For decades, many Jewish educational settings operated under a quiet but devastating assumption: that children who couldn’t access Hebrew language simply couldn’t participate. 

The cost of that assumption has been enormous. Children who struggle to read Hebrew often disengage entirely, leaving Hebrew school, feeling alienated at camp, withdrawing from day school, opting out of b’nei mitzvah, and ultimately drifting away from Jewish communal life. Many carry that loss into adulthood. We hear from them regularly: adults who wish, decades later, that someone had given them the tools to participate fully.

At Gateways: Access to Jewish Education, we refused to accept that outcome. Twenty years ago, Gateways’ Marion Green pioneered a new approach to Hebrew decoding, which is the ability to translate written words into sounds and spoken language. This Hebrew Decoding Program was built to be accessible for diverse learners.

We’ve found that educators don’t necessarily know how to teach certain kids Hebrew—those with dyslexia, ADHD, autism, intellectual and developmental disabilities, or other learning differences—so those kids are often gently excused; that door, closed. Today, we are giving educators the tools to change that by making our approach more readily available than ever before.

What Makes the Gateways Method Different

Written Hebrew is not inherently difficult to learn. But there are certain stumbling blocks that can feel insurmountable for some children. Many letters look strikingly similar—resh and daled, caf and bet, vav and zayin—and the vowel system is subtle and easy to mix up.

The Gateways Hebrew Decoding Program addresses these obstacles directly. We sequence instruction out of alphabetical order to deliberately separate letters that are easily mistaken for one another. Each letter is paired with a mnemonic that links its shape to its sound, and students engage with that mnemonic across multiple sensory channels: a visual image, an auditory phrase, a physical movement, and verbal expression. Encoding the information through these different pathways strengthens learning and memory in ways that more traditional approaches do not. 

Take the letter gimmel: students learn the “g” sound of gimmel through the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)