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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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Jewish Democratic support weakened slightly in midterms, survey finds
(JTA) — Democrats lost a small amount of Jewish support overall in the midterm elections, even as an overwhelming majority of Jews voted for the party, according to the results of a new survey published Tuesday.
The poll also found that significant shares of both Jewish Democratic and Jewish Republican voters believe their respective parties have become too accepting of antisemitism.
The survey from the Jewish Electorate Institute, a nonpartisan think tank that often works with Democrats, was the latest data pointing to simmering Jewish discomfort with the majority of the community’s longtime electoral home — even as actual voting patterns have remained largely consistent. Conducted by research firm The Mellman Group, the survey polled 800 national Jewish registered voters online from Oct. 29-Nov. 6, including both early and day-of voters.
The data “reveal warning signs for both political parties” in their relationship to Jews, institute chair Barbara Goldberg told reporters in a briefing.
Researchers found that 69% of Jewish respondents voted for Democrats, a six-point drop from the 2024 election. There was a 3.5% margin of error.
That drop occurred even as several other groups that have consistently voted for Democrats increased their shares in 2026, including voters under 45, voters of color, women and white, college-educated voters.
In the run-up to what would become a historic “blue wave” election, the Jewish vote – a reliably Democratic bloc — received particular attention as several high-profile candidates, including Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, broke with longtime party consensus on Israel or otherwise unnerved the Jewish community throughout the campaign. Studies of Jewish voting attitudes published since Election Night, which have also included polls from the liberal Zionist lobby J Street and the pro-Israel group The Jewish Majority, have found that the Jewish party-line vote was largely unchanged despite those reservations.
While the Jewish Electorate Institute did not isolate any polling on Jews in Michigan specifically, it did poll all Jews about their views on El-Sayed and found that his favorability in the group had climbed since September. He is now viewed favorably by 44% of all Jews and 59% of Jewish Democrats, the survey found, with 40% of the former group and 25% of the latter viewing him unfavorably — giving the senator-elect a net favorability rating in both camps. The same polling also found that 41% of Jewish voters view pro-Israel lobbyists AIPAC favorably, and 35% unfavorably.
The survey also found that 36% of Jewish Democratic voters expressed concern about the direction of the party, agreeing with the statement that it has become “too accepting of antisemitic rhetoric within the Party.” One in four Jewish Republicans believed their party was becoming too friendly to white nationalists and the far right.
“The one place both parties are having problems is on rising antisemitism,” Michael Bloomfield, managing director of the Mellman Group who oversaw the survey, told reporters. The questions about antisemitism within the party had not been asked in previous election surveys conducted by the Mellman Group.
In addition, 28% of Jewish Democratic voters said they voted for candidates whose views on Israel caused them concern, saying that other issues outweighed those reservations. One in six Jewish Republicans said they did the same.
In results that echoed an earlier survey put out by the liberal Zionist lobby J Street, 14% of Jewish Democrats said supporting Israel was one of the most important factors in their vote. A higher share of the Jewish Electorate Institute respondents, 27%, said fighting antisemitism was one of their most important issues, while preserving democracy was the top concern.
The Jewish Republican voters surveyed ranked fighting antisemitism as their top concern, and support for Israel as among their top concerns.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Museum cancels Dutch synagogue’s tricentennial celebration over Israel tensions
(JTA) — An exhibition honoring the nearly 300-year-old Amersfoort Synagogue was supposed to be a celebration of Jewish life in Amersfoot, a small city in the central Netherlands.
Instead, Dutch Jews say, it could become the latest casualty of anti-Israel cancel culture that has targeted Jews in the Diaspora.
The city’s mayor in the last week has scrambled to save a planned exhibit on the synagogue after it was canceled, but so far has not been able to guarantee that it will open as planned early next year.
On Nov. 4, Paul Baltus, the director of Amersfoort in C, an organization that oversees the Museum Amersfoort and several of the city’s other cultural institutions, said he was canceling the upcoming synagogue exhibition due to “pressure,” an apparent reference to possible confrontations by pro-Palestinian activists.
Pro-Palestinian protesters have held dozens of demonstrations in the Netherlands since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. On Nov. 8, tens of thousands of people gathered in Amsterdam to demand that the Dutch government impose stricter sanctions on Israel.
Although the museum started planning the exhibition five years ago, Baltus said in a statement, “Since then, the social climate has changed significantly. The situation in the Middle East is also having an impact on Dutch society. The public debate on this subject can be heated and, at times, lacking in nuance.”
Baltus said he is finding the “tension” surrounding the exhibition, which was slated to begin in early 2027, difficult to manage. “As a small and vulnerable organization, I do not want to expose my staff to that kind of pressure,” he said. While he acknowledged that he could hire security guards and install cameras, “the reality is that our volunteers would still have to deal with a range of reactions.”
Jewish community leaders in the Netherlands said they were shocked by the museum’s actions and called on city officials to ensure the exhibition would go on as planned.
The exhibition is one of several cultural events scheduled to mark the 300th anniversary of the Amersfoort synagogue, which opened in 1727. It is the oldest Ashkenazi synagogue in Western Europe still in use today.
On Nov. 4, Mayor Lucas Bolsius told the City Council that the municipality would begin discussions with the museum and other stakeholders “to ensure that the exhibition can proceed.” The museum’s decision to cancel “has caused considerable pain within the Jewish community, particularly by reinforcing the feeling that its members are not welcome or even allowed to exist,” he told council members.
Following a meeting the next day, Bolsius and Baltsus jointly announced on Nov. 6 that they would work together to try to find a solution.
Over the past week, the mayor said, “helping hands have been offered from the city, central government and across the country to address organizational matters. People and organizations want to help make this exhibition possible.”
Baltus said the help being offered has alleviated some of his concerns. “With this support, we will explore the possibilities with an open mind and a positive intention, in consultation with the Jewish community.”
While Jewish leaders told Jewish Telegraphic Agency that they welcomed these efforts, they said the museum controversy is just the latest example of hostility toward Jewish historical and cultural events in the Netherlands, where anything Jewish – even a 300-year-old diaspora synagogue – is often seen as inseparable from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“We are very glad the mayor intervened. Let this be an example for other authorities,” said Hans Weijel, vice chairman of the Centraal Joods Overleg (CJO), the umbrella advocacy organization that represents the interests of the Netherlands’ 40,000 Jews.
Emile Schrijver, director-general of Amsterdam’s Jewish Cultural Quarter, which encompasses the Jewish Museum, the National Holocaust Museum, the Portuguese Synagogue and other Jewish cultural institutions, said the Museum Amersfoort had made its decision without first consulting the Jewish community or the organizations involved in the planned exhibition.
“Largely since Oct. 7, Jewish artists have had a difficult time finding a stage, and Jewish events, including cultural, can’t find a venue. Jewish events are being cancelled for no reason,” he said.
Schrijver rejected Baltus’s contention that security concerns made the museum exhibition unmanageable, given that the Jewish institutions Schrijver runs in Amsterdam frequently host events, despite pro-Palestinian demonstrations and related security concerns.
“We train our staff all the time. We deal with this every day. Yes, it’s difficult, but no, it’s not impossible,” he said.
Schrijver warned that treating Jewish cultural events as potential security problems risks pushing Jewish communities out of public life.
“The effect of this is that the normality of Jewish presence in a town is being pushed away,” he said. “Suddenly anything Jewish is considered a security hazard or prone to cause problems.”
Cultural institutions have a responsibility to distinguish between their views on Israeli government policy and the history of Jewish communities in the Netherlands, Schrijver said.
“You have to separate your private opinion from the long history of a small town in the Netherlands. What they’re effectively doing is pushing the Jewish community to the fringes of society.”
CJO’s Weijel said the Jewish community has played an important role in Amersfoort’s civic life since the mid-1600s.
“We think it is ridiculous that a museum in a city doesn’t want to have an exhibition about a 300-year-old synagogue and its history in that city. The conflict is in the Middle East, not here,” he emphasized. “If you want proof that this is antisemitism, this is the proof.”
Weijel accused Baltus of being “a coward.”
“He’s afraid something bad will happen, but if you’re that afraid, you should stay in bed.”
In his Nov. 4 statement, Baltus acknowledged the Jewish community’s disappointment and offered to contribute his museum’s “expertise and collection” of Jewish historical artifacts to an exhibition in the synagogue instead. He also offered to incorporate the synagogue’s history into the museum’s permanent exhibition on the history of Amersfoort.
For Schrijver, the Amersfoort controversy is yet another attempt to marginalize Jews in a country they have lived in for generations.
“The moment you make Jewish history dependent on what is happening in the Middle East, you are making Jewish existence conditional,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Donald Trump actually faced a few tough questions on ’60 Minutes.’ So, why does Marine Le Pen get a pass?
Last Sunday, the news show “60 Minutes” hosted an outgoing president of one country and, quite possibly, the incoming president of another. While falsehoods and fatuities flowed from President Donald Trump, his interviewer, Ross Douthat frequently, if futilely, tried to push back. Yet when Marine Le Pen, running for the presidency of France, also fibbed or fudged the truth, her interviewer, Trevor Phillips, did little more than arch an eyebrow.
This split-screen experience was unsettling for a few reasons. First, it reminded us that our president’s famous “weave” reflects a mind that is declining as surely as his poll numbers. A glance at the interview transcript reflects the deepening incoherence of the man who occupies the world’s most powerful office. This made all the most startling the cogency of his reply to a question Douthat posed at the end of the interview: whether he could stop hating his enemies if that was the price to enter heaven. To a flabbergasted Douthat, Trump replied, “I probably cannot do that, no, because I do hate some of my enemies and I always will.”
While no one can say whether Trump is destined for heaven or hell, Le Pen’s remarks in her interview suggest that she will make life hell for those men and women who fail to qualify, in her eyes, as French.
Yet, in his interview, Trevor Phillips, formerly of The (London) Times and a recent Bari Weiss recruit, failed to make this as clear as a Mike Wallace, a Dan Rather, or a Scott Pelley would have. Nattily dressed and well-spoken, Phillips presented a segment on the violence that has “erupted in Paris’ romantic boulevards” where “the scent of warm croissants and fresh baguettes has been overwhelmed by the whiff of tear gas.”
Overwhelmed by the weight of silly clichés, Phillips could not help but add “They used to call Paris la ville de l’amour — the City of Love. But there hasn’t been much amour on show lately.” While Phillips does not state who “they” are — given the hoariness of the clichés, perhaps they asked to remain anonymous — he should think twice about his assertion that there is not much love. Of course, the protestors are expressing their anger towards the government of President Emmanuel Macron, but they are also expressing their deep attachment, even love, to the republican tradition that has made Paris la ville de la révolution.
More important than his potted account of the social upheavals in Paris, however, was Phillips’ problematic interview with Le Pen. “In 2011,” he explained, “Le Pen took over leadership of what was then a fringe movement from her father, a tough army veteran convicted and fined for Holocaust denial and hate speech.” Yet nine years earlier, in 2002, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of this “fringe party” then called the National Front, made it into the second round of the presidential election. Though Le Pen failed to make it into the second round in 2007, that more than 4 million French voted for him suggests that his party and person were hardly fringe. It is also odd that while Phillips noted Le Pen’s Holocaust denialism, he omitted Le Pen’s confession that he had tortured Algerian captives while serving in French Algeria.
No less stunning was Phillips’ description of Marine Le Pen’s decision to banish her father from the party in order “to rid it of its stain of bigotry.” If only it were mere bigotry. The National Front was founded, in part, by former members of the French division of the Waffen SS and sympathizers of the wartime collaborationist regime of Vichy. While the daughter has largely succeeded in removing these elements from the party, which she rebranded as the National Rally, she has not removed the “stain” of antisemitism. Little more than a month ago, the French newspaper Mediapart revealed that Le Pen’s second-in-command, Jordan Bardella, was trafficking in antisemitic bilge even after he joined the party as a teenager.
Time and again, Phillips posed questions but had not adequately prepared for Le Pen’s predictable replies. When he asked, in his opening question, “What is happening in Europe? Has politics here just become more radical?” Le Pen answered that “the extreme left creates chaos. They generate violence against people.” If Phillips had done his due diligence, he would have confronted Le Pen with the recent study by the historian Nicolas Lebourg revealing that while six murders in France since 1986 were “generated” by the extreme left, nearly sixty were “generated” by the extreme right. Phillips might also have mentioned last month’s mass killing and wounding of French Muslims in the town of Trappes by an individual who marinated in the literature of the extreme right.
Finally, when Le Pen made the jaw-dropping claim that “discrimination does not exist in France” and, moreover, is “the least racist country in the world,” Phillips did, in fact, raise an eyebrow while repeating her words. But it would have been more effective, perhaps, to raise the findings of various organizations, like the Defenseur des droits, which concluded in 2024 that the “perceived origin” of a job applicant weighs more than any other factor in hiring decisions in France.
As for his lack of follow-up questions to Le Pen’s assertion that France is the world’s least racist country, Phillips’ professional malfeasance was made fully manifest. In every presidential campaign, Le Pen has committed to establishing the law of national priority, which in effect would constitutionalize a racist agenda. Based on the extreme rightwing hobbyhorse of the “great replacement” — namely, that France’s white population is deliberately being replaced by third world immigrants — the law will limit employment opportunities, social and housing benefits to French citizens. Such a law not only runs counter to the laws of the European Union, but also to the humanist and universalist grounding of France’s constitution.
Phillips failed to contest this claim. Ironically, he closed the interview with Le Pen’s assurance that “French people have got to know me.” If only Phillips had done so, as well.
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