Focus on Issues: Israeli Principals Glimpse Pluralistic Jewish Education

Joyfully singing prayers of thanksgiving, some 40 third-graders clutch the new Bibles that their parents have given them.

As the children stand inside a large circle formed by their parents in the gym at Manhattan’s Abraham Joshua Heschel School, the grown-ups bend down to say a few private words to their children.

In unison, they sing the prayer thanking God for bringing them to this blessed moment at which the kids will begin their formal study of Torah. There is hardly a dry eye in the room.

At the back of the gym, a group of visitors, principals of Jerusalem public schools, are deeply impressed by the sight of non- Orthodox families so happy and serious about their children’s religious educations.

“The way the parents and the rabbis talked with such emotion spoke to the people involved and made it more significant” than the way the comparable Chumash ceremony is held for second-graders in his school, said Dov Segal.

Segal is principal of the Aleph elementary public school, which is Orthodox, in Jerusalem’s Ramot neighborhood.

He was visiting Heschel and other Jewish schools here as part of a delegation of 13 Jerusalem principals on a recent trip designed to demonstrate how Jewish education can inculcate religious values, pluralism and tolerance.

The seminar, titled “Jewish Education in a Pluralistic Society,” was organized jointly by the American Jewish Committee and the Education Authority of Jerusalem.

Jerusalem Mayor Ehud Olmert joined the delegation during the first of its dozen days visiting schools and Jewish education experts in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C.

Participants also met with leaders of Orthodox, Conservative and Reform Judaism.

Teaching tolerance to devoutly religious people and imbuing positive religious values in people who lead secular lives has become increasingly important in Israel since an Orthodox Jew murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin one year ago.

The assassination brought into painful relief the gulf separating the two populations.

The system of public schools in Israel reflects the estrangement. There are separate schools for every segment of the population, from the fervently Orthodox to the secular.

The populations are segregated and, as a result, students tend to possess inaccurate and slightly demonized views of the other segments of the population, the principals said.

In Israel’s Orthodox schools, students are often taught that there is only one way to be Jewish — their way.

And among secular Israelis who are now two and three generations removed from the meld of religious and communal identity that their grandparents knew in European and North African Jewish centers, there is Jewish illiteracy and resistance to the notion that Judaism as a religion might have something to offer them.

Although every secular school student is taught about three hours of Bible each week, it is transmitted as literature and history rather than as a sacred text with the potential to inspire holiness.

The central problem the trip was designed to address is the fact that in Israel, “secular education leaves people without any roots and religious education is very fundamentalist,” said Meir Kraus, deputy director of Jerusalem’s Education Authority.

“We haven’t found the balance between universalism and particularism,” he said.

The Israeli educators said they felt inspired by the integration of religious and secular identities evident in many of the classrooms they visited here and wanted to try and weave some of it into their own schools in Jerusalem.

Two years ago, Israel’s national Shenhar Commission concluded a four-year study of Jewish identity in Israeli schools.

One of the recommendations, to include Jewish religious education in secular schools, will be implemented next year, when the Torah portion of the week will be taught in Jerusalem’s junior high schools, said Kraus of the Education Authority.

“There is always suspicion [in secular schools] that we are trying to make them” Orthodox, said Kraus, “but we just want to build common Jewish identity.”

The challenge of implementing even this seemingly simple program was evident in the feelings of at least one of the principals, who dismissed the idea of teaching the portion of the week.

“I don’t think it is the most important thing for my students to know,” said Shula Carmel, principal of the secular Rene Cassin Junior High School. “Through history I teach them very important values, and I don’t think I’ll ruin the soul of some little child” by doing it that way.

She would like to see Israel introduce a religiously integrated school system, though she acknowledged that it is not likely to happen.

“Being divided makes extremists on both sides,” she said. “Judaism belongs to all of us.”

Some principals of both religious and secular schools in Jerusalem are working to introduce that concept to their students.

Dov Singer, principal of Mekor Chaim Yeshiva, a fervently Orthodox boys high school, this year began bringing his students together with boys from a nearby secular school once a week to study Talmudic texts.

At the secular Beit Hinuch High School, 11th- and 12th-graders are required to study Talmud, according to the principal, Gideon Stachel.

“It is very rare to learn Talmud in a non-religious school,” he said. “In the beginning there was some resistance, but if you are a Jew and an Israeli you must learn it because it is the basis for our culture.”

A new school in Jerusalem is making coexistence a reality.

The school, Keshet, brings together equal numbers of rigorously religious and stringently secular students and teachers.

The students study some subjects together and others apart, said Principal Ruth Lehavi, who is observant.

“We are not looking for a compromise between the two populations,” she said of the 2-year-old school.

Only religious students participate in morning prayers and study Jewish law. Secular students will look at the same theme as religious students, but “in a different voice,” she said.

For example, rather than studying the laws governing the observance of a particular holy day, the secular students are taught “the customs and the idea of the holiday,” she said.

While Keshet is the only school of its kind in Israel, it may be an idea whose time has come.

Although it was difficult to attract religious students during the school’s first year, Lehavi said, in the second year it received 10 times as many applications from religious students than the number of spaces available.