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
continued on page 10