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January 21, 2005/Shevat 11 5765, Vol. 57, No. 21
Day school institutes eco-kashrut
LOOLWA KHAZZOOM
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
BERKELEY, Calif. - As Jewish children around the world celebrate Tu B'Shevat by eating fruit and planting trees, students at the Jewish Community High School of San Francisco will take the holiday one step further.
They will spend the holiday at a science symposium called "The Green World," where they will work on projects that explore the impact of plant life on the earth's ecosystems.
This unusual holiday celebration reflects the school's mission to combine academia with Jewish and ecological values. The mission also is reflected in the school's eco-kosher lunch service, which offers an organic, vegetarian kosher meal every school day.
At a school assembly when the new lunch program began, students learned about the importance of eating healthy food and of recycling. The lunch program, students were told, would have a no-waste policy: Everything from plates to utensils would be biodegradable.
According to Noam Dolgin, associate director of the New York-based Teva Learning Center, the JCHS lunch program is on the cutting edge of growing environmental activism in Jewish day schools.
Through its Bring It Back to Our Schools program, Teva helps students and teachers across the country develop ways to be more environmentally conscious, both at school and at home.
"Each student, each school, each class makes a commitment to make changes in their personal lives or in their school - to turn off lights when they leave a room, to turn off water when they brush their teeth, to bike instead of drive," Dolgin says. "They sit down with us and figure out what they can do to make their school a greener place.
"Throughout the course of human history, all food was grown organically, regardless of culture or locale," he says. "It wasn't until the rise of the chemical industry in the 1950s that the introduction of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides changed agriculture as we know it."
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