JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

EDUCATION, JEWISH
a model of effective, school-based Jewish education in a congregation
which had apparently transformed itself into a community
of learning. Isa Aron led a systematic project, “The Experiment
in Congregational Education,” aimed at facilitating a
reconceptualization of congregational education. In Dr. Aron’s
vision, synagogues needed to re-engineer themselves into
congregations of learners. On a parallel track, adult education
frameworks such as Boston’s Meah program, the Wexner
Foundation Heritage program, and the Florence Melton Adult
Mini-School, each serving thousands of participants over a
two-year period of intensive study, aimed at effecting sociocultural
transformation through Jewish learning.
An Avi Chai Foundation study of day school enrollment,
released in the year 2000, showed that 80% of the 185,000 students
(pre-K–4-years-old–through 12th grade) enrolled in the
country’s 670 day schools were in Orthodox schools; more
than half of the total number of day school enrollees were in
the state of New York. Ḥasidic and yeshivah day school enrollment
– estimated at 33% in 1973 – had, a generation later,
grown to nearly 50%. That the day school phenomenon, however,
was not exclusively the concern of Orthodox institutional
leadership was reflected in the emergence of PEJE (Partnership
for Excellence in Jewish Education) – a consortium of mainly
other-than-Orthodox philanthropists organized to promote
access to and the quality of day school education – as a prominent
advocacy group in support of day school education. The
end of the 20th century saw an escalating number of day high
schools established, many of them “community” (non-Orthodox)
schools. Within the Orthodox sector, an Association of
Modern Orthodox Day Schools and Yeshiva High Schools
(AMODS) was established, affiliated with Yeshiva University.
The 1990s saw the emergence of “Partnership 2000,”
a series of “twinning” linkages between Israeli municipalities
and various American Jewish Federations. Within those
partnerships, educational initiatives between Israeli schools
and American Jewish schools (typically, day schools) were
launched. These joint ventures commonly brought faculty
(and, sometimes, students) together, often around the question
of the nature and meaning of Jewish peoplehood and
core Jewish values. A century after Aḥad Ha-Am suggested
that, somehow, a critical mass of Jews constituting a majority
population in the land of Israel might resolve the malaise of
Judaism in the modern world, the legatees of his thinking –
both in Israel and in the U.S. – were working jointly to meet
the continuing, complex challenge of articulating the very
meaning of Jewish identity. On both sides of these partnerships,
Jewish communities aggregating 75% of world Jewry
sensed the need for such definition, knowing that, in the case
of Jewish education as with any other educational matter, coherent
purpose is essential for effectiveness.
The 1990s saw renewed declarations regarding the importance
of Hebrew language literacy. The Statement of Principles
for Reform Judaism, for example, adopted at the 1999
Pittsburgh Convention of the Central Conference of American
Rabbis, affirmed “the importance of studying Hebrew, the
language of Torah and Jewish liturgy, that we may draw closer
to our people’s sacred texts.” It remained to be seen what impact
the “new” Pittsburgh Platform might have on emphases
in curriculum and instruction in the educational settings of
Reform Judaism. Similarly, in the mid-1990s, the chancellor
of the (Conservative) Jewish Theological Seminary of America,
Ismar *Schorsch, issued a pamphlet describing the seven
“core” values of Conservative Judaism. Schorsch identified
recognition of the importance of Hebrew as a core value of
Conservative Judaism, urging that Hebrew must emerge as
the unifying language of the Jewish people. Writing at a time
when Conservative congregational education was, for increasing
numbers of students, being restructured from three
weekly sessions to two weekly contacts, it remained to be seen
in which settings this sentiment might be “translated” to an
action program.
By 1998, Jewish civilization was being taught or researched
at over 700 American institutions of higher learning.
While the 2000–1 NJPS indicated that 41% of Jewish undergraduates
took at least one course in “Jewish studies” during
their college years, it is important to keep in mind that the
academic analysis of aspects of Jewish civilization is neither
designed nor presented as an exploration which should, in any
way, inform the learner’s identity. A revitalized Hillel Foundation
sought to meet – and, for many, to create – Jewish educational
needs of an estimated 400,000 Jewish collegiates.
By the year 2000, an estimated 18,000 post-high school
young men – in addition to the 150,000 students of both genders
in Orthodox Jewish day schools – were enrolled in yeshivot
and kolelim. Of this number, approximately 2,350 studied
at the Beth Medrash Govoha in Lakewood and 1,500 were at
the United Talmudical Seminary of the Satmar ḥasidim. An
emerging phenomenon was the establishment of small, “activist”
kolelim in cities from Boca Raton to Atlanta to Pittsburgh,
Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, in which full
time, deeply Orthodox talmudists devoted significant time
to community education, engaging in study with non-traditionalist
segments of Jewry. In addition to the growing number
of kolel participants, thousands of American Jewish young
men and women were studying in yeshivot and seminaries in
Israel each year. Yet, even the Orthodox population was by no
means impervious to acculturating tendencies. The estimates
for dropouts by youth from Orthodoxy, though not from Judaism,
ran as high as one-third.
The 2000–1 NJPS indicated that, among students ages 6
to 17 in once per week programs, 2–3 times per week, or Jewish
day schools, the day school group represented a plurality
of students, with 29% of school age students receiving day
school education, 24% part-time (but more than once per
week) Jewish education, and 25% attending once-per-week
classes, during the course of their educational “career.” Day
school enrollment had become ubiquitous in Orthodox circles
and PEJE was undertaking a series of initiatives designed
to double – over the ensuing decade – day school enrollment
in the non-Orthodox sector (this at a time of a shrinking po-
202 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6