CESJDS Links Blog

A guest blog sharing the voices, wisdom, and insights of the CESJDS community.

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Excerpts from CESJDS Board President Remarks - Graduation 2024
Ayala Nuriely Kimel

Class of 2024, together, this entire community, has created, year by year, the beautiful mosaic of your memories. 

And for so many of you, it is that moment when you stood proudly at the Israel rally in November 2023, yelling to the world that the hostages have to be brought home, and mesmerizing the crowd of 300,000 people during the largest pro-Israel gathering in U.S. history, by loudly singing, and dancing, shoulder-to-shoulder, SO PROUDLY “Am Israel Hai.” Such a powerful moment that made all of our hearts burst with pride, love, and nahas!!!

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Principals Perspective (January 2024) - Dr. Lisa Vardi
Dr. Lisa Vardi

Ms. Levitan and I wanted to engage our students in questions of civic responsibility, what they must do, and collective obligation, what Americans should do, to ensure a vibrant democratic future.  We wanted students to demonstrate knowledge, skills and character traits articulated in our Portrait of a Graduate, most especially those of an ethical, responsible, and compassionate global citizen AND independent, creative, and critical thinker.

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Principals Perspective (January 2024) - Rabbi Matthew Bellas
Rabbi Matthew Bellas

As CESJDS looks for more opportunities to expand community partnerships and expose our students to different cultures and faith communities, while remaining aligned with our educational mission and purpose, the Lower School is piloting serving as a placement site for the Don Bosco Cristo Rey (DBCR) High School Corporate Work Study Program this year.

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Principals Perspective (January 2024) - Ms. Cassandra Batson
Ms. Cassandra Batson

Of the different opportunities I have had since joining the CESJDS community in 2016, this was one of the most meaningful. Getting to be a student for the day gave me the opportunity to live our school’s core values from the perspective of a student. While there were elements of each of the CESJDS core values present throughout the day, the one that I found to be the most prominent was Torah Lishmah, a love of learning and learning for the sake of learning. 

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Principals Perspective (October 2023) - Rabbi Matthew Bellas and Rebecca Prigal
Rabbi Matthew Bellas and Ms. Rebecca Prigal

As the saying goes in the business world, “Location, location, location!” CESJDS is so fortunate to find itself uniquely geographically positioned to be able to take advantage of nearby resources that enhance so many elements of our rich and rigorous curriculum. Elementary school students across the country study similar subjects, but living in the DMV, especially the greater Washington D.C area, offers our students in-person access to and deeper understanding of sites and stories that most other children are only able to read about in books. This experience is particularly true of our social studies units in grades 2-5, which focus increasingly on particular periods of American history as the children get older.

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