Two Jews, Three Opinions

Klal Yisrael, Pluralism, and the Jewish Community Day School Network

Barbara Sheklin Davis

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781532673313, 9781532673320
• eBook ISBN: 9781532673337
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

Two Jews, Three Opinions examines a unique educational movement that began in 1980 when eight school leaders met to create RAVSAK: the Jewish Community Day School Network, an association of schools distinguished by being inclusive of all Jews in their communities.This singularly-purposed segment of the Jewish educational mosaic has not been studied before. As American Jews struggle with changing demographics and identities, it is instructive to see how community day schools and their network anticipated and accommodated many of this century's most significant Jewish educational challenges.Two Jews, Three Opinions illuminates the community day school network's embrace of Klal Yisrael, the unity of the Jewish people. It describes what led to RAVSAK's success and then to its elimination as an entity, the exceptionality and importance of which was vastly undervalued and underserved by the American Jewish establishment. Arguing for the vital importance of pluralistic Jewish education in the twenty-first century, it issues a call to Jewish communal leaders to champion community day schools as guarantors of a knowledgeable and committed Jewish future.

1

Jewish Day Schools in America

Here is one astounding constant of Jewish history since (at least) Mishnaic times: every boy was expected to go to school from the age of three to the age of thirteen. This duty was imposed on male children and their parents, administered and often subsidized by the community. At school, often a tiny one-room, one-teacher, multiage affair, the boys studied Hebrew – not their mother tongue, and not a living language even in Talmudic times – at a level sufficient for both reading and writing. This ten-year study was unconditional, independent of class, pedigree, and means.1

Amos Oz

As Jews emigrated from the Old to the New World, the religious education of their children was on their agenda, but attended to in random fashion. The Sephardic Jews who came first established Jewish schools in the early eighteenth century. Most Jewish education prior to that time had been provided for well-to-do families by private tutors. The Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue, Shearith Israel, opened a school in New York City in 1731 and focused on Hebrew studies, later adding secular subjects. Closed during the Revolutionary War, it reopened as a full-fledged day school, receiving funds from the state and thereby enabling students of lesser means to receive a Jewish education. A few other, mostly short-lived, Jewish schools opened during the colonial period. They were generally co-educational, dividing as their students reached Judaic maturity, with boys being prepared for bar mitzvah and girls for domestic pursuits.

In the nineteenth century, newly-arrived German Jews established gender-segregated schools, taught in German, with Judaic curricula that adhered to the Reform model, dispensing with ritual and focusing on midot, or values. In 1842, New York’s first Ashkenazi synagogue, B’nai Jeshurun, established a day school. Other schools were created in Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Like their predecessors, these schools were short-lived. By the end of the nineteenth century, public education had superseded Jewish day school education as both established and immigrant Jewish communities saw it as the gateway to the success in America that they wanted for their children. In 1901, there were only two Jewish day schools in North America. Full-time Jewish education for the young was not on the community’s radar, although many boys studied privately in cheders (rooms) with rabbis. In 1908, the New York City police commissioner complained that Jewish immigrants were responsible for half of the crime in the city, having a natural propensity for criminal activity. His comments gave rise to a surge of effort to improve Jewish education through structured educational experiences for Jewish youth, whose truancy rates from public school were extremely high. A cadre of Jewish philanthropists and educators, spurred by the police commissioner’s remarks, set out to make Jewish education a communal responsibility, with after-school Jewish education, through community Talmud Torahs, complementing public school education.

Thus arose a two-tiered system that would persist for decades: day schools for the Jewish few and afternoon schools for the Jewish many. In 1914, when more than a million and a half Eastern European Jews emigrated to the United States, it was the public school system that was tasked with turning those of school age into Americans. It was left to the one-room cheders, Talmud Torahs (supplementary religious schools), and the day schools to keep them Jewish. By 1935, eighteen Jewish day schools had been founded, described as “old-type Yeshibah,” “modern-type Yeshibah,” and “private progressive-type”2 by Israel Chipkin. He also disparaged them as institutions for the select because “they are financially prohibitive to the masses and cannot readily become the typical community school.”3 Although Chipkin believed that there would continue to be “a sufficiently interested minority within the community who will make every sacrifice to maintain them” and expected these schools to “supply that contingent of intensively trained Jewish youth who enter our higher schools of Jewish learning,” he concluded that they “must always remain the opportunity of the exclusive few.”4

Still, by the middle of the twentieth century, the number of day schools had climbed to thirty-five, enrolling 7,700 students in seven states and Canadian provinces. Most of these schools were Orthodox and were primarily for boys, although some separate schools were established for girls. The growth in Orthodox Jewish day schools was driven in large measure by Holocaust survivors who arrived in the United States with no desire to emulate the assimilationist goals of previous immigrants. They preferred to send their sons to yeshivas to study Talmud and rabbinical literature and their daughters to Bais Yaakov schools to learn Tanakh (bible) and dinim u minhagim (laws and customs). Secular studies were a decidedly secondary consideration.

Torah Umesorah (Torah and Tradition), the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools, was created in 1944 to foster and promote Torah-based Jewish religious education in North America. Its founders envisioned a network of dual-curriculum Orthodox day schools that would provide Judaic education for half the day and secular education for the second half. Each school was headed by an ordained rabbi who served as principal or headmaster and a general studies principal, preferably a Torah-observant Jew, who was responsible for a secular studies program that corresponded to the public school curriculum.

After World War II, the Jewish educational world underwent profound changes, reflective of residential shifts. As Jews moved from crowded urban neighborhoods to sprawling suburbs and built new houses of worship, congregational schools began to supersede community Talmud Torahs. Within the general Jewish community there were serious misgivings about day schools, chief among them that day schools would jeopardize the integration of Jewish children into American society. Day school proponents were considered, in William W. Brickman’s words, to be of “old-world background, financially underdeveloped, outlandish in appearance and inarticulate in the language of the land.”5 Day schools were seen as having inadequate facilities and outdated pedagogy. “Gray within and without”6 was the description applied by Mary Antin in 1912.

But there was a downside to acceptance in the larger society, as noted by Alvin Schiff in The Jewish Day School in America: “It has enabled the Jew to live freely as a Jew, with all that his Jewishness might imply. At the same time, it has enabled him to lose, without pain or difficulty, all signs of his Jewishness, and to disappear into the growing, mingling crowds.”7 Many in the Jewish community had begun a reappraisal of the price paid by those who had held Americanization as their primary goal in the twentieth century. The Pluralism Project phrased it well: “In the United States, Jews have found a degree of social acceptance unparalleled in their long history. But the openness of American society has proven to be a double-edged sword. While American Jews experience unprecedented opportunity for advancement and inclusion, they also face the challenge of ever-diminishing numbers and the fear of extinction as an identifiable group.”8

As a result of this awareness, proponents of day school education began to make some headway by the mid-century. Emanuel Gamoran, Director of Education at the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, declared in 1950, “We must admit that there is a great need for the training of Jewish leadership of which Hebraic education is a basis. We have no such basis now in the ranks of Reform Judaism. Without it we shall be largely dependent on Orthodox and Conservative Jews to supply us with children who have a sufficient Hebraic background to go into Jewish work, into Jewish education, or into the rabbinate.”9 While it was not uncommon for non-Orthodox families to send their children to Orthodox institutions, day school advocates within the Conservative and Reform movements began layin...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Jewish Day Schools in America
• Chapter 2: A Network Is Born
• Chapter 3: Pluralism and Jewish Community Day Schools
• Chapter 4: The Rise of RAVSAK
• Chapter 5: RAVSAK under New Governance—2010–2016
• Chapter 6: The Demise of RAVSAK
• Chapter 7: Challenges of the Jewish Community Day School Network
• Chapter 8: Responses to the Challenges
• Chapter 9: Epilogue
• Bibliography