THIS CHAPTER compares the background, attitudes, values, and practices of French Jewish families who send their children to Jewish day schools with those of other such families who send their children to public (state) schools or non-Jewish private schools. Choice of school plays a pivotal role in the formation and expression of French Jewish identity.

The issue of school choice and the struggle of French Jews to preserve their identity must be understood in the context of the long and rich history of the Jews in France. Throughout their many centuries in the country, the Jewish community waxed and waned as its members were subjected to periodic legal restrictions, punitive taxation, violent attacks, attempts at forced conversion, ‘blood libel’ trials, and expulsion orders. Despite all this, the Jewish communities in the region persevered; indeed, some of the most famous Torah scholars of all time came from France. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution brought political emancipation to the Jews. However, the equality extended to all French citizens under the republic was granted with the expectation that allegiance would be exclusively to the state, and that all affiliation with ethnic or religious communities would be strictly private and subordinate to citizenship. This philosophy, which discourages affiliation with ethnic or religious sub-groups, still guides the political culture of France.

Today, the Jewish community of France is the second largest diaspora community in the world, and one of the most vibrant. The French Jewish community has experienced major demographic and cultural upheavals since the Second World War. Under Nazi occupation during the Vichy regime a quarter of the Jews of France were killed or deported, and the institutional and educational structure of the community was almost completely destroyed. The psychological impact was equally traumatic. In the decades following the war, Jewish refugees from other European countries as well as half a million Jews from France's newly independent colonies in north Africa migrated to France. French Jews today, while patriotic and largely integrated into French culture, are attempting to navigate a path between expression of Jewish identity and respect for the republican ideals of universalism and laïcité (secularism).

IN THIS CHAPTER I present two different views of the relationship between the Jewish day school and the Jewish Community. I focus on one case—that of the Bet El Community in Buenos Aires, Argentina, founded in 1962 by Rabbi Marshall T. Meyer. A study of the Bet El Conservative School sheds light on the emergence of Jewish Community schools that has become, since the 1970s, the leading trend in Jewish education in Argentina. Bet El, an institution regarded as the flagship school of the Conservative movement in Argentina, was founded as a kindergarten in 1967, some five years after Rabbi Meyer's establishment of the Bet El community as a nucleus for the development of the Conservative movement in Latin America. The elementary school began operating in 1974, at the same time as an application was made to establish a Conservative high school— an application that was approved by the public authorities but not taken further owing to the need to consolidate and strengthen the elementary school.

The figure of Rabbi Meyer loomed large over Argentinian Jewry from his arrival in Buenos Aires in 1959 until his return to the US in 1984. He came to Argentina as a young rabbi having just completed his studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he was one of the dosest disciples of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Meyer contributed significantly to the consolidation of a new type of Jewish Community in Argentina, different from the accepted model built around central and centralized institutions, or around Zionist parties. Meyer's vision was of a synthesis between American and Argentinian modes of Jewish existence within a Western society undergoing extensive change. From the 1970s, however, he became a controversial figure, at once admired and vilified. He symbolized an innovative spirituality that attempted to combine traditional Judaism, Zionism, and human rights, integrating Jews into civic life and the struggle to attain a society that was democratic, pluralistic, and multicultural. Despite his seminal influence, there is almost no research that addresses his impact on Argentinian Jewry in particular and Argentinian society in general.

In this chapter I discuss Meyer's moulding of the Bet El School as an institution embodying two fundamental views of the connection between the Jewish Community and the Jewish school.

THE RAPID PROLIFERATION in North America during the past decade of new communal and Conservative Jewish day high schools has caught many by surprise. For years nearly all Jewish day high schools were run under Orthodox auspices. However, beginning in the 1990s, the demand for Jewish day school education beyond eighth grade expanded among a more liberal constituency. Families pleased with their children's elementary day school education were eager for that education to continue into the high school years. Marvin Schick reports that between 1992 and 2004 the numbers of students in American non-Orthodox day high schools grew from 1,500 to 4,100. In 2007 we know of thirty-four such high schools throughout North America.

These schools all provide a formal Jewish education through academic classes in Jewish subjects; now many have created ‘experiential’ opportunities for their students ‘to live their Judaism’. The focus of this chapter is on the most common intensive experiential opportunity the schools offer, the Shabbaton, a retreat focusing on the communal celebration of the sabbath. These Shabbatonim are a distinctive form of experiential Jewish education; yet despite their widespread implementation and the growth of experiential educational efforts in day schools, they have been given little attention in the educational literature. To address this lack, we draw on our experiences in training school-based experiential educators in order to discuss the educational goals of these Shabbaton programmes, the principles of running a successful programme, and the challenges faced by the experiential educators who are charged with planning and implementing these programmes.

Background

In North America, the non-Orthodox Jewish day high school came of age during the decade between 1995 and 2004. These years saw existing schools grow and new schools created in communities throughout the continent. Of the current thirty-four such high schools in North America, twenty-eight identify themselves as communal and six as Conservative. Officially, communal or community schools are open to Jewish students across a broad spectrum of Jewish backgrounds and do not follow the teachings of a single religious denomination; the Conservative schools follow the teachings of their movement. However, the realities on the ground are more varied than official policy would suggest.

THE SYSTEM of formal Jewish education in the former Soviet Union (FSU) began to develop during the final years of the Communist regime in major cities such as Riga, Vilna, Moscow, St Petersburg, and Kiev. Since the establishment of the Dubnow Jewish school in Riga in 1989, dozens more Jewish schools have opened throughout the FSU. The first day schools were established at the initiative of local activists, but the major surge came during the 1990s, in the wake of active intervention by Jews overseas. The parties to this endeavour included the Liaison Bureau in Israel (‘Nativ’), the Chabad movement, Karlin hasidim, strictly Orthodox groups of Lithuanian origin, and the Conservative movement.

The Heftzibah Support Programme for Formal Jewish Zionist Education in the FSU was established within the Israeli ministry of education in the early 1990s, on the initiative of the late minister Zevulun Hammer, to support Jewish schools within the territory of the FSU. In fact, the FSU is the only region in the diaspora where the Israeli ministry of education is involved with Jewish education. The aim of those who founded this unique programme was to provide the Jews of the FSU with the Jewish education that had been forcibly denied them for about seventy years. The programme includes financial support for school infrastructure, informal activity related to celebration of Jewish festivals, support for Jewish studies teachers, and the provision of sheliḥim (emissary teachers) from Israel.

Few non-religious Jewish schools in the FSU received support from the programme during the 1990s. Today, however, about forty-three schools participate in the programme; most of their students, who in total number more than 9,000, are Jewish, at least in the sense of qualifying for entitlement to migrate to Israel under the Law of Return. Some seventy sheliḥim, along with more than 200 local teachers, are currently teaching Jewish studies (Hebrew, history, tradition, etc.) at these institutions.

The Heftzibah programme brings together professional teachers (local as well as sheliḥim) of very different social, cultural, and personal backgrounds.

IN 1990 the Commission on Jewish Education in North America concluded that ‘the System of Jewish education is plagued by many problems, and because of its inadequacies it is failing to engage the minds of a critical segment of the Jewish population who have no other way of experiencing the beauty and richness of Jewish life'. The Commission then went on to suggest that strategies to address ‘this crisis of major proportions’ should rest on two building blocks, one of which is mobilizing Community support to meet the needs and goals of Jewish education. In specifying what ‘community support’ or ‘community mobilization’ might involve, the Commission recommended ‘recruiting top community leaders to the cause of Jewish education, raising Jewish education to the top of the communal agenda, creating a positive environment for Jewish education and providing substantially increased funding from federation, private family foundations and other sources’.

However, the Commission viewed the community not only as a key part of the solution to the crisis in Jewish education, but also as part of the problem. The Jewish community, it remarked, ‘has not yet recognized the indispensable role it must play, … it lacks understanding … and it is not sufficiently supportive of the massive investment required to bring about systemic change'.

What strikes me when rereading this assessment from over a decade ago is the prominence given to the need for the community to support the school, while there is the absence of any substantial role for the school in redefining the nature of collaboration between itself and the Community it serves.

In this chapter I focus on the role of the school in redefining that collaboration. I argue that it is important to explore the purposes and mechanisms of school-community collaboration. Why should a school pursue collaboration with the Community, and what are the mechanisms by which schools and communities can interact with and mutually support one another? I focus on three purposes, on the corresponding perspectives on why and how school-community relations can ‘work', and on appropriate mechanisms for bringing this about.

Background

Clearly, addressing the topic of Community in general, and as it relates to Jewish day schools in particular, is very complex.

IN THIS CHAPTER I present a case study of the Jewish High School in Berlin— the only Jewish secondary school in contemporary Germany. My focus is on the re-establishment of this school in 1993 and the associated hopes of the religious Community, on the one hand, and the religious selfunderstanding and expectations of the pupils regarding religious education, on the other.

I begin by setting out current developments in the Jewish educational System in Germany and the hopes that Jewish parents and religious communities have of it. I then give an account of the re-establishment of the Berlin Jewish High School and its Jewish profile. This makes it possible to understand the unique composition of the Student body in its religious, cultural, and social heterogeneity. I then present quantitative data that provide an insight into the religious self-understanding of the young Jews in the school: how they think of themselves as Jews in Germany, what is associated with this self-understanding, and what religious behaviour arises from it. The analysis focuses on the similarities and differences between young Jewish people from German and Soviet backgrounds. This focus is chosen because of the mix of expectations and anxieties within the Jewish Community associated with immigration from the former Soviet Union (FSU). I then move on to a qualitative analysis of the expectations and desires of the pupils in relation to their religious education.

In the final section I discuss what, realistically, might be the outcomes of an approach to Jewish religious education that embraces a Student Community so diverse in religious, cultural, and social terms.

Developments in the German Jewish Community's Educational System

Since the beginning of the early 1990s Jewish life in Germany has been revitalized. As a result of immigration of Jews from the states of the FSU, the Jewish Community in Germany has quadrupled from 30,000 to 120,000 individuals and the age structure has become younger. This revival has been most apparent in the establishment of Jewish educational institutions, both new foundations and re-establishments, since the mid- 1990s. In 1993 the first Jewish high school to operate since the Second World War began to offer classes. The first Jewish primary school in North Rhine-Westphalia was also opened in 1993, in Düsseldorf.

INTENSIVE JEWISH EDUCATION is seen in many countries, including Israel, as the most promising antidote to the assimilation of Jews—meaning the loss of Jewish identity and commitment. Full-day schools especially have been seized upon by Jews in the former Soviet Union (FSU) and their foreign supporters as the optimal solution to the lack of Jewish education, institutions, public life, and private religious practice among the 400,000 or so Jews left in the FSU. This conclusion is based on extrapolation from Western Jewry's experiences. Common sense would also lead one to believe that viable Jewish life—that which engages people in private and public Jewish behaviours and transmits commitment across generations— depends on education, and not of children alone.

One crucial difference between the West and the FSU is that in the West Jewish education is conveyed in a wider context of Jewish commitment and activity: the family, organized peer and interest groups, a communal structure, religious and cultural institutions, and family and group traditions. In the FSU Jewish schools exist in a partial void. Jewish public institutions were abolished by the Soviet authorities after 1948 when the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was dissolved and many of its leaders were arrested. In 1930 the Jewish Sections of the Communist Party were dissolved, and earlier still Jewish religious, Zionist, and/or Hebrew schools had been closed. Although the USSR was the only State in the world to provide füll funding for a network of Jewish schools, these were all run in Yiddish. No Hebrew was taught, Judaism was referred to only to criticize it, and Jewish history was limited to the modern era in the Russian empire and the USSR. There were about 1,100 Soviet Yiddish schools in 1931, in which 130,000 students were enrolled. Of all the Jewish children who attended school at all in Belorussia and Ukraine, in the former Pale of Settlement, nearly half were enrolled in Yiddish schools. But urbanization, industrialization, and the attractiveness of Russian culture as the key to social, economic, and political mobility led most Jewish parents to choose Russian (sometimes Ukrainian, rarely Belorussian) schools for their children.

WHEN I WROTE my friend Miriam to say I was Coming to Jerusalem to talk about Jewish education, she wrote back, and I quote, ‘You? On Jewish education?'

I admit, I had virtually no formal Jewish education. As a Student I went to independent private schools. The schools I have been involved in as a teacher and principal have all been public schools, in the US sense of that phrase, and it so happens they were all schools serving predominantly lowincome African American and Latino students and families, located in largely ghetto communities of colour and poverty. In some of these there was a small white population, and probably half of those were Jews.

So much for my qualifications to address this topic.

On the other hand, I have a strong sense of my Jewish identity, which is connected to my absurd belief that in fact I had a deeply Jewish secular education at the hands of a family that was immersed in New York City's Jewish life as well as its intellectual life. Both of my parents were prominent leaders of Jewish organizations: my father was head of the UJA-Federation for his entire adult life, and my mother was president of both the International and National Councils of Jewish Women. Our dinner table was always the centre of my education, and their library a challenge: would I ever read it all?

So I had a rather romantic and egocentric notion of what lay at the heart of being a Jew, and it had to do with the habits of heart, mind, and work that epitomized my own experience as a Jew in New York City. I imagined Jewish education was built around the idea of the young being immersed in the culture, or, as I later would say, in the Company of the adults they aspired to join and believed they were destined to become; that being ‘educated’ was a process that started with immersion, exposure, and acceptance.

I assumed Jewish education was also argumentative, questioning, doubting, and yet also loving and caring. It was, I took for granted, grounded in respectful uncertainties but not therefore one whit less passionately dedicated to the trutḥAnd I assumed, because my family's life was also immersed in social and political struggles for defending and expanding democracy, that these were also the habits of mind suited to a democratic society.

INA DELIGHTFUL but underappreciated book entitled Back to Basics, Fran Schräg opens by posing a question about the purposes of education in general. What, he asks, are our most fundamental aspirations for any particular educational endeavour? The question may seem intractable, but Schräg offers a helpful method for thinking about it. Adapting a thought experiment from the political philosopher John Rawls—the thought experiment that generated Rawls's Theory of Justice and launched a revitalization of liberal political theory—Schräg suggests that we try to imagine what aspirations might hold true not just for contemporary education but for the education of our great-grandchildren.

The virtues of the thought experiment are, first, that we cannot claim to know what society will be like for our great-grandchildren, what their Status will be within that society, what the culture will value, or what will be necessary for the common good; but second, that we may be presumed to care about our great-grandchildren. In other words, the thought experiment allows us to abstract our enquiry from accidents of history on both the societal and individual level, while also maintaining a personal connection with it sufficient to motivate a deep commitment to the welfare of the students. For Schräg, the thought experiment generates what he calls ‘three key aspirations'. First, students will care about arguments and evidence. Second, students will be disposed to continue learning. And third, students will acquire the capacity to continue learning. These aspirations, he believes, can withstand the test of time, and can apply to students in widely varying situations.

Now, for those who have attended to recent discussions of Vision’ in Jewish education, many of which have focused on defining and articulating visions of the ‘educated Jew’ as the ideal outcome of Jewish education, Schrag's arguments may be intriguing. After all, he is presenting a vision of an educated person; he is taking a stand on what such a person will consider most important, and what education can aspire to provide or promote. Schräg is not concerned here with Jews in particular, of course, and some readers may wonder whether his arguments stand in tension with the goals of Jewish education, as they understand them.

THE JEWISH SCHOOL in France was never conceived or planned; it just created itself behind the backs of community institutions. The first modern Jewish institution in the country with a pedagogical vocation, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, was founded in 1860 and decided against opening schools in France. The Alliance did not see the need or demand for special Jewish schools; its pioneers could not conceive of a school for Jews that would not be a school of the republic. Its leaders, rabbis and the members of its central committee (which always included the most prestigious members of the community), gently shied away from such a proposition.

Nevertheless, over the course of the following century the Alliance was not reticent about opening schools elsewhere in Mediterranean communities. In Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Malta, Greece, and of course in Palestine, it created a number of establishments. Among those in Palestine was the famous agricultural school Mikveh Yisra'el, founded in 1870 and built on land leased by the sultan to Baron Rothschild, sponsor of the institution.

In France itself the Alliance was satisfied with directing the famous École Normale Israélite Orientale (ENIO), which was charged with training teachers for the Mediterranean schools. In order to further its interest in developing the moral and intellectual level of oriental Jews, weakened by the neglect that prevailed in their countries of residence, the Alliance willingly relocated its principals and teachers with little concern for their personal preferences. In 1914 the Alliance ran 188 schools with 48,000 students from Tangier to Tehran.

In 1960, a century after its creation and having survived the Dreyfus affair and the First and Second World Wars, this venerable institution was still not ready to recognize the Jewish school at Pavillons-sous-Bois, in Seine-Saint-Denis, 10 kilometres north-east of Paris. The history of this school provides a good illustration of the way Jewish schooling expanded in France. It was founded at the beginning of the 1960s by a former principal of the Alliance in Morocco, without the support of the headquarters in Paris. It opened a first classroom and then a second one in a suburban house. Considering himself the holder of the pedagogical patrimony of the prestigious educational network, the principal dared to challenge the authority of its supervising organization and described his school as part of the Alliance.