W. J. C. Reports on New Forms of Jewish Education in England, France

The development of a wide range of forms of Jewish education in England shows a tendency to strive for improvements in quality and depth, rather than quantitative success, the World Jewish Congress reports in a study by its Institute of Jewish Affairs on Jewish Education in England and France.

The report said the British Zionist Federation has been concentrating this year on Jewish Day schools, “where the Jewish child spends his youngest and most tender years in a Jewish atmosphere, associates mainly with Jewish children, feels he belongs to a distinctive ethnic group and finally, is not morally obligated to adjust to non-Jewish school fellows with different ideas and customs.”

The work of the British Zionist Federation and of Zionists in other countries in support of day schools did not mean that “the Zionists are striving for a maximal isolation of the Jewish child from the surrounding world,” the report stressed. It said that “the Zionists look upon the education of the Jewish child in its earliest year in a purely Jewish school environment as the minimum necessity to stem the inundating waves of assimilation.”

Jewish education activities in France, the report noted, deal with a complicated situation in which one half of the Jewish community is deeply assimilated and the other is a mass of East European Jews most of whom came to France after the war from our camps “and for a long time did not feel rooted in the new environment nor ready to build thorough and long-term institutions.”

The greatest achievement of the French Zionists, in the face of this gulf, said the report, was “the summer camp which they have established in Israel. It revealed that some 1, 400 children have visited Israel during the past six summers and about 150 have remained permanently in Israel. “The rest have become the best means or propaganda for Zionism in general and for the Hebrew language and culture in particular,” the report stated.