Editorials
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Challenges Aplenty
etro Detroit's newest Jewish
W
high school will open on
We
Monday with the expectation Lear
that it can't miss — and that
should surprise no one.
Rabbi Lee Buckman, the Jewish Academy of Met-
ropolitan Detroit's charismatic and hard-working
head of school, has built a strong administrative and
teaching team — richly varied, deeply talented and
widely respected.
They will feel the joy of opening a Jewish high
school — offering both secular and Jewish studies —
with perhaps the largest opening-day enrollment of
a non-Orthodox yeshiva ever in North America.
That's yet another distinction for Detroit's Jewish
community, which has methodically become a
national laboratory for elevating the role of Jewish
education.
Skeptics stood up in 1998, when then-president
Jeffrey Garden and other determined founders
announced that their still-unnamed new Jewish high
school wouldn't recognize patrilineal descent — a
problem for some liberal Jews.
But even though it follows the principles of the
Conservative movement, the school is open to stu-
dents from each major stream. No one is turned
away without a concerted effort to overcome spiritu-
al and financial hurdles.
Notably, 90 percent of the academy's ninth- and
10th-graders say they would have gone to a public
Related cover story begins on page 6
high school. So the school hasn't hurt our
community's Orthodox yeshivot, as some
feared.
Meanwhile, the academy is communally
rooted. Without $750,000 from the Jewish
Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, $250,000
from the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Educa-
tion, a suitable educational setting at the Jewish Com-
munity Center in West Bloomfield and other levels of
support, the academy still would be a dream.
The academy promises to be a golden opportuni-
ty for impressionable teenagers ready to sharpen
their Jewish identity through increased knowledge
of, and appreciation for, their Jewish-heritage. But
first, it must earn high marks this kickoff year.
Ironically, the academy opens the week after the
25th annual conference of the Coalition for the
Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE). Whether
the school succeeds will depend to a large extent on
how well it responds to many of the concerns facing
CAJE educators: staff recruitment, training and
retention; tuition affordability; curriculum develop-
ment and cultural arts opportunities.
Like all Jewish day, afternoon and supplemental
schools, the academy must assure that teachers are
treated with respect and dignity — and as partners
with, not stand-ins for, parents. It must satisfy
parental pressure for a quality of education that is
equal to, or better than, that of tax-supported high
schools.
Two more grades still need to be added, too.
Tough, important challenges all.
IN FOCUS
A Dream Fulfilled
Representatives of the Detroit Jewish community wel-
comed two Bosnian-Muslim students upon their •
arrival here last Friday. The students, Adnon Memic,
18, and his sister, Nermina, 20, will attend St. Mary's
College in Orchard Lake through the help of Jewish
communal and institutional involvement, including
Detroit attorney Michael Traison, far left, and Jewish
Community Council of Metropolitan Detroit Execu-
tive Director David Gad-Harf, far right.
But with a little patience from everyone involved,
constructive staff and community feedback, and a
resourceful — even daring — approach to teaching,
there's every reason to believe the Jewish Academy of
Metropolitan Detroit will become a pillar of Jewish
Detroit. ❑
Right Plan, Wrong Time
II
ast week Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Barak finally got around to addressing
some of the toughest domestic issues. It
was too late.
For more than a year following his election,
American Jews watched with some pleasure Barak's
effort to forge a meaningful governing coalition that
embraced the political center as well as his natural left-
of-center constituency. We hoped that he could then
address not only the peace process, but also the need
to reform the government practices that discouraged
an open, pluralistic society in which all citizens were
treated in an even-handed, respectful way.
We knew it was a tall order, particularly as his One
Israel party controlled only a third of the 120 seats in
the Knesset, the parliament elected separately from the
prime minister. Having seen the gridlock in Washing-
ton as a Republican congress and a Democratic presi-
dent wasted their energies in childlike feuding, it was
easy to understand the frustration that ordinary Israelis
felt about the standstill in Jerusalem.
But the top priority had to be the effort to strike
a peace deal with the Palestinians while the national
consensus for that was so strong. That it reached
the present impasse is not dishonorable; Barak did
well to show that it is the Palestinian intransigence
and fear that stands in the way of a settlement.
In the meantime, however, like a general choosing
to ignore his flank while concentrating on the front,
Barak made no public effort to address some basic
internal unfairness. So when he unveiled this weekend
his proposal for reforms such as a modern constitu-
tion and for recognizing marriages that were not per-
formed by an Orthodox rabbi, the action smacked of
political cynicism rather than an honest effort to con-
front an unfair and unworkable system.
The proposed changes themselves seem laudable.
Israel desperately needs a constitutional govern-
ment that balances the judicial, executive and leg-
islative forces while maintaining a place for the
moral values that Torah mandates in a Jewish state.
The current system in which the Knesset routinely
flouts the Supreme Court, for example, simply
breeds disrespect for government.
Similarly, while it is unrealistic to expect to cut
the Gordian knot of "who is a Jew" in one stroke,
the government needs to find a fair way to recog-
nize the rights of those citizens who choose not to
follow a strictly Orthodox path. Abolishing the
stalemated Ministry of Religious Affairs is a good
.
Related story: page 30
start. Mandating some national service from yeshiva
students is another fair demand.
Similarly, requiring all schools that get state
funds to teach a basic curriculum that includes
civics and mathematics is a sound way to assure the
future of young people. Shas, the political party of
the Sephardim, should not expect to enjoy massive
government subsidies without agreeing to alter its
schools to meet basic standards of education.
But sadly, all of these solid, progressive ideas are
being put forward way too late by an administration
that has lost its mandate to govern and that knows it
must go to elections in the very near future. Barak and
One Israel seem to be trying to shore up their natural
political base with secular Jewish and Arab-Israeli vot-
ers by laying out a program that the Knesset certainly.
will never even consider, much less enact.
As we have noted before, the right-wing opposi-
tion of Likud and the in-again, out-again Shas part-
ners have deplorably chosen paths of self-interest
rather than working for a national good. Now
Barak, in the timing of his proposals, seems to be
doing the same thing. It is sad that he had lowered
himself and his once hopeful party to a narrow par-
tisanship that weakens the state of Israel in the eyes
of its citizens and of the world. ❑
8/25
2000
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