JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

der the SABJE) in Johannesburg and the Religious Instruction
Department of the SAJBD in Cape Town. Jewish pupils
in Pretoria and Durban received Jewish education through a
special department at the Crawford College branches. This
arrangement came about following the takeover of the Carmel
College Jewish day schools in those cities by Crawford
during the 1990s.
The mainstream schools in Johannesburg were the three
King David schools, located in Linksfield, Victory Park, and
Sandton. The first two provided Jewish education from preschool
to matriculation level while the third went up to primary
school level. King David’s counterparts in Cape Town
were the Herzlia schools.
The ideological basis of the King David, Herzlia, and
Theodor Herzl schools was officially described as “broadly
national traditional,” a formula intended to indicate both the
religious and the Zionist character of the education. Pupils
received a full education following a state syllabus and a Jewish
studies program, including religion, history, literature, and
Hebrew language. However, many demanded more intensive
religious instruction and greater religious observance. Thus
Johannesburg’s Yeshiva College developed into a full-time day
school from nursery school up to matriculation and steadily
grew from an initial few dozen pupils to well over 800 by the
turn of the century. In 1995, the school received the Jerusalem
Prize for Jewish Education in the Diaspora. Yeshiva College
could be regarded as centrist Orthodox in its approach. More
right-wing Orthodox schools that subsequently were established
included Torah Academy and Cape Town’s Hebrew
Academy (both under Chabad’s auspices), Yeshivas Toras
Emes, Shaarei Torah, Bais Yaakov, Hirsch Lyons, and Yeshiva
Maharsha.
The Progressive movement also maintained a network
of supplementary Hebrew and religious classes at its temples.
These schools are affiliated with the Union for Progressive
Jewish Education.
At the tertiary level, university students were able to take
Jewish studies through the Semitics Department of the University
of South Africa (UNISA); the Department of Hebrew
and Jewish Studies of Natal University; and the Department
of Hebrew and Jewish Studies (including the Isaac and Jessie
Kaplan Centre for Jewish Studies and Research) at the University
of Cape Town. Programs of adult education continued to
be provided by the South African Board of Jewish Education,
the South African Zionist Federation, and the various affiliates,
including most particularly the Union of Jewish Women,
the Women’s Zionist Council, and the South African Zionist
Youth Council.
[David Saks (2nd ed.)]
Bibliography: B. Steinberg, in: Jewish Education, 39 (1969),
14–22; A. Eisenberg (ed.), World Census on Jewish Education (1968).
argentina
Jewish education was sponsored and supervised by the Central
Board of Education, an affiliate of the Va’ad ha-Kehillot.
EDUCATION, JEWISH
This Board represented a consolidation in 1956–57 of two formerly
independent educational boards, one for Buenos Aires,
the other for the provinces. It included the Agudah-oriented
Heikhal ha-Torah school with 500 students in 1970. Only the
Yieuf (Peoples Democrats, Communist) schools with some
2,000 students remained out of this national Jewish school
network. In the past the Argentine Jewish educational system
consisted of supplementary schools. The first day school was
opened in Buenos Aires in 1948; it took a long time for these
schools to spread. Supplementary education was facilitated by
the fact that the public schools meet on a four-hour two-shift
basis. This enabled Jewish children to attend either morning
or afternoon Jewish classes. The predominant element
in the program was national rather than religious. Yiddish
was given preference over Hebrew, although both languages
were taught. Each of the many ideological groupings had its
own program of instruction. In the 1960s these curricula began
to coalesce and to gravitate toward more traditional and
broadly national common elements. There were many inherent
weaknesses in the system. As late as 1965 it was pointed out
that only 17% of the Jewish school age population was enrolled
in Jewish schools. Of those who did attend the first grade in
Buenos Aires in 1960 only 4.2% stayed until the sixth grade.
Small schools predominated; most buildings were inadequate.
European-trained teachers were gradually replaced by native-born,
most of them female and inadequately prepared
for teaching. Since schools were often initiated and administered
teaching by lay individuals, supervision left much to be
desired. The general apathy of parents and the assimilatory
factors in the community resulted in cultural deprivation of
the children.
In the late 1960s there was a turn for the better. Many
school buildings were modern, airy, and roomy. The well-organized
community supplied a considerable proportion of
the school budgets for operational and capital expenditures
and strove toward a general upgrading of curriculum and supervision.
There were four types of schools: purely Hebraic,
Yiddish–Hebrew, Hebrew–Yiddish, and religious. Israel was
a most important element of the course of study.
In addition to in-service training courses for teachers
there were a number of teachers’ seminaries. The oldest among
them was the Midrashah, or Seminario Docente para Escuelas
Israelitas, established in 1940. In the course of the first 25 years
it enrolled some 3,000 students; 900 teachers were graduated.
Close to 70% of the teachers in Buenos Aires and neighboring
schools were graduates of Midrashah, recognized for the
higher Jewish learning it offered, and the requirement was
that high school teachers must be graduates of that school.
In 1966 it had 350 students enrolled. The Moisesville Teachers
Seminary trained many of the teachers for the interior of
the country. In 1949 it graduated its first class of ten primary
and kindergarten teachers. In 1966 it had 120 resident and 85
local students. Ninety-nine percent of the teachers were native-born.
Many spent a year in Israel. In 1964–69, 281 Buenos
Aires graduates of teacher training schools enjoyed such
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