American Jewish Institutions Spend $60,000,000 a Year on Schools

The average expenditure of $100 per child per year in the United States for Jewish education “is inadequate to provide for education in depth or for the engagement of properly qualified teachers,” Isaac Toubin, executive director of the American Association for Jewish Education, warned yesterday.

Addressing the closing meeting here of the board of governors of the Association, Mr. Toubin noted the vast increase in attendance and in expenditures for Jewish education for children disclosed by the association’s recent National Survey of Jewish education. He said the 600,000 children attending various religious schools and the $60,000,000 expended by communal and congregational institutions annually for this purpose “are unprecedented in all of Jewish history.”

He added, however, that “the continuing crisis in Jewish education cannot be blurred by the magnitude of the statistics. The solution to the teacher shortage problem and to the improvement of learning conditions will be found only after we plan the careful consolidation of schools and achieve an increased level of philanthropic support.” To reach that goal, he said, Jewish Welfare Funds throughout the country will be asked to double their support of the work of the association.

More than 100 leaders in the field of Jewish education, attending the annual meeting of the board of governors, elected Philip Lown to his sixth term as president and Samuel H. Daroff as chairman of the board. Mr. Lown announced that an initial gift of $100,000 had been made by the family of the late Samuel Rosenthal of Cleveland, a former founder and long-time leader of the association to establish a National Curriculum Research Institute. Additional contributions totaling $50,000 to subsidize fellowships in the Institute also were announced by Mr. Lown.