New siddurim better connect children to prayer

“Tefilla (prayer) is a journey,” says Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom.

This school year, some students will better be able to experience that voyage with the release of the first two volumes in the Koren Magerman Educational Siddur Series, a joint project of Yeshiva University (YU) and Koren Publishers Jerusalem.

These two new prayer books—“The Koren Children’s Siddur” for students in grades K through 2 and the “Koren Ani Tefilla Weekday Siddur” for high school students—offer a new approach to tefilla education in the school, home, and synagogue. The books, which according to YU’s Dr. Scott Goldberg are based on dialogue with close to 100 elementary, middle, and high school Jewish educators, were first published in February and offered to educators at the iJED 2014 Jewish day school conference.

Following a short trial period, during which YU and Koren received positive feedback from Jewish educators who reviewed them and tried them in their own classrooms, the books are now available to the general public. Two more volumes, one for children in grades 3 through 5 and another for those in grades 6 to 8, should be available around this time next year.

In an introduction, publisher Matthew Miller conveys that the siddurim serve two purposes. One is the obvious: prayer. While volume one is abridged, the prayers follow traditional conventions. So, too, with the high school siddur, which is not abridged.

The other purpose, however, is much deeper.

“Each page is replete with teaching opportunities to bring the tefillot contained in the siddur alive cognitively and emotionally for our children, advancing the overall goal of developing a spiritual connection to prayer and to G-d,” writes Miller.

Giving children age-appropriate siddurim is a paradigm shift, says Dr. Daniel Rose, project director of “The Koren Children’s Siddur” and author of the adult educational companion.

“You don’t give first graders a high school math book and say, ‘You’ll get something now, but by the time you get to high school you’ll really get it.’... So why do we give them an adult siddur?” explains Rose.