Learning

Torah

Every Jew is a member here and we charge no membership fee. That goes for learning too: every class on this page is free, none of them assumes you know anything, and you can start this week.

Where to start

The honest answer is: anywhere, and the choice matters far less than starting. But if you would like a recommendation rather than a menu —

• Come to a class once and see what a room of people learning is actually like. You are not asked to read anything out or say anything at all.
• Read the Parsha for the week, in English, before Shabbat. Twenty minutes, and you arrive on Saturday morning knowing what is being read.
• Take one daily thing and keep it. Fifteen minutes a day beats three hours once. See the cycles below.
• Ask for a chavrusa — a study partner, one-to-one, on whatever you want to learn. This is the one most people wish they had asked for sooner.

The daily cycles

Jewish learning is largely organized into cycles that everybody is on together. Nobody explains this to a beginner and it is genuinely useful to know.

Where we are in some of them is worked out for you each day: the weekly portion, Tehillim and, in season, the Omer. If a word is new to you, try the glossary, or work out the value of a Hebrew word with the gematria calculator.

Ask and we will set you up with whichever of these suits, including the app or the book for it.

Classes

There are regular weekly classes, in person and online, plus the women’s program and the teen program. Times, teachers and how to join are on the Torah classes page, and everything dated is on the calendar.

If nothing on the schedule fits your week, say so — a class that runs at a time nobody can come to is no use to anybody, and one-to-one learning exists precisely for that.

One to one

You choose the subject, the pace and the time. Chumash, Talmud, Jewish law, Chassidus, the prayer book, learning to read Hebrew, or simply the questions you have been carrying around for years. In person, by phone or over video. No charge, and no commitment beyond the next session.

Ask for a study partner

Learning with children

Hebrew School for ages five to thirteen. Teens have CTeen, and bar and bat mitzvah preparation is its own thing again.

We do not run a preschool or an after-school program in San Jose. For the youngest there are two Chabad preschools near enough to matter, and there is a Hebrew after-school in Santa Clara — what each preschool actually is and what the after-school costs are set out so you can call the right one.