Community Views
Editor's Notebook
The Education Question:
Is Day School The Answer?
To Our Heroes:
Our Jewish Moms
LAURENCE !MERMAN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS
PHIL JACOBS EDITOR
My friend, Marv,
worked as a
teacher and edu-
cational adminis-
trator until he
decided to switch
careers. He now
is employed by a
multinational
corporation,
which transferred him to Aus-
tralia last year.
According to Marv, a recent ar-
ticle in the Sydney Morning Her-
ald reported that more than 50
percent of school-aged Jewish
children in that city attended the
five local Jewish day schools. This
followed a concerted investment
in day-school education. This
news triggered a wave of e-mail
from Marv.
Mary surmises Detroit is
following the same path as did
the Jewish community in Sydney.
However, he believes an empha-
sis on parochial education is
misplaced. My friend character-
ized it as the "saving remnant"
approach. This approach concen-
trates financial re-
sources on those who
are already the most
Jewishly committed
and engaged.
The strategy neglects
the vast majority of
Jewish metro Detroiters
with school-aged chil-
dren who do not desire
a narrow and insular
educational experience.
My friend includes in
this group the non-ob-
servant and the nomi-
nally religious: those
believing in a univer-
salistic learning setting
and the children of the
intermarried.
Another of our e-
mails discussed the ap-
parent shift in our
communal philosophy.
Mary contends that,
historically, we have directed lit-
tle communal money to religious
institutions. Now, millions are
funneled to Orthodox and Con-
servative educational institutions
at the near exclusion of other
"branches" of Judaism.
Mary also wrote of his youth,
growing up among children from
Orthodox families. His playmates
attended the then-"Christianized"
public school, receiving their re-
ligious instruction at the cheder.
He does not understand the cur-
rent need for multiple, large Or-
thodox day schools under
communal sponsorship.
He expressed surprise at the
need for allocations given certain
day schools and not others. If a
group wishes a certain kind of ed-
Laurence !merman is a
Birmingham attorney.
ucation for its children, it will cre-
ate a school regardless of gener-
al communal involvement. He
cited as examples the apparent
success of Yeshivas Darchei
Torah and the yeshiva operated
by the Lubavitch movement.
It troubled him that the push
toward day schools may rob the
public schools of a pool of com-
mitted and involved parents. The
leadership void can only mean, in
Marv's view, a decline in the qual-
ity of public-school education.
My friend. pointed to those he
knew who had attended Catholic
and Protestant parochial schools.
They often intermarried despite
the education received.
Lastly, Mary decried the fact
that the stress on day-school ed-
ucation is ill-placed, given that
most Jewish children receive for-
mal religious education in schools
controlled by synagogues. He es-
timated that communal alloca-
tions to synagogue schools
amounted to less that 5 percent
of the total amount spent on
maintaining those schools.
I tried to explain to Mary the
uniqueness of a day-school ed-
ucation and how both the quali-
ty and quantity of Jewish
knowledge transmitted cannot
be compared to after-school pro-
grams.
My messages explained the es-
sential role day schools play, and
will continue to play, in Jewish
communal survival. It is from the
graduates of such schools that the
next generation of teachers and
communal professionals will
arise.
I wrote that one cannot mere-
ly examine day-school education
as the learning of ritual. Rather
and more importantly, day-school
education teaches Jewish values
and how those values affect every
aspect of our lives.
I repeated the results of stud-
ies, which showed a day-school
education decreases the likelihood
of intermarriage and enhances
Jewish identity. Finally, I men-
tioned how communities around
the United States, and appar-
ently around the world, are build-
ing systems of Jewish parochial
schools.
Yet some of Marv's comments
continue to bother me. If we
are truly committed to Jewish
continuity and the universal
need for a Jewish education,
then our approach in Detroit
could be interpreted as elitist.
We also seem locked into the bu-
reaucratic model of a set of client
agencies largely dependent on a
single funding source for sup-
port.
I wonder whether a different,
flexible approach might be in or-
der — a Jewish education fund
operated as a charitable founda-
tion.
This Jewish education fund
might issue grants to the best-
managed day schools. It could
provide seed money for one or
more Jewish culture and Hebrew
language charter
schools. Such schools
would teach Jewish
history, literature, cul-
ture, values and He-
brew language. As a
quasi-public school, re-
ligious education
would be reserved for
either before or after
the school day.
A Jewish education
fund could give free tu-
ition for the first few
years of religious ed-
ucation at an approved
institution. The ap-
proval process would
be denominationally
blind and as broad-
brush as possible. An
experimental voucher
system even could be
tried.
Incentives through
grants could be offered by the
fund to those educational insti-
tutions which attract the most
Jewish children with no prior
Jewish education. Or the fund
might establish monetary re-
wards for educational institutions
which possess the best track
record for retaining children.
Rather than just relying on the
Agency for Jewish Education to
inject innovation into the system,
we should let the free market pro-
vide the impetus for attracting
Jewish students, introducing new
educational ideas and inserting
excitement into the educational
process.
I look forward to future ex-
changes with Marv. Perhaps he
will make me evaluate my posi-
tion. Perhaps he will make me
think of new solutions to old prob-
lems. O
was
There
snow all over
the place. Radio
announcers
were telling us
to stay at home.
Certain roads
were blocked off
by the drifts.
A woman
with auburn hair looked out
the back door of her brick town
house. She stood behind her
aluminum, fold-up walker. The
footing wasn't so steady. She
had multiple sclerosis. She
needed to get her hair done.
On that snowy Saturday in
February, when her own son
told her she was crazy to go
outside in her condition, they
arrived at Delma's. It was one
of those places that smelled like
hair spray and perm chemicals.
The looks on the faces of
Delma, the lady who owned the
place, her shampoo girl and
another beauti-
cian were never
forgotten. The
auburn-haired
woman's eyes of
determination
said, "Get me to
the beauty par=
lor." Her eyes
said it, even
when she fell off
the slippery step
into the snow.
I know this lady. You do too.
I remember her in her sis-
ter's basement — the sister
who changed her last name
from a Jewish one to one
that would gain admittance to
the WASP country clubs. This
sister's son, the medical stu-
dent, talked about how "all the
Jews" were getting the good
residencies and internships.
That the Jewish doctors were
"controlling" the world of med-
icine.
The lady who fell off the
snowy step wheeled herself to
her nephew, pushed herself
into a standing position and
pointed a finger at the young
"doctor." She told the young
man that he, too, was a Jew.
That his assimilation had
brainwashed him to a state
nothing less than anti-Semitic.
She told him this.
It didn't end there. She con-
tinued telling her own family
about Israel and the need for
all Jews to support the small
country as if it were their own
country.
The voice of the woman stays
in my head to this day. Because
even her frailty couldn't mask
the strength of her conviction.
Those same eyes that want-
ed — no, demanded — to have
her hair done, appeared again,
castigating a loved nephew. It
changed her nephew's outlook,
his life. He later apologized and
remembers that moment which
took place better than 20 years
ago. It changed him.
Finally, the woman's eyes
made a different demand. She
couldn't talk with her voice.
The MS, now combined with a
stroke, redefined the word
"communication."
She sat in a chair and used
the one arm that worked to
reach out. The woman want-
ed to hold the baby, her grand-
daughter. This granddaughter
was an active one, getting into
everything as a toddler. Yet she
climbed into her grandmother's
lap and held still, cuddling into
her grandmother's one con-
trollable limb.
The two stayed together that
way literally until they had to
be pulled apart.
Yet the hardest aspect to pull
apart was the
gaze. It's as if the
lady was talking
to her grandbaby
with some sort of
secret look.
But there was
nothing secret
about it.
It was love.
The lady died.
When I'm feel-
ing sorry for my-
self, I remember that time on
the back step in the middle of
February.
In the years of covering the
Jewish community I've been
honored to spend, no event of
confrontation between Jew and
Arab or even among Jews
comes close to that moment be-
tween the lady and the medical
student.
The best part, though.
Whenever I want to remind
myself of those eyes of deter-
mination and drive, I simply
have to look inside the soul of
the baby who sat in the lady's
lap. She's 13 now, yet my moth-
er's spirit is so alive within my
daughter.
But not just within my fam-
ily. You know the strength, the
comfort, the determination
we've learned from our Jewish
mothers. It's more than just be-
ing the cook of a good chicken
soup.
These are women who said
the Sh'ma to us before bed, who
told us how great we were
when we didn't believe it our-
selves, who held our hands on
the boxcars in Poland, and who
blew the wind of Jewish her-
itage and strength through
generations.
Happy Mother's Day to our
heroes, our moms. O
Her eyes said
it, even when
she fell off the
slippery step
into the snow.