A Jewish Living Delaware Exclusive Interview with Joshua Salter, CEO of Jewish Interactive

Emma Driban, Editor

It’s no surprise that education has undergone significant changes since the beginning of the 21st century. From blackboards and overhead projectors to the widespread use of smartboards to the appearance of laptops in every classroom and even remote schooling during COVID, educational technology is developing rapidly to keep up with the times. But how does that translate to Jewish learning?

Where secular academia has regular funding, Jewish education is in danger of falling behind due to lacking resources. That’s where Jewish Interactive enters the picture.

Jewish Interactive (Ji) is a non-profit organization with a vision to educate this digital generation of Jewish children to be proud and knowledgeable about Judaism, Hebrew, and Israel. The group develops digital, interactive, and inspiration learning programs for these subjects and even helps to train teachers and schools to incorporate their technology.

Joshua Salter, CEO at Jewish Interactive, is no stranger to the needs in Jewish educational programming. Over the past 20 years, Joshua has worked in a variety of roles including management, operations, fundraising, events, and logistics for Jewish communal organizations in the UK, including UJIA, JAFI, Chabad Lubavitch, JLE & Aish UK.

Joshua generously lent his time to teach us about the wonders of Jewish Interactive, and how it can enhance your student’s Jewish education.

1. Tell us a bit about Jewish Interactive. How did the organization get started?

Jewish interactive, or Ji as we’re commonly known, is a global nonprofit educational technology organization and we are dedicated to enhancing and transforming Jewish and Hebrew education through the use of interactive digital tools. Our mission is to make Jewish learning engaging, accessible, and relevant—specifically aimed at these kinds of 21st century learners—and no matter where you are around the world. We’re a global organization operating in over 70 countries.

Ji has been around for almost 14 years now. We began as a grassroots initiative back in 2012 in South Africa. Ji was born out of a small group of educators and tech experts who identified an issue within Jewish learning in South Africa, specifically that Jewish schools were struggling to keep students engaged in Jewish learning using traditional classroom models. They saw the potential of technology at quite an early stage in the whole EdTech evolution. It was also at a time when there was a lot of investment and money being put into digital secular education, and there was a worry and a fear that this wasn’t going to be replicated for the Jewish educational market. Ji was created to level that playing field and make sure that Jewish education didn’t get left behind.

In our initial phase, we put a lot of money into building content, materials, apps, and development. Now, with our current products, our focus is on increased content production in addition to a continued commitment to innovation, constantly putting out fresh tools and features that teachers and students want and need.

We’ve grown a lot since our origins, from just a handful of people in South Africa to a bigger team with offices in Johannesburg, London, and New York City. We’re still a small team in the grand scheme, but we’re making a huge impact out there.

2. What is the main focus of Ji and who do you aim to serve?

At our core, we believe that Jewish learning should not be a passive experience. It should be interactive. What we do is try and empower teachers and students to create, question, and explore all facets of Jewish education and interact with their Jewish identity and heritage in meaningful ways. What has always remained as our focus since our inception—and what serves as the slogan for our main product, Jigzi—is our commitment to creating joyful Jewish learning. Something you will see across all of our products is this idea of instilling joy into learning to elevate it and make it more meaningful.

We have over 20,000 students using our services every month, and that grows at peak times, and around 5,000 or so educators or parents accessing our services, as well, per month.

Our services are used by a range of different audiences—educators, families, students, education organizations, communities—and we are essentially providing a dynamic range of resources that combine Jewish values, traditions, and language, all with innovative cutting edge technology.

Ji aims to be flexible and versatile. We have a diverse audience, from religiously left-leaning all to way to the right. We’re used in day schools, religious supplementary schools, Hebrew tutoring, at home, a mix of educational organizations, and so many more. Our services are directed to students in K to five, around ages four to 12, and we have also developed materials for older kids, too.

In addition to our work in schools and homes, we work with many educational organizations building tailored content and training them in educational technology areas.

We refer to ourselves as the largest school in the world, both in the number of students coming to us and utilizing our services every week and in the amount of content we have available for teachers and kids.

3. What would you say are some key differences in the learning needs of today’s youth compared to previous generations? How does Ji meet those needs?

We’re obviously big on the power of technology, but it’s not just about that. It’s also about embracing zeitgeist and realizing where things are heading and the changing direction in learning. It’s clear that youth today are growing up

in a completely different environment. They’ve got technology in their hands from day one. We don’t believe kids should be on their devices all the time, but we understand the power of integrating this technology with those traditional methods. It’s a no brainer that technology in education should be further developed but, unfortunately, Jewish education doesn’t have the same level of investment or funding to develop EdTech in the same way that the rest of the world of education does. That’s why we’re here.

Another shift is in the expectation of and desire for personalized education. Classroom models of the past relied on lecture and memorization, but we focus on interactivity and engagement. It’s a completely new model. Attention needs to be captured to tap into students’ full potential, and that’s where digital education comes in. You can learn without feeling like you’re learning through gamified experiences. It feeds into the method that children and students have been brought up with, in how they interact with technology.

And then there’s also this idea that all young people want to be creators. They see the influencers and content creators and that leads them to want to create their own kind of online presence. The methods that we encourage through our creation tools give both students and teachers the freedom to express themselves and personalize their own learning journeys.

The creativity and flexibility of this technology have the power to adapt learning very simply and quickly for the different needs of the users.

4. Ji offers a variety of products and services, but one really stands out above the others. What is Jigzi and how has it helped change the landscape for Jewish learning?

In 2021, we received a substantial investment to develop our own, in-house platform or portal to bring together everything that we do to be able to manage everything in one place. We created something really special for Jewish education in Jigzi. It was born out of the need, as an EdTech organization, to constantly be innovating and staying ahead of the curve. It took a couple of years to build; we consulted with a huge team around the world of pedagogical experts—both in general, physical teaching and online teaching—and other tech companies who had the expertise we were looking for. Jigzi launched in 2023 and we started building it up pretty quickly. It enables people to access all of our services and products. If someone wants training or to use our Hebrew reading resources, they can reach it through Jigzi.

Our three main areas are Hebrew reading, Hebrew speaking, and Jewish holiday and Shabbat learning. We offer a huge range of resources, curriculums, individual lessons, guides, workbooks, and more. The key to it all is the gamification. It challenges kids, rewards them for their achievements, and helps spur them to continue learning. We’re also working on developing Torah and tradition learning as a result of feedback telling us that more of that resource would be appreciated on  our platform.

One of the things that I think makes Jigzi so successful is that it is constantly changing and evolving. We are always adding new value and enabling customization and personalization. Those are the ideas at the very core of this platform.

Another key thing is saving time in the classroom for teachers and educators. We have ready made materials, so they won’t need to spend loads of time preparing lessons. We have ready-made materials that people can access at any time. We also have a smaller percentage of our users, about 20%, who are our content creators; they’re the people that come to our platform to create their own, personalized content. Everything that gets created gets put onto our network unless they choose not to publish it there. Because of that, our resources are a mixture of both professionally, in-house developed content and content created by teachers, and we’re talking over 16,000 resources.

5. Ji is active in over 70 countries. What makes your products so accessible and versatile to users from different walks of life?

Unless we are building something for a specific partner who wants something a certain way, we try to build various versions of games to help keep it relevant for different audiences. For example, a Torah game might be created so it is suitable for a liberal group or a conservative group, or pretty much whichever denomination.

We pride ourselves on being accessible, versatile, and inclusive. We have games and lessons in 15 different languages. We can be accessed anywhere in the world—all you need is an internet connection and a browser. We’re accessible on any device—mobile, tablet, computer.

6. How can students, parents, and educators bring Jewish Interactive into their schools and homes?

We have two kinds of models. We have a free model—freemium as it’s called in the tech world—and we have a premium model. We put out many games, apps, and lessons completely for free, and also offer teaching tools and other higher-level material for which we charge. We do understand the market of who is using our services, so we have subsidized costs to help make it more accessible. Wherever a school or organization can’t afford something, we either try to find a way to subsidize it or find a donor to help support them.

Ji offers free demos and free trial periods, so people can get a feel for our services. You can sign up per month or per year.

7. Any parting words?

Check out Jigzi! It’s free to sign up, it just takes 30 seconds to register. I encourage any user to try out Jigzi with the free trial where you can fully explore everything we offer and then determine what is suitable for your needs. For our premium models, we offer an initial 20% off for new users.

To learn more about Jewish Interactive and Jigzi, visit www.JewishInteractive.org, or visit  JewishInteractive.org/donate to learn how you can support  their work.