feature
Hebrew School
Enrollment Asaf Elia-Shalev | JTA.org
L iving in Brooklyn, surrounded by
synagogues and Jewish schools, Rachel
Weinstein White and her husband hoped
to fi nd a place where their children could receive
a Jewish education for a few hours each week.

But they knew they didn’t want to enroll
at a traditional Hebrew school associated
with a local synagogue. For one thing, White
wasn’t interested at the time in participating
in prayer services, the main off ering of most
congregations. Plus, her husband is Black and
not Jewish, and they were not sure how well he
or their children would be welcomed.

So about eight years ago, she started her own
program together with a few families, setting
up a cooperative and hiring a teacher in an
early version of the “learning pods” that would
become a pandemic fad.

“It was just this incredible, magical year,” White
said. “So many people started hearing about
our little class and asked to join that it became
necessary to create a second class. … It just kind
of grew organically from there.”
Today, the school, Fig Tree, enrolls about
350 children across three locations, and plans
are underway to expand further. In hour-long
classes on Sundays and weekday afternoons,
children learn about Jewish holidays and history,
16 APRIL 27, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
engage in art and creative
play, explore their local
Jewish communities and learn basic Hebrew,
in a program that culminates in a b’nai mitzvah
year. It overlaps signifi cantly with traditional
Hebrew schools, but outside the usual setting
— a synagogue classroom — that has become
a cultural shorthand among American Jews for
rote, uninspiring Jewish education.

That dynamic may be why Fig Tree is an
outlier in a stark trend revealed in a new report:
Enrollment in supplemental Jewish schools —
those that students attend in addition to regular
schooling in public or secular private schools
— is down by nearly half over the last 15 years.

Even as the estimated number of Jewish
children in the United States rose by 17% between
2000 and 2020, enrollment in Hebrew schools
fell by at least 45% between 2006 and 2020,
according to the report by the Jewish Education
Project, a nonprofi t that promotes educational
innovation and supports Jewish educators in a
wide array of settings.

The report identifi es pockets of growth,
mostly in the small number of programs like
Fig Tree that operate outside of or adjacent
to synagogues, and in schools operated by
the Chasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. But
overall, according to the report, just 141,000
children attend supplemental Jewish schools in
the United States and Canada, down from more
than 230,000 in 2006 and 280,000 in 1987.

Some of the decline in Hebrew school
enrollment is countered by increasing enrollment
in Jewish day schools, where students study
Jewish topics for at least part of every day. The
number of U.S. children attending Jewish day
schools has risen by roughly the same amount,
90,000, that Hebrew school enrollment has fallen
since 2006, according to the report, though a
signifi cant portion of the increase stems from
population growth in Orthodox communities,
where the vast majority of students attend day
schools. Miriam Heller Stern, a professor at Hebrew
Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said
the results suggest that, as with many aspects
of religious life today, Hebrew school enrollment
cannot be counted on as an act of obligation or
tradition. “There’s this idea that parents send their
kids to Hebrew school because they went to
Hebrew school and that’s a rite of passage in
North America, but that may be a myth,” she
said. “People don’t want to push their kids to
have to do the same thing they did, necessarily,
anymore.” The report speculates about what has fueled
the enrollment decline — from demographic
Background pattern and Hebrew book: Slanapotam/iStock / Getty Images Plus/Getty Images
Across US Down
by Nearly Half
Since 2006