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Schechter school system of Conserva-
tive Judaism.
The bottom line is sobering. For all
the talk of day schools as a leading
weapon in fighting assimilation,
they're hardly even present on the bat-
tlefield. Right now they serve almost
exclusively to educate children least at
risk of assimilation. The vast popula-
tion of at-risk Jewish youth — three-
quarters of a million children from
moderately affiliated families — isn't
enrolled in day schools and won't be
anytime soon.
What would it take to bring day
schooling to the mainstream? It's hard
to imagine. Even a modest doubling
of non-Orthodox enrollment, to 10
percent, would require billions of dol-
lars to build new classrooms, endow
scholarships and train new teachers —
assuming teachers could be found at
current salary levels. Few knowledge-
able observers believe such sums are
remotely available.
More important, the day-school
mystique overlooks a crucial fact
about intermarriage. Several studies in
recent years have shown convincingly
that Jewish marriage patterns follow
adolescent experience. More than any-
thing, the studies show, the person
Jews marry depends on whom they
date. Jewish experiences during high
school — Hebrew High, youth group,
summer camp, Israel trips — are actu-
ally more effective in deterring inter-
marriage than a day-school education
that ends with eighth grade. And near-
ly all non-Orthodox day schooling
ends then.
Building new Jewish day-high
schools would help. It's a pipe dream,
though.
Non-Orthodox high schools cur-
rently have a combined enrollment of
2,200 nationwide. That's less than 1
percent of all non-Orthodox teens.
Boosting the number of students to
10 percent would cost at least $2 bil-
lion. That's just for construction.
By contrast, Young Judea, the Zion-
ist youth camps sponsored by the
organization Hadassah, currently
reaches 12,000 youngsters a year at a
cost of $20 million. It surveyed its
alumni last year and found an inter-
marriage rate of only 5 percent.
Day schools aren't the same as
summer trips and camps, of course.
Limited Scope
They create an informed, educated
The biggest and most insular chasidic
Jewish
population, steeped in the
stream, the militantly anti-Zionist Sat-
tradition in a way that youth groups
mar sect, accounts for just over 17,000
can't match.
students, or 9 percent of the total day-
But that's a different discussion.
school population. That's roughly the
You can't scare Jews with ignorance. E.
same size as the nationwide Solomon

Jacob Joseph Schools. He compiled
the census by contacting schools
directly and requesting enrollment
information for ages 4 and up. All
told, 676 schools were contacted.
Schick says cooperation was "100 per-
cent." Allowing for a handful of
schools that may have gone unnoticed,
it appears his figures present a nearly
precise count, not an estimate, of the
day-school population.
"They were very scrupulous in
hunting down schools no one was
aware of," says Dr. Leora Isaacs,
research director of the mainstream
Jewish Education Service of North
America (JESNA). "And they were
appropriately cautious in interpreting
the numbers that were given to them."
One of the census' biggest shocks is
its depiction of Orthodox Jewry. For
one thing, they're much more numer-
ous than commonly thought. The
1990 National Jewish Population Sur-
vey reported Orthodox Jews to be 6
percent of the total Jewish population,
some 330,000 souls. But the 138,000
Orthodox schoolchildren in the census
point to a much bigger population.
After factoring in statistics on family
size provided by the schools, Schick
estimates the Orthodox population at
500,000 to 550,000. That's 8 to 10
percent of the overall Jewish commu-
nity. The Orthodox proportion of the
school-aged Jewish population is 14
percent, thanks to higher birth rates.
More startling, the census indicates
only one-third of Orthodox students
are enrolled in modern or "centrist"
Orthodox schools — those that
encourage college education and, in
Schick's words, "evince a more positive
attitude toward Israel." (Modern
Orthodox schools, unlike centrist, are
coeducational.)
The other two-thirds of the Ortho-
dox student population — some
92,000, which is fully half the total
day-school population — are enrolled
in chasidic and "yeshiva-world"
("black-hat" or ultra-Orthodox, but
not chasidic) institutions. These are
schools where secular studies are
downplayed and Judaic studies are
commonly taught in Yiddish. The
schools also report averages of seven
children per family.

