Introduction: Jewish Schools, Jewish Communities: A Reconsideration

Summary

The Raised Stakes of Day School Education

Towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first Century, more Jewish children attend all-day Jewish schools than at any other time in history. Nobody knows for sure, but it is likely that there are just over 1,400,000 Jewish children enrolled in Jewish day schools worldwide. The great majority of these children, three-quarters of them, are in Israel, but in the diaspora too—the primary focus of this book—an unprecedented number of Jewish children attend Jewish day schools. In 2004 there were about 225,000 children in North American day schools, and approximately 125,000 more scattered across the globe in every continent other than Antarctica. These numbers represented an increase of slightly under 120,000 students (or just over 50 per cent) since Sergio DellaPergola and Uziel Schmelz calculated worldwide day school enrolment as 232,000 in 1982-3.

Growth has been evident not only in the number of children in diaspora Jewish schools but also in the religious diversity of the Student population and its size in proportion to the number of Jewish children educated in non- Jewish private and public or State schools. For most of the twentieth Century, the overwhelming majority of students served by all-day Jewish schools came from Orthodox homes; by the Start of the twenty-first a significant proportion of the growth in enrolment consisted of non-Orthodox students. The changing profile of day school enrolment prompted Walter Ackerman to refer to this development as one of the most remarkable social facts of Jewish life since the Second World War. It indicated, he argued, a veritable transformation ‘in the image Jews have of themselves and of their relationship to the wider society'.

A further change concerns the north-south balance. For most of the twentieth Century the proportion of Jewish children attending Jewish day schools in the northern hemisphere lagged far behind the corresponding proportion in the southern hemisphere. In Australia, South Africa, and Latin America, more than 70 per cent of Jewish children attended Jewish day schools. In the northern hemisphere the level was everywhere below 50 per cent, barring only a handful of exceptional cases such as that of Montreal, where all public education was organized along religious denominational lines.