Israel Won’t Save the Jewish People: Day Schools Will
Dr.
Harold Goldmeier is a free public speaker for community groups and consults
businesses and NGOs on management and marketing. He manages an investment
company and writes about business, social, and political issues. He can be
reached a harold.goldmeier@gmail.com
Jewish community
leaders obsess over the rampant assimilation of Diaspora Jews. Assimilation is
not just about breaking free of the straitjacket rules of Judaism like keeping
the Sabbath, kosher, and marching in Israel Day parades. It manifests as the
crumbling of psychological kinship with the Jewish collective, and the
inexorable diminution of affinity for Israel.
NGOs and the government
of Israel are investing billions of dollars in programs to stem the tide. The
somber fact is they are failing. Diaspora Jewry champions diversity, racial and
gender equity, and ensuring human rights through class and economic equality at
the expense of organized religion and identity politics. Walter Benn Michaels
wrote, "Our identity is the least important thing about us.”
The phenom is so
noteworthy that my alma mater, Harvard University, is addressing Jewish
assimilation in The Pluralism Project. The Project attributes Jewish
assimilation to the unprecedented opportunity Jews have for economic
advancement and social inclusion; these spur the “ever-diminishing numbers and
the fear of extinction as an identifiable group.”
Young assimilated Jews
don’t remember the Borscht Belt. They cannot name a Jewish comedian. Lox and
bagels are passe. So is synagogue attendance. Who knows a knish from a
kreplach? They know sushi, poutine, and kombucha. But they also do not know
Shema Yisroel or Friday night kiddish. Diaspora is not the defining criterion.
I watched an on-duty Israeli soldier take a lulav and esrog in hand for the
first time in his 20 years. The putative trophic cascades are not limited by
geography.
We know Jewish day
school education builds Jewish self-identification and attachment to Israel. We
have to increase access to Jewish day schools supplemented with summer camps,
trips to Israel, and youth groups. Spend more money on the daily grind of
outreach.
Yet, these tools are
the poor sisters and do not expect a change in priorities from funding sources.
The bulk of dollars will continue flowing to arcane, creaky, old-line
establishment groups where the average age of leaders (among the six most
influential Jewish organizations) is 76 years. Each man has
been in office for decades. But there is a whisper of hope.
On taking office in
January 2023, Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, declared his agency
would spend nis60M (nearly $20M) to make Jewish education affordable. “It is
our duty to act so that every Jewish community is interested in Jewish
education… many Jewish families are unable to pay for private Jewish
schools.”
Chikli is right on the
mark. A few years ago, 73 North American Jewish Federations out of 146 invested
$52M in day schools; that was out of $3 billion raised annually or a mere, on
average, 16% of the Federations’ budgeted funds. 301 schools out of 906 got
something like $173.33 per student per year. Concomitantly, K-12 tuitions were
$7,000 to $30K per child per year. MK Chikli will need to muster all the
gravitas of his new position to influence change.
Perhaps a new book will
inspire the old guard to get behind Chikli’s initiatives. Inside Jewish Day
Schools: Leadership, Learning, & Community (Brandeis University Press 2022)
makes the case for “rejewvinating” Diaspora. Day schools succeed regardless of
denomination, whether Israel-centric, focusing on STEAMM, Torah knowledge, and
faith, or in any combination. Alex Pomson and Professor Jack Wertheimer of Rosov
Consulting Israel and The Jewish Theological Seminary, respectively, studied
nine American-based day schools “to identify important challenges facing these
schools—and how they respond to those challenges.”
Schools “cultivate
Jewish cultural virtuosos… (despite) ongoing struggles to ensure their
financial sustainability and to recruit quality personnel.” The Introduction is
appropriately sub-titled The Black Box. A black box is commonly thought of as a
recording device. In other fields, the black box details the characteristics of
a system’s internal workings. That’s what the reader gets from Pomson and
Wertheimer. They report “on what happens inside Jewish day schools,” asserting
“every school we studied has a profound impact on the lives of people it touches.”
The book is a more
social anthropology tome. It is not an academic read in the style of narrative
nonfiction. Their case is persuasive. Their descriptions of schools and school
leaders are expository. On the critical side, the font of the 281 pages is
small with a lot on each page. The Glossary and Index are convenient tools.
Inside Jewish Day Schools is akin to a travelogue, the scenes, the
settings, the missions, the amenities, and the challenges. Names, job
descriptions, and stories are true. Style of leadership and quality of
communication seems to determine success.
The book offers 27
pages of conclusions. Foremost, “Day schools possess the special potential to
nurture young people with the ability to contribute to Jewish culture; they
cultivate Jewish cultural virtuosos.” Students internalize the Jewish values
the schools promote, “becoming expert in complex endeavors and were growing in
responsibility.”
Then there is the
bandwagon effect. Students bring home their values and knowledge that touch and
sometimes change the less intensively Jewish lives of families increasing their
Jewishness. My doctoral thesis concluded the same from my studies of parent
education programs in three Hebrew schools.
The more diverse the
parent body, the more crucial is Israel in the mission and curricula. In
community and pluralistic schools, students celebrate Jewish holidays; most
have prayer services and extol Israel. “Israel serves as an important glue
holding such schools together because it is a common denominator in an
otherwise diverse parent body.” The schools, it seems, need Israel to nourish
their raison d'etre.
MK Chikli is meeting in
Israel this week with the presidents of major Jewish American NGOs. We hope the
Minister and later the Prime Minister will tout the value of Jewish day school
education and embolden the presidents to dramatically increasing financial aid
to their local day schools.
The book, however,
offers no clarion call for more money. None of the nine schools is in danger of
financial collapse but school leaders agree they need to increase salaries to
attract and keep good staff and pay for better programs and facilities. Pomson
and Wertheimer sidestep the issues created when American day schools recruit
Israelis to teach and their pay packages are more lucrative than locals’.
BTW, one year, our day
school tuition costs were more than the income my wife and I earned during the
first six years of marriage. For us, it was worth every penny in terms of
outcomes. Like the Jewish fruit vendor in Cabaret sang, money, money, money
makes the world go ‘round.
Dr. Harold Goldmeier
22/3 Nachal Dolev, Bet Shemesh 050 2619116
Teacher, Business Consultant, Public Speaker, Financial
Writer
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-harold-goldmeier-37b6a618/?originalSubdomain=il
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