I am delighted to welcome you to the new Ohr HaTorah Religious School year. I have a great year planned for our future B'nei Mitzvah students and am excited to share my plans with you and start (for some, continue) working with you and your children.

The goal of the Trope component of the Religious School curriculum is for students to become fluent in the mechanics of reading Torah before they begin preparing for their bar/bat mitzvah ceremonies. While by then most will have been reading Hebrew for several years, reading Hebrew is one skill and reading Torah -- actually, chanting -- is quite another. Acquiring the technical skill before engaging in actual bar/bat mitzvah ceremony preparation both reduces the stress of preparation, the time required for preparation and allows the ceremony to be a genuine demonstration of what the bar/bat mitzvah actually knows (i.e., how to read Torah publicly) rather than of what they have committed to memory for a particular event. As with reading Hebrew, leading prayer and interpreting Torah, reading Torah is a skill that our students will use for the rest of their lives.

On Saturday mornings, I will spend 30 minutes each with the sixth/seventh grade and the fourth/fifth grade classes. I will introduce the fourth/fifth graders to the symbols, musical phrases and "rules of the road" for reading Torah in public. I will teach the sixth/seventh grade more advanced applications of the fundamentals we studied last year as well as a new set of musical phrases -- those for chanting Haftarah.

I have broken down the material into small, easily digestible pieces that build on each other. For both grades, each class session will consist of a review of material learned the previous week and introduce a new component or two that build on the previous week's material. Small homework assignments will re-enforce material covered in class and I will quiz the students regularly to help them focus on and retain the material. Because each piece of the system builds on another, it is critical that the students learn and absorb the material in succession. All of the study materials distributed in class will also be available on the website. If your child should need to miss a class, please download the materials from that class and have your child review and work from them to prepare for the following week. Also, please feel free to contact me for assistance.

It is a great source of pleasure for me to introduce our students to the ancient, sacred practice of Biblical chant and witness their awe as they come to understand and embrace it. I am eager both to get started with the new fourth/fifth graders and to continue with the sixth/seventh graders. In just a few short weeks, our hallways -- and your homes -- will be brimming with the sound of young voices discovering the joy of chanting Torah.

B'Shalom oo'vracha (with peace and blessings),

Julie Giuffrida