The Schechter That Could

While a neighboring Conservative high school foundered and closed, the movement’s k-8 outpost in Manhattan is thriving.

Steven Lorch, head of school at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan looks on as second grade teacher Alisa Weisser teaches a lesson on the rescue of Yemeni Jews to Israel. Courtesy of Solomon Schechter

by Carolyn Slutsky
Staff Writer

Alisa Weisser reads to her second grade class in an engaging voice, and the children seated at her feet listen in rapt attention. Their classroom is decorated with pictures of Passover and lots of Hebrew text. The story she tells them is about Margalit, the daughter in a Jewish immigrant family that left its native Yemen for Israel during Operation Magic Carpet, the program that brought 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel between 1949 and 1950.
Weisser asks the students to look at photographs of immigrants in a hollowed-out airplane, awaiting passage to Israel.
“It looks like the Holocaust,” someone says, squirming on the carpet, of the haunted people captured in the image.
“What’s the Holocaust again?” someone else asks.
This scene took place not

long ago at the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, a Conservative Jewish day school that has survived and thrived where others of its ilk have foundered and closed. The school has spent much of the past two months on an involved, school-wide curriculum in honor of “Israel at 60,” which approaches Israel’s history decade by decade, exposing students to the state’s wonderful — and challenging — narratives.
“We didn’t want it to be simply a celebration or a lament,” says Head of School Steven Lorch, a slight man with a knowing smile who wears themed ties everyday (today’s features a football, for “Israel at 60 Kickoff”) that he orders from a specialty Web site.
“We thought a lot about Israel’s history decade by decade and tried to identify key developmental events,” Lorch continues, noting that this is despite the fact that his staff consists of few Israelis, and that only 10 to 15 percent of families in the school include one Israeli parent. “We wanted to [promote] an identity based on the shared assumption that we’re like Israelis and Israelis are like us.”
As for trying to show a fuller picture of Israel than is often introduced to young students, Lorch says balance and questioning were key in planning the curriculum. “We wanted to practice the habit of critical inquiry,” he says while perched at a large, wooden table at the school’s center. The lower grades are located on the East Side, while older students are here at the Society for the Advancement of Judaism on West 86th Street, where Lorch does not have a desk.
Critical inquiry is a foundation of the school’s philosophy. SSSM uses an educational strategy that highlights what students know, what they want to know and what they learned, in various lessons and subjects. With this method, students are encouraged to become resourceful learners rather than simply being taught lessons by a teacher standing at the front of the room.
Israel is also a prominent component of the school’s focus.
“We do a lot of living the rhythms of Israel year in and year out,” Lorch says of the community of 160 students in kindergarten through eighth grades, which opened in 1996 and is poised to outgrow its current location in September of 2009. “We’ve upped the ante this year.”
At an assembly recently for the “Israel at 60” curriculum’s commencement, students met in groups according to Hebrew proficiency, their bodies sprawled on the floor and their blue and white uniforms forming an abstract Israeli flag across the room. As much as possible, conversations about Israeli culture, food, politics, religion and people take place in Hebrew.
After the assembly and back in a fourth grade classroom, students break into groups and draw maps of Israel, their familiarity with Israeli geography as easy as if they were talking about streets and landmarks on the Upper West Side. In the sixth grade, conversation turns to Israel’s various industries. Students seated at individual computers provide examples of specific industries — clothing, defense, international relations and high-tech — and engage in a complex lesson on some of the medical advances that have come out of the Jewish state.
Teacher Michael Fine, a young man who his students call “Mick,” encourages the class to say whatever industries come to mind, his manner supportive of their questions and contributions to the conversation.
Lorch says his school is “particularly menschy,” that teachers focus on “micro-interactions,” minor communications between them and their students that are so minute as to almost go unnoticed but that enhance education. He articulates what characterizes a Conservative education in an era when the movement is waning and many of its schools are suffering from a lack of demographics and self-definition.
He says Schechter schools embrace both tradition and modernity, support critical inquiry that mirrors what is happening in academic Jewish studies, allow for the centrality of God, Torah, the Jewish people and the state of Israel and believe that study leads to action in the realm of social and political justice and tikkun olam.
Lorch also calls up a culinary metaphor to describe the problems some people, both within and outside the movement, have in understanding its nature.
“People who don’t understand Conservative Judaism think of it as pareve — Orthodox is meat, Reform is dairy and Conservative is somewhere in between and hence not robust,” says Lorch.
Back in the second grade classroom, Weisser tells the students in her smooth voice that they have a choice about how to respond to the story of Margalit, the Yemenite girl who made aliyah to Israel with her family so many years ago. They disperse to write in their journals about Margalit’s experiences, this piece of the history of Israel fully understood, and the next pieces theirs to discover soon enough.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization