Innovation Garden


Review of Garden Tour:
Daniel Resnik, Dor Hadash, Pittsburgh

The Kaplan Center, with Rabbi Jeffrey Schein as its Executive Director, has a mission. It is to share the vision of Mordecai Kaplan for a contemporary Judaism that celebrates language, literature, history, ethics, the arts, and community as central to Jewish identity and peoplehood. Kaplan, a long-time faculty member at the Jewish Theological Seminary, was a key figure in the foundation of a movement now known as Reconstructing Judaism.

Celebrating Judaism as a multi-dimensional civilization, the Kaplan Center has created the website (https://kaplancenter.org/innovation-garden) for an Innovation Garden that links to more than 30 sites that showcase webinars, educational materials, texts and commentary, lectures, bibliography, artworks, and performances. Tours of the Garden can be self-directed or undertaken in small groups with the guidance of staff from the Center.

I have spent an hour touring the site and lots more time delving into the links.


The Mordecai Kaplan Center for Jewish Peoplehood is excited to announce the two recipients of the Dan Cedarbaum Prize in Jewish Education: Rabbi Michelle Greenfield and Rabbi Bec Richman.

Rabbi Michelle Greenfield from Kol Tzedek Synagogue in Philadelphia, Kol Tzedek Hebrew and Tefillah Curriculum, a project engaging children in producing liturgy that reflects the pluralism and diversity of the Jewish community

Rabbi Bec Richman, whose B’Yadeinu Monthly Makers project establishes a new center for Jewish growth  in Cleveland Heights, Ohio incorporating meditation, music, and art

A Dialogue with Rabbis Michelle Greenfield and Bec Richman, Cedarbaum Prize Winners


In addition to our two recipients of the Dan Cedarbaum Prize, we have placed thirteen other projects in our 21st-century Kaplanian Innovation Garden. We found the work suggested in each of these projects to be creative and worthy of further support. We have thus given them a $250 Kaplan Center innovation award.

The Kaplan Center’s Educational Innovation Conference was November 9, 2022. Watch recordings from our innovative presenters here.