Behind the Headlines Diaspora Jewish Education

About 40 to 45 percent of diaspora Jewish children aged three through 17 receive some form of Jewish education, either in day schools or in supplementary education institutions (Sunday school or evening classes).

This is the basic finding of a major scientific survey of diaspora Jewish education undertaken by the Hebrew University’s Institute for Contemporary Jewry on behalf of the Joint Program for Jewish Education.

The survey is the first centrally organized census of Jewish schools ever undertaken on a global scale for a single period of time (1982) and using scientific techniques of data collection and processing.

The report, compiled by Prof. Allie Dubb, was submitted recently to the World Zionist Organization chairman Leon Dulzin in his capacity as head of the Joint Program. It covers the entire diaspora, though not the Soviet bloc countries, except Rumania and Hungary which were included. Dubb is the director of the Institute’s Project for Jewish Educational Statistics.

A PRONOUNCED DISPARITY

In absolute terms, the report refers to some 540,000 Jewish boys and girls in the diaspora attending 3,330 educational institutions. The report showed a pronounced disparity between the United States and the rest of the diaspora in terms of school attendance. The U.S. figure, 28 percent, is significantly lower than the overall diaspora average. In England, the figure is 47 percent; and in other countries the figures range from 67 to 100 percent.

These percentages are of Jewish children who receive Jewish education in some form. In the U.S., 72 percent of Jewish pupils enrolled in some institution of Jewish education, attend supplementary education institutions.

For the whole diaspora, the proportion of pupils enrolled in the first six grades of day school is 1.6 times higher than those enrolled in grades seven and up. This may be due, Dubb says, to a preference for public school secondary education or to the more limited availability of Jewish secondary schools because of cost or other reasons.

The dropout rate at Bar/Bat Mitzvah in supplementary schools is found to be even higher than the drop in attendance in the day schools between elementary and secondary levels. Fully 70 percent of supplementary school pupils quit after Bar/Bat Mitzvah.

ANOTHER KEY FINDING

Another key finding was that in the entire diaspora, two-thirds of the day schools are Orthodox, ranging from ultra-religious through mainstream Orthodoxy to “traditional.” The figure for North America is 63 percent and for the rest of the diaspora it is 69 percent, a two-thirds average.

There is a vast difference between North America and elsewhere, however, in the breakdown of supplementary schools. In North America, the Reform and Conservative movements had more supplementary schools than the Orthodox. In the U.S. the figures for supplementary schools are: Orthodox, 13 percent; Conservative, 43 percent; and Reform, 33 percent. “Other” and “unknown” affiliations account for 10 percent.

In the rest of the diaspora, nearly two-thirds of the supplementary schools are Orthodox; II percent are Reform (catering to some 20 percent of the pupils attending such schools); and 25 percent are classified as “other” and “unknown.” There are no Conservative supplementary schools as such outside North America, nor indeed Conservative day schools. The day school breakdown outside North America is: Orthodox, 70 percent; Reform, 1.8 percent; and “other” and “unknown,”29 percent.

CITES BASIS FOR DISPARITY

On the disparity between the Orthodox and the other branches of Judaism in terms of day schools in North America, Dubb writes: “One reason for the difference in distribution between the two types of schools in North America — suggested by a preliminary examination of school sponsorship — may be that the day schools are designed to serve the widest possible cross-section and therefore adopt a traditional or mainstream Orthodox orientation. On the other hand, supplementary schools are more closely associated with the synagogue, a large proportion of which are Conservative or Reform.”