8 | JULY 6 • 2023 

interview
The Roots of Jewish Sunday Schools
A

s a kid I went to 
Sunday school at our 
Reform synagogue. I 
didn’t hate it as much as my 
peers did, but let’s just say 
there were literally dozens 
of other things 
I would have 
preferred to do 
on a weekend 
morning.
As a Jewish 
adult, I had 
a vague 
understanding 
that Sunday school was a 
post-World War II invention, 
part of the assimilation and 
suburbanization of American 
Jews (my synagogue was 
actually called Suburban 
Temple). With our parents 
committed to public schools 
and having moved away from 
the dense urban enclaves 
where they were raised, 
our Jewish education was 
relegated to Sunday mornings 
and perhaps a weekday 
afternoon. The Protestant and 
Catholic kids went to their 
own religious supplementary 
schools, and we Jewish kids 
went to ours. 
In her new book Jewish 
Sunday Schools, Laura Yares 
backdates this story by over a 
century. Subtitled “Teaching 
Religion in Nineteenth-
Century America,” the 
book describes how Sunday 
schools were the invention 
of pioneering educators 
such as Rebecca Gratz, who 
founded the first Sunday 
school for Jewish children 
in Philadelphia in 1838. As 
such, they were responses by 
a tiny minority to distinctly 
19th-century challenges 
— namely, how to raise 
their children to be Jews 

in a country dominated by 
a Protestant majority, and 
how to express their Judaism 
in a way compatible with 
America’s idea of religious 
freedom.
Although Sunday schools 
would become the “principal 
educational organization” of 
the Reform movement, Yares 
shows that the model was 
adopted by traditionalists 
as well. And she also argues 
that 20th-century historians, 
in focusing on the failures 
of Sunday schools to 
promote Jewish “continuity,” 
discounted the contributions 
of the mostly volunteer corps 
of women educators who 
made them run. Meanwhile, 
the supplementary school 
remains the dominant model 
for Jewish education among 
non-Orthodox American 
Jews, despite recent research 
showing its precipitous 
decline.
I picked up Jewish Sunday 
Schools hoping to find 
out who gets the blame 
for ruining my Sunday 
mornings. I came away with 
a new appreciation for the 
women whose “important 
and influential work,” Yares 
writes, “extended far beyond 
the classrooms in which they 
worked.” 
Yares is assistant professor 
of Religious Studies at 
Michigan State University, 
with a joint appointment 
in the MSU Program for 
Jewish Studies. Raised in 
Birmingham, England, she 
has degrees from Oxford 
University and a doctorate 
from Georgetown University.
Our conversation was 
edited for length and clarity.

Tell me how your book 
came to be about the 19th 
century as opposed to 
the common 20th-century 
story of suburbanization.
There’s a real gap in American 
Jewish history when it comes 
to the 19th century, chiefly 
because so many American 
Jews today trace their origins 
back to the generation who 
arrived between 1881 and 
1924, the mass migration of 
Jews from Eastern Europe. So 
there’s a sense that that’s when 
American Jewish history 
began. Of course, that’s not 
true at all.
The American Jewish 
community dates back to the 
17th century and there was 
much innovation that laid the 
foundations for what would 
become institutionalized in 
the 20th century. 
Sunday school gets a 
very bad rap among most 
historians of American 
Judaism. If they’ve treated it at 
all, they tend to be dismissive 
— you know, there was no 
substance, they just taught 
kids the 10 Commandments, 
it was run by these 

unprofessional volunteer 
female teachers, so it was 
feminized and feminine.
But there’s also a lot of 
celebration of Rebecca 
Gratz, who founded the 
first Sunday school for 
Jewish children. 
That’s the first indication 
I had that there might be 
more of a story here. Rebecca 
Gratz is lionized as being 
such a visionary and being so 
inventive in developing this 
incredible volunteer model 
for Jewish education for an 
immigrant generation that 
was mostly from Western 
Europe. And yet, by the 
beginning of the 20th century, 
[Jewish historians] say it has 
no value. So what’s the story 
there?
Two other things led me 
on the path to thinking that 
there was more of a story in 
this 19th-century moment. I 
did my Ph.D. in Washington, 
D.C. And as I was searching 
through the holdings of the 
Library of Congress, there 
were tons and tons of Jewish 
catechisms.

Andrew 
Silow-Carroll
JTA.org

PURELY COMMENTARY

A Hebrew lesson at the Jewish Educational Center in St. Paul, 
Minnesota, 1931. 

©MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY/CORBIS/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES/JTA

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