Conserving a Culture

When Irving Gellman founded Tarbut V’Torah Community Day School six years ago, it opened with just 37 pupils. This fall, the hilly 10-acre campus south of Irvine has 340 students--up from summer enrollment of 190.

“We can’t figure it out,” Gellman said. “I have been around in Jewish education for 35 years, and I have never seen such growth in any school.”

The increase is not unique, though. Across the nation, thousands of children are swelling the ranks at Jewish day schools.

Some of those schools--which meld the three Rs with the study of Hebrew, the Bible and Judaica--are even moving from makeshift classrooms to multimillion-dollar campuses, particularly in Southern California.

In Orange County, estimated enrollment at Jewish schools this year is about 700. In Los Angeles County, the figure is much larger: an estimated 9,000 pupils this fall.

Nationwide, 11 new Jewish high schools opened in September.

The numbers are likely to keep growing, observers say. Ten prominent Jewish business leaders and two leading Jewish organizations announced in New York last month that they are donating $1.5 million apiece--a total of $18 million--to jump-start an effort to raise $36 million for construction of additional schools.

Why the boom? One obvious reason is dissatisfaction with public schools and private alternatives.

At its core, however, the move to Jewish schooling is tied to the key issue of how to maintain a Jewish identity in secular American society. Even something as seemingly benign as a cheeseburger involves Jewish soul-searching, for Jewish tradition does not allow the mixing of milk products and meat.

“For me, it’s about Jewish identity more than anything else,” said David Wagman, father of a student at Menorah Community Day School in Redondo Beach. “Identity is inseparable from faith. And if you don’t get the background, it’s very difficult to develop the identity.

“What I want, and hope, for Michael [his son] is that he develops that Jewish identity and a sense of resonance so that, when he’s an adult and participates in Judaism, it goes all the way down to his toes.”

The day schools have critics, though, including those fiercely committed to public education, some who doubt that the new Jewish schools can be academically credible, others who label some facilities substandard and who see them as insular and counterproductive to American life. Still others point out that the day schools are costly and underfunded.

Tuition at Menorah, which has kindergarten through fifth-grade classes, is $7,050 annually. The Milken Community High School of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles costs $13,500 a year. Tuition at Orange County’s three day schools ranges from $4,000 to $10,000, depending on the grade level and campus.

Tuition seldom covers all the costs, though, according to a report last month by the Avi Chai Foundation, a New York-based agency that promotes Jewish education and identity.

Expenditures per capita in the day schools are “well below” comparable spending at other private schools and about the same as in public schools, according to the study, which surveyed 154 Jewish day schools nationwide.

As a result, the report concluded, “too many Jewish parents [believe] there is a great gap between what the day school offers and what is available in competing schools.”

What the day schools do offer, according to a 1993 Avi Chai study, is “the only type of Jewish education that stands up against the very rapidly growing rate of assimilation.”

The authors of last month’s report, Marvin Schick, the president of four day schools, and Yossi Prager, Avi Chai’s executive director, have since called repeatedly for deeper financial support. “If Jewish day school education was properly funded, then these schools would be growing at an even faster rate,” Prager said.

Jews of all denominations have long sent their children to the local temple for a few hours a week of after-school religious training. But most of the 700 full-day schools nationwide are affiliated with Orthodox Judaism, the denomination that most closely adheres to traditional Jewish laws. Such schools typically revolve around diligent study of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

But there is remarkable growth too in “modern Orthodox” and even more liberal “community” schools that at the high school level feature a heavy load of college preparatory classes--and whose goals go beyond maintaining Jewish identity.

Most intriguing to Southern California Jewish educators is the presence of day schools in places far away from the Los Angeles Westside and San Fernando Valley, the longtime strongholds of Jewish life in the Southland.

“People say there are no more miracles,” said Bruce Powell, president of the Milken School. “Nonsense. It’s happening with the birth of our children and with the building of Jewish day schools in places such as Irvine.”