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Help Wanted

Nationally and
locally, there is a
shortage of
Jewish educators
for top-level
positions.

3/13
1998

8

JULIE WIENER

Staff Writer

larmed by high rates of
intermarriage and assimila-
tion, Jewish leaders through-
out the country are begin-
ning to invest more resources in reli-
gious education.
The Jewish Federation of Metropol-
itan Detroit, which has been steadily
increasing allocations to day schools
over the past five years, recently
announced it would grant $750,000
to a proposed Conservative Jewish
high school and is talking about creat-
ing a $25 million "continuity" endow-
ment to benefit — among other
things — day schools and synagogue
schools.
But amid this surge of interest in
Jewish education lies one major prob-
lem, described by some leaders as a
crisis: There is a shortage of Jewish
educators, particularly for top-level
positions such as headmasters, syna-
gogue directors of education and exec-
utives of Jewish education agencies.
In Detroit alone, six searches are
currently under way for top-level edu-
cation positions. At Adat Shalom,

which is looking for a director of edu-
•
cation, and Shaarey Zedek, which
hopes to find a youth director, search-
es have lasted more than nine months.
A Jewish high school in Atlanta,
after losing a bidding war with a Jew-
ish high school in Boston for a partic-
ular headmaster candidate, opted
instead to pair a non-Jewish headmas-
ter with a Jewish principal.
Don Adelman, a New York execu-
tive headhunter specializing in non-
profit organizations, said at any given
time he is working on filling 7-10
openings for Jewish day schools, with
searches generally taking 2-3 months
for schools in large cities and consider-
ably longer for schools in areas with
small Jewish communities.
"The disparity between the number
of qualified, talented people out there
and the number of positions opening
up is widening," said Adelman. "As
schools are proliferating and the
demand grows, we're looking at a
problem that's going to grow and
exacerbate over the next five years
before we begin to see some catch-
up."
Why are there so few people out
there with the qualifications to head

Jewish educational institutions? Direc-
tors of programs that train Jewish edu-
cators point to a number of factors,
particularly the fact that education has
traditionally been a low-pay, low-sta-
tus field in the American Jewish com-
munity.
"The community has never quite
caught up in terms of making these
positions prestigious," said Professor
Sara S. Lee, director of Hebrew Union
College's Rhea Hirsch School of Edu-
cation in Los Angeles. "It's starting to
get better now, but in the past there
was nothing to encourage people to
enter and stay in the field.
Even people who enter the field,
many tend to leave because they don't
get the status and salary they want and
it's also a very difficult profession ...
Often boards of day schools and con-
gregations don't provide adequate
infrastructure and support." The low
prestige accorded Jewish education has
impacted on recruitment, says Dr.
Paul Flexner, director of human
resources development at the Jewish
Education Service of North America.
Flexner is currently helping Detroit's
Agency for Jewish Education find an
executive director.

