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Hebrew school enrollment across US down by nearly half since 2006, report says
(JTA) — Living in Brooklyn, surrounded by synagogues and Jewish schools, Rachel Weinstein White and her husband hoped to find a place where their children could receive a Jewish education for a few hours each week.
But they knew they didn’t want to enroll at a traditional Hebrew school associated with a local synagogue. For one thing, White wasn’t interested at the time in participating in prayer services, the main offering of most congregations. Plus, her husband is Black and not Jewish, and they were not sure how well he or their children would be welcomed.
So about eight years ago, she started her own program together with a few families, setting up a cooperative and hiring a teacher in an early version of the “learning pods” that would become a pandemic fad.
“It was just this incredible, magical year,” White said. “So many people started hearing about our little class and asked to join that it became necessary to create a second class. … It just kind of grew organically from there.”
Today the school, Fig Tree, enrolls about 350 children across three locations and plans are underway to expand further. In hour-long classes on Sundays and weekday afternoons, children learn about Jewish holidays and history, engage in art and creative play, explore their local Jewish communities and learn basic Hebrew, in a program that culminates in a b’nai mitzvah year. It overlaps significantly with traditional Hebrew schools, but outside the usual setting — a synagogue classroom — that has become a cultural shorthand among American Jews for rote, uninspiring Jewish education.
That dynamic may be why Fig Tree is an outlier in a stark trend revealed in a new report: Enrollment in supplemental Jewish schools — those that students attend in addition to regular schooling in public or secular private schools — is down by nearly half over the last 15 years.
Even as the estimated number of Jewish children in the United States rose by 17% between 2000 and 2020, enrollment in Hebrew schools fell by at least 45% between 2006 and 2020, according to the report by the Jewish Education Project, a nonprofit that promotes educational innovation and supports Jewish educators in a wide array of settings.
The report identifies pockets of growth, mostly in the small number of programs like Fig Tree that operate outside of or adjacent to synagogues, and in schools operated by the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement. But overall, according to the report, just 141,000 children attend supplemental Jewish schools in the United States and Canada, down from more than 230,000 in 2006 and 280,000 in 1987.
Some of the decline in Hebrew school enrollment is countered by increasing enrollment in Jewish day schools, where students study Jewish topics for at least part of every day. The number of U.S. children attending Jewish day schools has risen by roughly the same amount, 90,000, that Hebrew school enrollment has fallen since 2006, according to the report, though a significant portion of the increase stems from population growth in Orthodox communities, where the vast majority of students attend day schools.
Miriam Heller Stern, a professor at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who was tapped to help design the study, said the results suggest that, as with many aspects of religious life today, Hebrew school enrollment cannot be counted on as an act of obligation or tradition.
“There’s this idea that parents send their kids to Hebrew school because they went to Hebrew school and that’s a rite of passage in North America, but that may be a myth,” she said. “People don’t want to push their kids to have to do the same thing they did, necessarily, anymore.”
The report speculates about what has fueled the enrollment decline — from demographic changes to shifts in how American Jews think about countering antisemitism to increased access to Jewish learning online — and also about what has allowed some schools to thrive. It notes that all of the supplemental schools that responded to its census said their schools help children feel connected to the Jewish people.
“We believe that many factors have led to the decline in enrollment of students in supplemental schools in the last decade,” said David Bryfman, the Jewish Education Project’s CEO. “However, it’s also a myth that all supplemental schools don’t work.”
The group is planning a series of online sessions with some of the dozens of researchers and practitioners involved in the report, with one goal the sharing of success stories identified by the survey. Of the six identified in the report, a common theme is urging experiential, community-based learning. Some of the promising models explicitly position themselves as infusing Jewish content into child care, filling a pressing need for American families.
Still, it may be hard to counter the demographic realities of contemporary American Jews: Just a third of U.S. Jews in a 2020 survey said someone in their household was a member of a synagogue. That was the case even for the majority of non-Orthodox Jews who said they identified with a particular denomination, a marker of traditional engagement.
The waning of synagogue affiliation is borne out in the Jewish Education Project’s report, which found that more than 700 supplemental schools shuttered between 2006 and 2020 — most outright, though as many as 200 have survived in a new form after merging.
Temple Solel, a small Reform congregation in Fort Mill, South Carolina, shut down its Hebrew school in recent years. The volunteer-run program had up to eight students at a time, according to Russ Cobe, a lay leader.
“We sort of hit a point where we weren’t able to sustain it,” Cobe said. “We only had a couple of people teaching and students from a wide range of ages and they wouldn’t show up every week. Also, our wheelhouse seems to be retirement age and above. We don’t have a lot of young families.”
Hebrew school mergers offer one possible approach to countering the enrollment decline. Two synagogues, one Reform and one Conservative, located half a mile apart in Oak Park, Michigan, established a joint school about seven years ago and called it Yachad, which means “together” in Hebrew.
“One day a week we meet at the Conservative congregation and one day a week we meet at the Reform congregation, so we are keeping our kids involved in both,” said Gail Greenberg, Yachad’s director. “My goal is to make it at the highest common denominator. For example, all of our food is kosher so anyone who wants to eat here can.”
The arrangement appears to be working. Last year, about 90 students were enrolled, and this year, enrollment is at 128, including 26 new kindergarteners, with even larger numbers expected in the future.
Another set of programs has grown dramatically in recent years: those affiliated with the Chabad movement, which tend to operate even when small and cost less than synagogue programs. Since 2006, the study says Chabad’s market share in terms of enrollment has grown from 4% to 10%, and in terms of the number of schools from 13% to 21%.
Those figures might represent an undercount, according to Zalman Loewenthal, director of CKids, the Chabad network of children’s programs. While the study says there are some 300 Chabad programs in the United States, Loewenthal said he is aware of at least 500 and perhaps as many as 600 — a number driven up in the last decade amid a push by Chabad to launch more Hebrew schools. His count is based on the number of customers purchasing the curriculum offered by his organization, which is also new in the last decade and in his view has contributed to improved quality among Chabad Hebrew schools.
In general, non-traditional approaches to Jewish education may be attractive at a time when American families have packed schedules and competing needs, according to Stern.
“People want to be able to have bite-sized pieces just like you sign up for a six-weeks art class, they might want a six-weeks Jewish class,” she said. “In this atmosphere, some communities are finding ways to be more modular and more flexible, and meet people’s needs in different ways.”
Stern also said, referring to six programs highlighted in the study as success stories, that the future calls for programs to offer an “immersive” experience, meaning that children become part of a community.
“They are getting something beyond just knowledge,” Stern said. “They’re also getting connection and belonging, which provides the foundation for something bigger in their lives.”
Stern said she thought the report pointed to gaps in the way American Jewish communities allocate their resources.
“Supplementary education really was abandoned as a communal priority,” she said. “Individual communities had to find ways to fund it on their own. And I think that is part of why we’re seeing a decline.”
Bryfman said he’s optimistic, both about the power of supplemental schools and the potential for them to generate new support from Jewish donors.
The Jewish Education Project had sought outside funding to pay for its study and failed, he said. But now that the numbers are clear, he is beginning to see interest from philanthropies.
“I don’t want to count the dollars before they’re granted,” Bryfman said. “But the study is already beginning to have the desired effect of bringing more resources to the field.”
Fig Tree isn’t set up to benefit in a possible future of increased charitable investments in Jewish education. That’s because the school is set up as a business — an expression of confidence in its growth and to insulate itself from the vagaries of philanthropy.
“It’s a very unusual model for the Jewish education and I would argue a self-sustaining one,” White said. “We don’t have to rely on fundraising… and we’re not beholden to some of the other requirements that a nonprofit would necessitate, which allows us to be nimble.”
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Canadian progressive party picks Jewish anti-Zionist politician as its leader
(JTA) — Canada’s main progressive party aims to make a comeback under its new leader Avi Lewis, a Jewish anti-Zionist.
Lewis, a filmmaker and former journalist, was elected to lead the New Democrats on Sunday. He campaigned on principles that have energized the global left, including affordability, the environment and unapologetic anti-Zionism. He repeated his position on Israel in his acceptance speech in Winnipeg.
“When Israel commits a genocide in Gaza, we call it by its name, and we do everything in our power to bring it to an end,” Lewis said in his speech.
Lewis hopes to rebuild a party that suffered its worst losses in history during the 2025 federal election. Center-left voters who were alarmed by President Donald Trump’s threats to Canada flocked to the Liberal Party and elected Mark Carney as prime minister.
Lewis comes from a line of progressive royalty. His grandfather, David Lewis, was one of the founding members of the New Democrats and its leader in the 1970s. His father, Stephen Lewis, led the party in Ontario. He is also the great-grandson of Moishe Lewis, who was an outspoken member of the socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe and immigrated to Canada in 1921.
Lewis is married to Naomi Klein, a prominent author and critic of Israel. Klein was among several writers who declined to participate in PEN America’s annual World Voices festival in 2024, saying the group failed to “stand firmly” with Palestinian writers. She also addressed protesters during a rally outside U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s residence in Brooklyn during Passover that year, called “Seder in the Streets to Stop Arming Israel,” and urged Jews against worshipping the “false idol” of Zionism.
Lewis was formerly a reporter for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Al Jazeera. In a debate with other candidates in January, he described himself as an “anti-Zionist Jewish person” seeking to “unlearn and unpack the Zionist myths that most Canadian Jews were brought up with.”
The Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, an advocacy arm of the Jewish Federations of Canada, said it acknowledged Lewis’ victory “with a deep sense of sadness.”
“Avi Lewis is himself Jewish, and we respect his family’s history in this party,” the group said a statement. “But Jewish identity is not a shield against accountability. When a leader declares that Zionism is inseparable from ethnic cleansing, he is not engaging in legitimate policy critique. He is telling Jewish Canadians that a core part of their identity is illegitimate.”
On the eve of the New Democratic Party’s leadership convention, CIJA joined dozens of rabbis from across the country in an open letter criticizing the party.
“Too often, the NDP’s response to antisemitism in Canada has been inconsistent, hesitant, or clouded by rhetoric that fails to recognize how hatred manifests in today’s environment,” said the letter.
Perhaps anticipating Lewis’ victory, they added, “Even more troubling is the repeated elevation of fringe or non-representative Jewish voices to deflect, dilute, or dismiss the legitimate concerns of the vast majority of the Canadian Jewish community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Canadian progressive party picks Jewish anti-Zionist politician as its leader appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu orders Church of the Holy Sepulchre open after Palm Sunday closure flares tensions
(JTA) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ordered that the top Catholic clergy in Israel be allowed into the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ahead of Easter, in an attempt to calm tensions that flared after police blocked their access.
Police cited wartime restrictions when prohibiting Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa and three other Catholic representatives from visiting the church, located in the Old City of Jerusalem, on Palm Sunday, a holy day for Christians.
Many holy sites in the city, including the Western Wall for Jews and al-Aqsa Mosque for Muslims, have been closed or tightly restricted since the start of the Iran war last month because they lack bomb shelters for the number of people who typically gather there. Shrapnel from Iranian missiles have landed in the Old City multiple times, including near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
But the prohibitions on Pizzaballa’s access come at a time when some Christians are expressing concern that Israel is discriminating against them. A statement from the Latin Patriarchate on Sunday accusing Israel of having made a “hasty and fundamentally flawed decision, tainted by improper considerations,” seemed to fuel those sentiments.
“For the first time in centuries, the Heads of the Church were prevented from celebrating the Palm Sunday Mass at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre,” the Latin Patriarchate said. “This incident is a grave precedent and disregards the sensibilities of billions of people around the world who, during this week, look to Jerusalem.”
Christians believe that the church is the site of Jesus’ burial and resurrection, making prayers at the site on Palm Sunday, which kicks off the week leading up to Easter, particularly significant. Pizzaballa was seeking to pray privately at the site, not lead a major service as is typical.
Criticism over the closure resounded across the globe, including among allies of the Israeli government. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni condemned the closure as “an insult” and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it “difficult to understand or justify” given that wartime rules prohibit only gatherings of 50 or more.
Soon, Israeli authorities were negotiating a special arrangement that would allow Pizzaballa and a handful of other Christian leaders access to the holy sites without opening them widely. Israeli President Isaac Herzog said he called Pizzaballa personally to express his commitment to religious freedom.
“I reiterate the unwavering commitment of the State of Israel to the freedom of worship for people of all faiths and the importance of upholding the status quo at the holy sites in Jerusalem,” Herzog said in a statement.
For his part, Pizzaballa downplayed the incident when speaking to a Catholic news channel. “There were no clashes, and we don’t want to force matters, but rather figure out what to do while respecting the right to prayer,” he said. “There were misunderstandings, we didn’t understand each other, and that’s what happened. It’s never happened before; it’s a shame this happened. This morning’s events are important, but we must consider the broader context. There are people who are much worse off than us who cannot celebrate for very different reasons. Once again, we are celebrating a subdued Easter.”
The police said the closure was justified because in addition to the lack of bomb shelters in the Old City, the area’s narrow and winding streets make it hard for emergency vehicles to reach anyone who might be injured in an attack.
Netanyahu said that while he understood the safety considerations involved in turning Pizzaballa back on Sunday, he had called for changes going forward.
“I have instructed the relevant authorities that Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch, be granted full and immediate access to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem,” he said in a statement.
The dustup came as Pope Leo, in his Palm Sunday address in the Vatican, condemned the Iran war and lamented that Christians in the Middle East “are suffering the consequences of a brutal conflict and, in many cases, are unable to observe fully the liturgies of these holy days.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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While sculpting Jesus, this Jewish artist wrestled with his demons
You may not know the name Jimmy Grashow, but it’s likely you’ve seen his work. His psychedelic drawings have been featured in The New York Times, Ms. and Playboy. He illustrated album covers for The Yardbirds and Jethro Tull. His cardboard sculptures of people, animals and buildings have been shown all over the country, including at MoMA, the Library of Congress, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Within the first 30 seconds of Jimmy & the Demons, a documentary about the artist directed by Cindy Meehl, I recognized his cardboard sculptures of a dancing couple; a version lives in the Cameron Art Museum in Wilmington in my home state of North Carolina.
The documentary follows Grashow as he works on his latest commission: an eight-foot tall wooden sculpture of Jesus hoisting a cathedral on his back, while demons, each one completely different from the other, reach out of the flames around his feet. The cathedral’s intricate exterior is matched by an equally elaborate interior: A mural of Eden decorates the cathedral wall and a figure resembling the piece’s commissioner Michael Marocco, a Catholic art collector who has several Grashow pieces in his private sculpture garden, kneels in prayer. If you look closely at the mural, you can see God’s name written in Hebrew on a painted banner. The cathedral’s stained glass windows are illuminated by an electric bulb.
Grashow’s work is painstakingly detailed and took years to complete, as the slightest error in measurement or cut could have ruined the whole thing. While the documentary doesn’t last for years the way the project did, it follows a similarly leisurely pace, spending lots of moments in silence with Grashow in his home workshop in Redding, Connecticut. It’s a close look at the mostly solitary work of an artist, although viewers also get a few moments to meet Grashow’s family, including his daughter who is a rabbi.
Meehl has profiled unconventional figures in her past documentaries, such as Buck, about horse whisperer Dan “Buck” Brannaman, and The Dog Doc, about holistic veterinarian Marty Goldstein. Grashow, who passed away in September 2025, three months after the film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, is no exception.
Despite his artistic talent, Grashow said that as a kid he “felt inadequate in every way.” Dyslexic and bad at math, Grashow struggled in his Brooklyn high school. At home, he felt overshadowed by his athletic brother and brilliant older sister. But he found a place to succeed at the Pratt Institute, where he studied woodworking, and received a Fulbright to study in Florence. There he fell in love with the cathedrals that would appear in many of his projects over the years.
Grashow did not view his sculpture of Christ as conflicting with his Jewish faith, noting the relationship between the word “Israel,” which means one who wrestles with God, and the meaning he saw in the piece.
“The world is full of peril and devils,” Grashow said. “And there you are trying to carry your faith and keep your faith alive. It’s a simple idea of trying to move forward in life with chaos and the possibility of chaos everywhere.”
“I’m wrestling all the time,” Grashow said. “It’s a brutal world.”
Grashow told the filmmakers that, when the idea for Marocco’s sculpture came to him, he “knew it was like a hineini moment,” using the term which means “here I am” and is also the name of a prayer traditionally chanted during the High Holidays, implying that one is showing up as their full self, with all of their flaws.
“It was God saying ‘Here’s this’ and it was up to me to say ‘Here I am. I’ll do it,’” Grashow said.
It was not a simple task. In addition to the years spent building the project, there was an emotional toll. Early in the film, Grashow says that the project feels like “the grand finale.” He asks that the filmmakers not share that information with his wife, Guzzy, although she later tells them herself that she feels Grashow’s time is running out.
Later in the film, the Museum Contemporary Art in Westport, Connecticut offers Grashow a retrospective exhibit of his work, with the new piece at the center. Grashow’s musings about death imbue the project with a sense of urgency and the proposed exhibit title is fittingly Man, Mortality: A Retrospective. However, when the museum refuses to fully fund the show, Grashow and Guzzy are left scrambling for a way to showcase his life’s work.
As Grashow wrestles with his own corporality, his art is both an escape from and an expression of his worries.
“When I’m doing demons, I know that it’s a little boy playing,” he said. “And an old man being terribly afraid.”
Jimmy & the Demons opens in New York at the Quad Cinema on April 3, 2026.
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