Juniors Work on Rabbinics "Genius Hour" Projects

by Liba Fruithandler, SSLI '28

Recently, the junior class has been working on a Rabbinics project in which each student picks a topic from their studies that they are personally interested in and dives deeper into it.

The project, called “Genius Hour,” is based on an activity that was offered to Google employees, where they researched a topic of their choosing. This resulted in the creation of many of Google’s utilities, such as Gmail. Rabbinics teacher Ms. Rebecca Friedman-Charry explained that, similarly to Google’s practice, her “students are invited to follow their personal passion within the units of the course.”

This is the last of four projects that the juniors will complete in their Rabbinics course. While the fall semester’s project was based on the question of how to be Jewish in a Jewish community, Friedman-Charry said that “this [week's] Genius Hour focused on Jews interacting with non-Jews.”

The cover slide of junior Shir Levenson's "Genius Hour" presentation. (S. Levenson)

There were multiple options regarding topics that the juniors could choose, some of which included whether or not a Jew can enter a church and how one should speak in interfaith dialogues.

Junior Josh Jurmann chose the topic of whether or not “non-Jewish construction businesses can work for Jews on Shabbat,” a controversial topic because of the law forbidding Jews to do or commission work from other Jews on the holy day. In order to research the topic, Jurmann looked for articles from a “reliable Jewish organization” and then picked a subtopic from there. After he had found his subtopic, he looked for sources on Sefaria, which is a digital library of Jewish texts that is frequently utilized by the high school students.

By doing this project, juniors were able to bridge the gap between their Torah studies and their real world experiences. Junior Micah Bidner said that he first thought that his project revolving around surrogacy was on “such a far-off topic that no one has ever discussed,” but he ended up finding “lots of instances of surrogacy” in the Bible.

Friedman-Charry shared that her students felt more comfortable utilizing new sources and doing their own research in Jewish Studies.

Liba Fruithandler is a writer for Paw Print Now and has been published on the site since January 2025. Liba is currently a freshman at Schechter School of Long Island and can be reached at the following email address: lfruithandler28@schechterli.org