USCJ Review - Spring 2007
Small-Town Religious Schools Find Ways to Cope Creatively
It’s 5:30 in the afternoon in a classroom in the religious school at Temple B’nai Shalom in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Four 9- and 10-year-old boys, part of a school of 25 students, sit together and consider the question “Why do your parents send you to religious school?”
They don’t think for long. Their hands shoot up, and without a moment’s hesitation the first says, “We come to school to give time back to God for all that God has given us.” “We come to religious school to learn the Hebrew language. We should know the main language of our people,” says the second. “When Moses got the Torah from God, he was told to teach it to everyone. That’s what we are doing here,” says the third. And, as if we weren’t already totally blown away with these answers, the last one says, “When you come to Hebrew school it’s like praying. It is where I come to talk to God.”
We were fascinated and a bit in awe of these children, who felt so comfortable sharing their thoughts on God and religion. But this was only part of what we experienced on our road trip through Indiana and Michigan this fall.
The purpose of our trip was to visit, speak with, and mostly learn from some of our small congregational schools, which are to be found off the beaten Jewish track. Our tour included visits to Congregation Beth Israel in Munster, Indiana; Sinai Synagogue in South Bend, Indiana; B’nai Shalom in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Congregation Ahavas Israel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. We wanted to understand the challenges the schools faced, and how United Synagogue’s education department might be smarter in serving them better. Each community was somewhat different in personality and approach, but all are in the midst of “churched” Christian communities. Their neighbors and friends are religiously observant, churchgoing Christians. Among other things, we wondered about the impact of being raised in small towns in and near the Bible Belt, where God and religion-focused conversations are all around them.
In each of these communities, the sense of connectedness to the synagogue and to the Conservative movement was strong and unwavering. In all four places, the rabbis said that they had chosen to serve small congregations because of the relationships that it allowed them to build. Each of the rabbis knows the name of every child in the congregation, jokes warmly with them, and encourages a more personalized style of learning. Each of the schools directs its curricular focus on the teaching of prayer, boasting that their children can chant Torah and haftarah and lead Shabbat services at an early age.
Although it’s within commuting distance of Chicago, Beth Israel in Munster, Indiana – a congregation of 220 families that has 66 children in its school – has not attracted Jewish growth in its direction. It’s an aging community, and members’ children do not return to it after college. Even the reasonably affordable housing does not seem to be a strong enough magnet to draw new Jewish families. When the steel industry left the area, high-tech startups did not come in to replace it. It has a brand-new synagogue building, a gift significantly funded by local philanthropist, that sits across the parking lot from its rented Federation space, but synagogue leaders do not think that the new building will increase membership.
Rabbi Raphael Ostrovsky has led the congregation for 30 years. He is dedicated to raising the necessary funds to send children to Camp Ramah and to Israel. Sharon Bartel has been the education director there for 23 years. She grew up in the community and earned degrees from Indiana University, Purdue, and Spertus. She works as a special needs teacher in the public schools; she takes advantage of our department’s Ednotes and our consultation services. The synagogue prides itself on having a professionally run school. It’s proud as well of being a close-knit community. All the mothers are everyone’s “auntie.” Each looks out for the well-being of every child.
Our next stop was in South Bend, Indiana, where we met members of the 170- family community that is Sinai Synagogue. The synagogue is in the shadow of Notre Dame; the Catholic university brings in a modest number of Jewish faculty and staff. The town’s economy is otherwise flat. The Studebaker plant that bolstered the local economy closed in 1963, and it was never replaced. Seven thousand people were put out of work, and the town never recovered from the blow. Most of the Jews in town are affiliated with the black-hat Orthodox community, the Reform temple, or Sinai.
Sinai’s Rabbi Michael Friedland has been nurturing a Shabbat-observing community for the past 10 years. The synagoguewide education program is aimed at creating a participating congregation – and it is working. Every Shabbat, the congregation swells with prayer and song, lunch, dancing, and socializing. In the late afternoon the Freidland family – Michael, Lizzie, and their four children – opens its home in shared fellowship. One congregant told me, “I never considered myself as being shomer Shabbat, but since I spend my whole day at shul and then at the rabbi’s house, I guess I am.”
Sinai created a Shabbat morning school program to supplement the midweek community school, which served students from both the Conservative and the Reform congregations. That program, Feast, is taught to its 30 children by parent volunteers. (Some of the parents have taught in the program for up to 7 years.) Sinai’s Tamid program is designed for its 20 post-bar/bat-mitzvah students. “The rabbi has high expectations, “one teacher told us. “And the children rise to meet them.” As we sat in the classroom to observe, we marveled at the teachers’ breadth of knowledge. It was inspiring to learn that many of them were converts to Judaism. But Sinai still faces challenges. Last summer the community school broke apart. The Reform temple wanted to reduce classes from two days to one. Sinai now is creating its own midweek program. seeing it as an opportunity to strengthen its children’s education. The congregation anticipates growing more learned, committed Jews but does not foresee growing its congregational membership.
Economically depressed from the loss of the Whirlpool Manufacturing Corporation, the Benton Harbor community is a study in contrasts. The swelling summer beach resort community of St. Joseph, with its pretty boutiques and upscale restaurants, is in sharp juxtaposition to Benton Harbor’s commercial district, which marked by many boarded-up buildings that wait quietly for their long-hoped-for renaissance. The towns’ Jewish residents, who come from both communities, find a shared and comfortable home at B’nai Shalom.
Our first encounter with Rabbi Michael Rascoe, who is active in community outreach, was shortly before he had to leave to speak at a local college. He said, “In small towns, you have to make do with what you have. One needs to teach members to be teachers.” By inviting congregants to teach in the school, he has involved them in many other volunteer opportunities, which are so important to the health of the congregation. Even though many of the shul’s member families were intermarried or made up of Jews by choice, B’nai Shalom’s families clearly identified themselves as Conservative Jews. Its part-time education director, Sondra Levin, earned a master’s degree in Jewish studies from Spertus College. She gives the school her professional and organizational skills, as well as her love for Judaism, and she makes use of the many learning and enriching opportunities that United Synagogue offers. She has participated in our New Director’s Institute, Lilmod U’Lilamed, and Imun, and uses our website, www.usjc.org, Ednotes, and education consultation. Partnering with United Synagogue, she said, has helped the synagogue and its school remain viable.
In an era when so many community schools are breaking apart, Rabbi David Krishef is creating a different, far more positive model for Ahavas Israel in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Passionate about the truth that Jewish education must focus on “what’s best for the kids,” he has planted the seeds for a community school to be shared by children from his congregation and the local Reform temple. Although the community’s two synagogues share only a long history of separation from each other – often the children from the two congregations would not meet each other until they went to college – they took a joint trip to Israel in 2000. That trip allowed a discussion of a community school to begin. Both rabbis, and a board with an equal number of representatives from both synagogues, have been working out the kinks of the new school, which opened this September. Because they knew that the trend is for community school to break up rather than to come together, the board and the rabbis invited us to address the newly formed school. They wanted us to talk with them about what it would take for them to succeed. We recommended, among other things, that each synagogue should make sure to connect its families back to it for services and for family programs. We also cautioned both institutions not to use the joint school program as an opportunity to fish in each other’s ponds for membership.
The congregants with whom we met spoke emotionally about the advantages of belonging to small congregations. It offers unique personal relationships with warm, approachable rabbis, schools that can individualize instruction for each child, many opportunities for hands-on educational experiences on a variety of levels, and the feeling that every person’s participation really does count. One congregant described her congregation as the “Cheers of Jewish congregational life.” Why? “Because it was the only place where everybody knows your name.”
In our continued research on small congregational schools we invite you to tell us your stories at either Victor@uscj.org or light@uscj.org.
Wendy Light and Serene Victor are both national education consultants for United Synagogue’s department of Education.
