MONTREAL — The numbers speak for themselves: 30,000 students, 5,000 educators, 400 schools, six continents.
Those figures point to the full scope of the TaL AM Hebrew language and heritage teaching program, an original, Montreal-created and developed system for elementary schools.
It was only last October – after decades based at the Bronfman Jewish Education Centre (BJEC) at the Jewish community campus in Snowdon – that TaL AM struck out fully on its own by moving to a building on Thimens Boulevard in western St. Laurent.
By any reckoning, it’s far from the campus. But according to founder Tova Shimon and her husband, Shlomo, the BJEC’s former director, the move has allowed TaL AM to flourish as never before.
Where once its different departments were scattered around Montreal over several sites, including the BJEC, the new location has consolidated the creative, publishing, warehousing and shipping ends into a coherent, creative and efficient whole.
The new headquarters is called Beit TaL AM.
“We are all delighted,” Tova Shimon, TaL AM’s director, said. “We knew it would be easier to run this place with coherence and vision by working all at the same place and all together.”
By “together,” Shimon was referring to the 35 full-time (and many other part-time) employees who work at TaL AM, formerly the site of a small pharmaceutical company. For Shimon, they are the glue that holds everything together.
Before the relocation, TaL AM worked out of very cramped quarters off a BJEC hallway. Now it has more than 17,000 spacious square feet, including a 10,000-square-foot warehouse. One room even has treadmills – to exercise the bodies attached to the minds that get their workouts elsewhere on the floor.
At the evening event marking the new location’s official opening earlier this month, TaL AM board chair Zave Climan was excited about what he considered to be a historic event in the Jewish community.
“Eighteen years ago, we never would have dreamed it would evolve into this,” he said. Federation CJA president Marc Gold, another guest, referred to the move as a “joyous and joyful occasion.”
TaL Am has evolved into an autonomous, non-profit corporation that’s now separated from federation both legally and physically.
Its history, the Shimons recounted – Shlomo Shimon, formerly Tova’s “boss” at BJEC, is now TaL Am’s director of operations– actually goes back to 1979, when the Education Resource Centre, a department of the BJEC’s precursor, the Jewish Education Council, received its very first seed money from Multiculturalism Canada to develop and test a Hebrew-language curriculum called Tal Sela, which was conceived by Tova Shimon and others.
It used a “spiralled,” thematic approach to teaching Hebrew through the use of original and colourful interactive printed and audiovisual materials ranging from flash cards and games to audiocassettes. (“Spiralled” means that each grade “reinforces and builds on the skills acquired over previous years.”)
But the program really didn’t really start to accelerate until 1983, when Stanley Plotnick, then the JEC’s president, helped secure $300,000 in line-of-credit backing both to produce materials and to set up teacher-training “institutes” for professional development.
Tal Sela then was able to become self-financing through revenues from the sale of materials.
“Once we began to sell, one year paid for the next,” Shlomo Shimon said. “The revenues paid back debts.”
In 1990, through the injection of additional funding from foundation grants, the TaL AM program began to be developed. In contrast to Tal Sela, which dealt exclusively with “Hebrew language arts,” TaL AM was more ambitious and comprehensive in scope, incorporating a Jewish heritage component that’s adaptable to all levels of observance.
It uses the same “spiralled” structure and colourful, interactive materials to teach everything from Torah and holidays to Jewish values that are considered essential for developing a well-rounded Jewish identity.
One of the most significant supporters of TaL AM has been the U.S.-based Avi Chai Foundation, which has allocated some $10 million (US) to TaL AM and has enabled schools to purchase materials at a significant discount.
At the launch, Avi Chai’s executive director, Yossi Prager, described TaL AM as “not just a project, but a historic undertaking,” and he stressed how the program has not only helped to teach the Hebrew language, but also to affirm a “sense of peoplehood” that’s essential for Jewish survival. Two representatives from Avi Chai sit on TaL AM’s board of directors.
Tova Shimon said TaL AM’s future plans, besides continued development of TaL AM for the later elementary grades and developing the training institutes, will include establishing “testing centres” and implementing a survey of schools that’s being overseen by co-ordinators Drorit Farkas and Miriam Cohen.
For the Shimons, Beit TaL AM fulfils a long-held dream.
“And it will allow us to continue our dream,” Tova said.
