The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE), founded as the Coalition for Alternatives in Jewish Education, was a non-profit organization based in New York City founded by Jerry Benjamin and Cherie Koller-Fox. . Its activities included an annual conference that drew ~2000 Jewish educators, advocacy for Jewish educators, various education-related publications, and more.
CAJE went bankrupt in the Winter of 2008, in part because of the recession that year that stressed the finances of synagogues and schools who paid for educators to attend and partly because of the financial mismanagement on those running the organization.[citation needed] In 2010, a new organization called NewCAJE arose, led by CAJE's original founders Koller-Fox and Benjamin.[citation needed]
Leadership
CAJE was led by Dr. Elliot Spack, Executive Director for 26 years, [citation needed] a president, and chairpeople. On the West Coast, founders Stuart Kelman, Joel Grishaver, and Ron Wolfson founded the regional branch that made CAJE a national organization.[citation needed]
Presidents
Rabbi Dan Syme
Jerry Benjamin
Rabbi Cherie Koller-Fox
Rabbi Stuart Kelman
Carol Starin
Betsy Dolgin Katz
Rabbi Michael Weinberg
Sylvia Abrams
Alan Wiener
Fran Perlman
Iris Petroff
Conference
CA
CAJE's yearly CAJE conference drew between 350 at the first conference and as many as 2,400 Jewish educators from around the world at later conferences..The first conference was held in August 1976 at Brown University. Around 350 people attended. It was sponsored by NETWORK, where Jerry Benjamin was the President. At the end of the conference, the participants voted to have another conference which was held one year later in Rochester, New York where CAJE was officially founded.
Due to its size and nature, the CAJE conference was held on a university campus. There were thousands of volunteers who organized and taught at every conference. The CAJE conference was the model for the Limmud Conferences in England and later around the world.[citation needed]
Unlike other conferences of its size, the CAJE conference typically offered several hundred workshops over the course of only a few days. The workshops were lead for the most part by teachers in the field. The daily workshops were supplemented by evening keynote addresses and performances of the arts including music, storytelling, comedy, dance and art etc.and a choir led by Debbie Friedman. The CAJE definition of teacher included "anyone involved in the transmission of Jewish education and culture;"[citation needed] intended to create a pluralistic organization that included all who worked in Jewish education from any denomination and teaching any age group from birth until adulthood.
Network at the conference created a field of Jewish education and gave support to teachers, both formal and informal; many innovations in Jewish education were spread through the conference to schools around the country and the world.[citation needed] At CAJE 25, CAJE started to advocate for better salaries, higher status, benefits, professional development and other things necessary to create an excellent teaching community to educate Jews living in the diaspora.
In recent years, sub-conferences such as the "Consortium for the Future of the Jewish Family" ran concurrently with the CAJE conference.
After CAJE closed in 2009 following their 2008 bankruptcy, the conference planned for 2009 was canceled on 9 January 2009 via email to all CAJE members. The conference was intended to take place at Trinity University. Instead, a MANAGE conference planned by participants was held at Pearlstone Jewish Retreat Center with 186 participants.[citation needed]
The first NewCAJE conference had 350 attendees, including 75 young professionals.[citation needed]
