Cohort 10 of the Mandel IDF Educational Leadership Program launched this week at the Mandel Leadership Institute, with participants drawn from several IDF corps. The program aims to help them develop their identity as educators-in-uniform, and to broaden the range of their educational knowledge, conceptual understanding, and practical capabilities.
The program’s opening lecture, titled “Leaders and Educators in Rabbinic Literature,” was given by Prof. Avigdor Shinan of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Together with Prof. Shinan, the participants read a selection of rabbinic stories and discussed the leadership values they embody, as well as exploring the question of how to combine the roles of leader and educator.
Moshe Vigdor, director-general of the Mandel Institute-Israel, introduced the participants to the Mandel Foundation and its philanthropic activities. “The Mandel Foundation values the opportunity to work with and aid the IDF, contributing to the conceptual approaches and insights that will help you perform your roles even better,” he said.
The Mandel IDF Educational Leadership Program was founded in partnership with the IDF Education Corps in 2005. The one-year program, directed by Dr. Chava Shane, covers subjects that include the aims of education, educational challenges in the IDF and in Israeli society, values-based education, and educational leadership.
“At the Mandel Leadership Institute, our tools of the trade are the question mark and the exclamation mark. If we can help you ask well-honed, constructive questions that in turn will enable you to garner exclamation marks, then we’ll have succeeded,” said Dr. Eli Gottlieb, Institute director and vice-president of the Mandel Foundation-Israel, in his introductory remarks. “The Institute is a home for thinking, and for asking the most important questions of all.”
