Bye Bye Mr G, Hello Rabbi S

IN a landmark overhaul, Yeshivah and Beth Rivkah Colleges will share a principal from January 2013 – with Yeshivah principal Rabbi Yehoshua Smukler to assume both posts.

Yeshivah Centre committee of management chair Don Wolf said that after the committee conducted a global search for a new principal of the school, it found with Rabbi Smukler, who has been Yeshivah College principal for two years, “that the best candidate was already in Melbourne”.

The switch heralds a new era after a marathon 42-year innings by Shmuel Gurewicz as Beth Rivkah’s principal.

Tasked with developing what he calls an “amalgamated” approach to running Yeshivah and Beth Rivkah, while at the same time retaining the separate identities of the two colleges, Rabbi Smukler explained that the two schools have experienced distinct but largely parallel development, due to effective leadership structures at both.

“We started a while ago to move the two schools forward together in key areas. A lot of it has been in curriculum development, a lot of the preparation for the national curriculum, adapting it to our own ethos. We looked across the campuses and developed a whole-school ICT [information/communication/technology] and e-learning plan, we’ve appointed