutions.
The results also indicate that participants' perceptions and images of the future point to a striking transformation of the perceived role that their Hebrew school is playing in their Jewish life. The purpose of the Hebrew School of Minneapolis, since its founding in 1894, has been to provide a supplementary Jewish education to children...