Education & Careers

Opinion Responding to families drowning in day school tuition bills, UJA-Federation of New York has proposed a bold plan to raise $300 million in endowments to expand scholarships. Can a massive undertaking like this actually succeed? A major day school endowment effort for New York is critical — and decades overdue. The day school tuition crisis is essentially an issue of middle-income affordability.

Although Gail Rusgo and her husband are Orthodox and attended day schools, they’ve decided not to have their children follow in their educational footsteps. Rusgo, a teacher, told her rabbi at the Lido Beach Synagogue on Long Island, “I’m going to be sending my children to public schools, and we need more children.” So she proposed offering a supplementary Hebrew school—Torah Time For Kids— as an alternative for some of the congregation’s own families, as well as non-Orthodox Jewish families in the area.

The story of the Garden of Eden could be seen as a biblical truth, raising eternal questions of wrong vs. right, good vs. evil. Or it could be used as a parable, a map of the human choices we face today, exploring issues of what is knowledge and what are the consequences of it in our lives? For one Manhattan congregation, the story was recently used as a little of both, as educators set up a mock court, assigning the roles of Adam, Eve, the snake and of course God to congregants, and role playing the scenario in order to learn from it.

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, several English speakers circled around a pair of large wooden tables trying to learn Hebrew. They were in Ahuva Tal-Hollander’s program at West Side Institutional Synagogue, one of the largest Hebrew language programs in the city. Some were secular Jews who were dating someone religious or Israeli; others had become religious and wanted to better understand the Torah; and still others were American medical students preparing for classes in Israel this fall.

Near the end of the 2007-08 academic year, some unusual news about one class at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan came home to Miriam Akabas and her daughter Ariel and other families of then-fifth-grade students: there would be no boys in the school’s sixth-grade class the following year. For various unconnected reasons, several families of end-of-year fifth-graders were moving from New York City; seven of the departing students were boys, all the males in the class.

Near the end of the 2007-08 academic year, some unusual news about one class at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan came home to Miriam Akabas and her daughter Ariel and other families of then-fifth-grade students: there would be no boys in the school’s sixth-grade class the following year. For various unconnected reasons, several families of end-of-year fifth-graders were moving from New York City; seven of the departing students were boys, all the males in the class.

On a business visit to Houston three years ago, Israeli real estate agent-turned-educator Eran Dubovi accepted a suggestion from Lee Wunsch, executive director of the city’s Jewish federation. Go see a certain public school in southwest Houston, Wunsch said.

The Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE) may be making a comeback. The education organization shuttered its doors in February and cancelled its annual conference this summer, but last week held a small, regional conference in Maryland where talked turned to what could be done to revive CAJE. The self-funded Maryland gathering was called MANAJE (Mid-Atlantic New Alternatives in Jewish Education) and brought together CAJE-ers with 30-plus years of experience as well as young new teachers.

Many universities encourage their students to perform community service, but for students at List College it comes with a twist. The school has begun offering the Fellowship in Jewish Social Entrepreneurship, which combines social justice internships with courses that put it into a Jewish perspective. The school is the undergraduate college of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Rebecca Hammerman, assistant dean and director of the fellowship program, said the project was launched as a pilot in the spring.

Conflict continues at the embattled Shulamith School for Girls, the first Orthodox girls school in the nation, located in Brooklyn since 1930. Parents and the school, headed by Rabbi Moshe Zwick, have fought each other for more than a year over the school’s fate. Rabbi Zwick and the board hope to sell the Brooklyn building and use the profits to purchase a building for a new school, Bnot Shulamith, located in the Five Towns.