JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

EDUCATION, JEWISH
Early Postwar Developments
A Communal Conference on the Reconstruction of Jewish Education
in Great Britain was held in London in 1945, as a result
of which two major coordinating bodies came into being: the
London Board of Jewish Religious Education and the Central
Council of Jewish Religious Education, which had the harder
task of organizing schools and classes in Jewish communities
throughout the British Isles. In London and the Provinces, the
old “ḥeder” and talmud torah institutions gradually gave way
to the Jewish day school system, and increasing emphasis was
laid on combating ignorance, apathy, and assimilation. In this
battle much inspiration was obtained from the emergence of
the State of Israel, which has enlivened the Jewish calendar
and added a new zest to the learning and teaching of Judaism
and Jewish history as well as the Hebrew language.
During the late 1940s and the 1950s many new Jewish
day schools were founded in London and the major cities,
this movement gaining added impetus and encouragement
after the Ministry of Education granted recognition to several
such schools in 1951. Most of them provide primary education
(ages 5–11) in general subjects and Jewish studies, but
there are also some secondary and grammar schools which
receive state aid. Progress was at first slow after the devastation
of the war years and in 1953 less than 19,000 Jewish children
in the Greater London area (with a total Jewish population
of 285,000) received regular religious instruction, as
compared with slightly more than that number in 1924, when
there were only 175,000 Jews in the British capital. By 1954,
there were ten Jewish schools in Britain receiving state aid
and 13 others operating on a private basis. One important development
was the revival of the old Jews’ Free School as the
JFS Comprehensive School in Camden Town, North London
(1958). The postwar years also saw the growth of the Jewish
Secondary Schools Movement and of two other Orthodox networks:
the right-wing Yesodey Hatorah schools (1943) and the
Lubavitch Foundation (1959). A few schools were also sponsored
by the British Mizrachi Federation in conjunction with
the Jewish Agency Torah Department (North-West London,
Dublin) and many more in London and the Provinces by the
British Zionist Federation. Schools of the Zionist type run in
conjunction with the London Board or local Jewish education
authorities were founded in the London suburbs of Clapton
(1956), Willesden (1945, 1947), Hampstead Garden Suburb,
Golders Green (1959), Edgware (1956), and Ilford (1970), and
older schools refounded in Bayswater and Stepney. The same
trend was maintained in the Provinces with Jewish primary
schools in Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle,
Southend, Sunderland, and in Dublin and Glasgow.
The rate of educational progress may be gauged from the
fact that, while only a little more than 4,000 Jewish children
attended day schools in 1953, nearly 9,000 were enrolled in
schools of this type by 1963. In 1961, it was estimated that 13%
(approximately 8,000 children) out of the total Jewish school
population attended 18 kindergartens, 23 primary, and 9 secondary
schools under various Jewish auspices in Great Britain
(of which 16 were state-aided); while 22,000 Jewish youngsters
were enrolled in “withdrawal classes,” “ḥadarim” and talmud
torah and synagogue schools throughout the country. Nevertheless,
only a little over half of the Jewish population of school
age received regular Jewish education. Attendance in the day
schools compared with the national average, whereas boys
enrolled in synagogue and similar classes tended to abandon
their Jewish studies after the critical age of 13, when they had
reached their bar mitzvah. The same was true of girls once
they reached their early teens. By 1970 there were 50 Jewish
day schools in Great Britain (a little over half of them in the
London area), with about 10,000 pupils in all, including 4,000
in the Provinces.
Secondary and Higher Education
During the 1950s and 1960s there was a gradual, but significant,
increase in the number of Jewish youngsters in fulltime
attendance at Jewish secondary and grammar schools.
In the Provinces, the two principal mixed grammar schools
were both in Lancashire – the Liverpool King David School
(part of a local network with a total enrollment of 700, not
all of whom were, however, Jewish children) and the Manchester
King David High School, which also had associated
infants’ and junior schools. The Glasgow Hebrew College
taught youngsters over the age of 13. There were also a number
of voluntary schools in Manchester, where about half the
Provincial day schools were concentrated, including the Manchester
Jewish Grammar School (Boys) and the Manchester
Jewish High School for Girls. The most novel experiment in
Jewish education of the postwar years was Carmel College at
Wallingford, near Oxford, founded by Rabbi Kopul Rosen in
1948. This was a highly successful Jewish “public school” combining
a high level of secular and traditional Jewish studies.
It appealed to parents frustrated by the public school “quota”
system operating against Jewish boys, but also attracted students
from abroad. Whittingehame College in Sussex, run
on a Zionist pattern, was, unlike Carmel College, based on
a secular program, which may account for the lack of public
support which led to its closure in the late 1960s.
The Jewish institutions of higher learning were headed by
Jews’ College which, under the direction of Isidore *Epstein,
was reorganized from 1958 as a seminary for the training of
rabbis, ministers, and cantors, with an associated teachers’ institute.
The Judith Lady Montefiore College (1869) in Ramsgate
was reestablished in 1952 as the result of an agreement
between the London Sephardim and the Jewish Agency Torah
Department to train teachers and cantors mainly recruited
from North Africa. In 1960 the college was transferred to London.
Leo Baeck College (1956), a Reform foundation, was later
reorganized in conjunction with the Liberal and Progressive
movement to train non-Orthodox rabbis and teachers. By
1967, there were a dozen yeshivot in Great Britain with a total
enrollment of some 400 full-time students – about four times
as many as those attending the two London seminaries. Four
of the yeshivot (Etz Chaim, Law of Truth, Horomo, and Chaye
206 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6