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Gemara Academy: in Yeshivos and online

About 1 year ago an exciting new website was launched to help students with their Gemara studies in Yeshiva.

In this short amount of time, Gemaraacademy.com already has close to 300 videos on Gemara Shabbos, Perek Hakoines, and Perek Hamafkid. There has been more than 6,000 plays and 72,000 hits.

There has also been feedback from various Yeshivos. A Menahel of a Mesivta shared in an email that his Bochurim are using the videos for their Chazarah and they love it.

Gemara Academy had a booth at the Torah Umesorah convention and there was a tremendous positive response and interest. It has been presented to over 150 educators from Chassidish, Litvishe, and Modern Orthodox Yeshivos. In all of these Yeshivos there was tremendous interest and readiness to bring it into their classrooms once it is prepared on the Mesechtos they are learning.

The national director of Torah Umesorah wrote a letter of recommendation and it is currently in the process of receiving Haskamos from a number of prominent Rabbonim from various communities.
For this upcoming Yeshiva year Gemara Academy will be used in a number of Yeshivos as a curriculum. They are:

1)    Menachem Mendel Cheder of Seattle

2)    Hillel High in Milwaukee

3)    Hamesivta on Ocean Parkway

4)    The Cheder at the Ohel

5)    Darchai Menachem

6)    A class in the Cheder in Lakewood

7)    A class in the Chabad Cheder of Monsey
Gemara Academy is designed to be a personal Chavrusa that a student can use to learn at his own pace. The classes can be paused, rewound, or played over again. It can be used to prepare for the next day’s class or for Chazarah of the previous day’s class.
Thanks to the generosity of donors a new and state of the are website will be up and running in the near future.
The teacher is Rabbi Chananya Hoffinger who has been teaching at Hamesivta of Ocean Parkway for 7 years and experienced firsthand the difficulties that come up when learning and teaching Gemara.

“One of the most common difficulties is the vast expansiveness of the Gemara that makes it so hard to stay focused and see the structure of the Gemara,” he says. “Another challenge is the feeling of not knowing what approach and method the Gemara will use in the current Sugya”

To deal with this, Rabbi Hoffinger created a system of teaching using PowerPoint presentations that use flowcharts that show exactly which tools the Gemara uses in each Sugya and the larger map of the Gemara.

Because Gemara is a study of the Mishna it therefore uses the same tools over and over again; since in the process of analyzing a teaching the same tools are always used. As a result after a very short time the student begins to become more familiar with these tools that the Gemara uses as he sees them used over and over again within the visual context of the flowchart.

One of the important goals of Gemara Academy is that the student come to appreciate the text, and not that the text be replaced with a visual based class. As a result each flowchart is exactly parallel and mirrors the Gemara that it’s teaching. In addition each PowerPoint presentation of the Gemara also has the Gemara text with the Tzuras Hadaf so that the student can become familiar and comfortable with the text.

So Gemara Academy seeks to accomplish a number of things:

1) Show the map of the Gemara so that the student can see the bigger picture and not become lost in the details

2) To become familiar with the style and tools that the Gemara uses

3) To see through the flowchart how the ideas in the Gemara are developed

4) To exactly mirror the text so the student comes to appreciate and become comfortable with the text

All of this will help students become more independent in their learning. As they master the style and tools the Gemara uses, they will feel more empowered and able to approach a new piece of Gemara and learn it on their own.

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