In our last chapter, we urged the critical importance of vision for a revitalized Jewish education. Accordingly, we argued for vigorous new efforts to formulate overall conceptions of Jewish life and to articulate their corresponding visions of the ends and means of Jewish learning. Our hope was that ensuing processes of reflection and debate would deepen our educational thought and enhance the quality of our educational practice. These ideas, elaborated in Chapter 1, explain the background and motivation of our project – the “why” of our efforts. Now we turn to the “what”; what did the project attempt, how was it organized, and what did it do?

The project aimed, first of all, to create a sample of what it was urging for the community at large, a serious conversation among proponents of variant conceptions of Jewish life and their attendant visions of Jewish education. It needed, thus, to elicit a number of relevant visions and create a forum within which they could be set forth and elaborated, confronted with alternatives, and debated in a collegial but critical atmosphere. Secondly, it sought to encourage analogous conversations within institutions and communities.

The initial step was to elicit the visions, and that presupposed forming a working group of those who were to supply them. To this end, the Mandel Foundation (then the Mandel Institute), represented by the project's director, Seymour Fox, and associate director, Daniel Marom, decided in 1991 to convene a group of scholars who were both learned in their special fields of study and knowledgeable about Jewish education and who, moreover, were likely to integrate these qualities into visions of Jewish learning, drawing upon comprehensive conceptions of Jewish life.