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Editorial
A Lesson In PersPverance
I
t began modestly with just two
grades, no permanent facilities and
no significant endowment. Today,
the Frankel Jewish Academy embarks on
its eighth school year with 224 students
and gorgeous new classrooms in the West
Bloomfield JCC and is the proud holder of
a $20-million Endowment Challenge Fund
for operations.
"Today is about rededicating ourselves
to a certain kind of education, one where
we are concerned not only with how
much students know, but with what kind
of people they become said Rabbi Lee
Buckman, head of school, at the Aug. 29
ribbon cutting.
The measure of a school is the quality
of its students and what they are doing,
and have the capacity to do, to elevate the
world.
The Academy was a fragile experiment.
Many doubted it could attract enough stu-
dents to even open in 2000. The risk was
too high to send a college-bound student
to a school without an academic reputa-
tion, they felt.
But the Academy defied the odds and
opened with 51 students, the largest start-
up of any Jewish day school nationwide.
What most people don't see are the
years of preplanning that went into creat-
ing the vision for the Academy. A core
group of families believed in the need for
the halachically based, nondenomina-
tional school.
Federation delivered financial and plan-
ning assistance to assure the startup. Early
on, however, the school had to approach
generous families just to meet payroll.
The Academy has gone on to quadruple
its enrollment. And it has more than 150
alumni studying at top universities in the
U.S. and Israel.
No names are more fitting to adorn
the Academy than Jean and Sam Frankel.
By giving a $2-million challenge grant,
they spurred the $9.2-million fundraising
campaign that led to the Academy's new
home inside the JCC's Kahn Building. The
Frankels extracted that grant from their
2002 gift to the Academy: a $20-million
Endowment Challenge Fund for opera-
tions, which included a $500,000 Tuition
Assistance Challenge Fund.
Wisely, the Academy's founding lead-
ers set out to hire excellent teachers and
pay them competitively. The intent was to
provide exceptional Jewish learning and a
rigorous secular education equal to that of
the best private schools.
However, Frankel Jewish Academy
tuition, now $17,000, remains a concern;
35 percent of students is on some form of
scholarship.
Clearly, Israel echoes
through the Academy.
Twenty of the 50 June
graduates will spend this
school year there. One
year, Rabbi Buckman
chartered a jet to take
AND IS
SUICIDAL
all of the students to
PROTECTED BY.
BLINDERS
Washington to rally for
Israel.
Students also have ral-
lied on behalf of victims
of the Darfur civil war
and Hurricane Katrina.
WHY 00
Additionally, the teens
WRY IS THIS TNEY us8 2 ATE THE PROBLEM
WHAT HAVE p.
make the JCC more
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vibrant. And the renova-
i
tions necessary to clear
leir?
space for the Academy
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www.drybonesblog.com
gave the JCC fresh new
administrative offices.
But the JCC must stay vital and solvent
the only Jewish institution or organiza-
if the Academy is to do so. They are now
tion housed there that depends on its well
inextricably linked. Executive Director
being.
Mark Lit and his board know that and
One of the less-publicized rewards of
are up to the challenge. Federation has
our Jewish day schools — Frankel Jewish
been wonderful covering JCC shortfalls in
Academy, Hillel Day School, Yeshivat
recent years, but the Annual Campaign is
Akiva, Yeshiva Beth Yehudah, Yeshivas
stretched to the limit.
Darchei Torah, Yeshiva Gedolah – is their
The JCC belongs to Jewish Detroit. It's
success in producing future leaders of the
our central address. We're a better com-
Detroit Jewish community or alternatively,
munity because of it. The Academy isn't
active participants in Jewish life. II
.
Reality Check
Making It Better
I
was in Budapest 17 summers ago,
writing about the end of the com-
munist regimes of Eastern Europe. A
conversation I had with an American aid
worker, sent in to help with the economic
transition, has haunted me ever since.
She had been out in the countryside,
teaching the owners of a new factory how
to set a price for their goods. She told
them that they had to account for trans-
portation, advertising and also include
a profit for themselves. So the price, of
course, would be much higher than their
actual production costs.
They were shocked to hear such a thing.
"We can't do that;' they told the aid worker.
"After all, we're not Jews."
There are so many things jumbled up
in that statement. The persistence of anti-
Semitism. The effect of 45 years of living
under an economic system that shunned
reality. The close identification of Jews
with capitalism.
The essence of communist doctrine is
that progress is an illusion. Economics is
a zero-sum game and unless
the workers control the
means of production they will
be relegated to lives of per-
petual serfdom. The idea that
wealth can be created and the
material well-being of every-
one improved lies outside the
realm of Marxism.
It is really this concept of
progress that has separated
America from its enemies for
the last 75 years — from the
Nazis to the radical Islamists.
Maybe it was a historical accident that
Jews were freed from the ghettos around
the same time that technological innova-
tion was reordering daily life. But the idea
of progress, that things are improving and
will be better for the next generation, is
something that Jews eagerly bought into,
along with the concept that capitalism was
the ideal economic vehicle with which to
harness these advances.
Progress is such a recent idea in human
affairs. Up until about 180 years
ago, people looked to the past,
to Greece and Rome, for their
benchmarks. In many regards,
the world hadn't changed that
much. One still could travel no
faster than a horse could move,
just as in the days of chariots,
and medicine was more super-
stition than science.
Many historians have linked
the rise of capitalism with the
Protestant Reformation, when
interest and new vehicles of credit were
freed from religious prohibitions. In
Catholic countries, where these bans still
existed, it was the Jews who performed
such functions.
So when capital, technology and exper-
tise were ready to take off, somewhere
around 1820, progress was born. And Jews
were present at the delivery.
The Nazis rejected progress and wanted
to return to an imaginary pagan past.
Marx saw the excesses of early capital-
ism and thought progress was folly. The
Islamists believe that submission to the
will of Allah is what is demanded in this
life, with the reward to come in the next
world. Islam, in fact, means "submission."
Improving one's lot is unimportant to
them. Acceptance is what is demanded.
The concept that human beings can bet-
ter their lives through their own efforts
is not only fanciful but hateful. Is it any
wonder that America is the focus of their
wrath?
No people in history have been more
committed to progress than Americans
and no group of Americans have
embraced it more eagerly than Jews. Even
in uncertain times such as these, we enter
a new year still believing that we have the
ability and the will to make things better.
They hate us for so many other things.
They might as well add that to the list
while they seethe in their own squalor. Fl
George Cantor's e-mail address is
gcantor614@aohcom.
September 6 a 2007
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