The only city on the North American continent which has established a network of Jewish parochial or “day” schools, outside of New York, is Winnipeg, a city with a Jewish community of less than twenty thousand souls. This city now has four such Jewish day schools, where secular as well as Jewish subjects are taught and where Yiddish and Hebrew are the languages of instruction.
Winnipeg’s remarkable Jewish educational system is led by the “Peretz Schule,” a secular Yiddishist institution, now in its 18th year. This is the largest Yiddish school in North America, having nearly 600 pupils. This school was the first to esetblish a Jewish kindergarten and a day school, where children go through five years of public school work, after which they are admitted to the sixth grade of the regular public schools. The largest local Talmud Torah and the two other Yiddish schools of Winnipeg have also established kindergartens and day schools on the model of the “Peretz Schule.”
The two other Yiddish schools are the “Arbeiter Ring Schule,” which counts about 200 children, and the Poale-Zionist “Folk-Schule,” which counts about 175 children. In all the Talmud Torahs of Winnipeg too, Yiddish is either taught as a special course or is used as a language of instruction.
Altogether between 60 and 70 percent of all Winnipeg Jewish children of school age, perhaps the largest percentage of any Jewish community in the United States and Canada, attend these Jewish educational institutions. But a large part of those Winnipeg Jewish children who do not attend these institutions also get some Jewish instruction, through private teachers mainly.
In the smaller Jewish communities of Western Canada, like Vancouver, Calgary, Saskatoon and Edmonton, Jewish educational institutions are also very well developed. Winnipeg Jewish teachers are experimenting with various new methods of Jewish education, some of which have been adopted and have brought very fruitful results.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
