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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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Child Pregnancies Surge in Gaza Amid Reports of Hamas Fighters Demanding Sex From ‘Wives of Martyrs’ for Food
Hamas gunmen stand guard on the day that hostages held in Gaza since the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack, are handed over to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as part of a ceasefire and hostages-prisoners swap deal between Hamas and Israel, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
The sexual depravity that Hamas proudly broadcast to the world during its Oct. 7, 2023, rampage across southern Israel has now show up in Gaza, with video testimonies emerging of pervasive abuse, coercion for food, and an increase in both child marriages and child pregnancies.
In a new bombshell report, the Daily Mail presented findings from both the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) into rising child marriages and an anonymous journalist at Jusoor News who filmed Gaza residents reporting on the exploitation of women.
According to the UNFPA, while pre-war numbers of child brides fell to 11 percent in 2022, a decrease from 26 percent in 2009, marriage records from 2025 showed that at least 400 girls between 14 and 16 had become wives. This number likely only counts a fraction of the total as many such religious ceremonies to theologically justify child abuse go unreported.
Nestor Owomuhangi, whose official title is “UNFPA Representative to Palestine,” explained that war and collapsing humanitarian conditions had exacerbated this regression.
“We are witnessing the dismantling of a generation’s future,” Owomuhangi said.
Multiple men told Jusoor News they had seen or heard of Hamas members abusing women, with one reporting that a Hamas charity organization had blackmailed his neighbor and sought to become her pimp. “They wanted her to whore herself in exchange for a food parcel, or an aid voucher, or 100 shekels,” he said.
Exchange rates on Monday placed 100 shekels as equal to $33.48.
A fighter in Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, confirmed the sex crimes, saying that Hamas members took advantage of the “wives of martyrs” in a tent in the Gharabli area in Deir al-Balah. He was told to say nothing but chose to tear down the tent, declaring, “We told them it was an insult to our honor and dignity.”
Another anonymous man in Gaza said “we were contacted by the wife of a friend. She had asked a Qassam Brigades commander to help her, but he took advantage of her. His behavior is disgraceful. We investigated the matter and found her in a tent in the Gharabli area where a bunch of Qassam members were taking advantage of her.”
He also reported that “we informed the leadership, but we were told we had to keep silent about it.”
An unnamed woman said she had experienced sexual harassment from a man at a Hamas charity who appeared religious when she sought help. “I asked him how he could talk to me like that. And he should be ashamed,” she said. “I told him I would expose him. He said, ‘You cannot expose me; I am the government here.’”
One anonymous elderly woman said that “one charity in Gaza is unfortunately the biggest perpetrator. From its chairman all the way down to its doorman, it’s being done by all their employees and members, as though it’s an organization set up for sexual harassment, psychological abuse, and harassing young women.”
Reports of rising sexual abuse against girls and widows come as Hamas continues to resist pressure to disarm in accordance with the US-backed ceasefire and peace plan for Gaza.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that two Hamas officials had said the Palestinian terrorist group planned to surrender thousands of automatic rifles and small weapons which belonged to Gaza police and other internal security organizations. However, this would not entail full disarmament, which according to the peace plan is a key prerequisite for beginning major reconstruction of Gaza and for Israel, whose military currently controls 53 percent of the enclave, to further withdraw its force.
According to several reports, Hamas recently rejected the Board of Peace’s eight-month phased plan for the terrorist group to disarm. US President Donald Trump proposed the Board of Peace in September to oversee his plan to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, subsequently saying it would address other conflicts.
Meanwhile, Hamas is further tightening its grip on the nearly half of Gazan territory it still controls, where the vast majority of the population lives.
Since the initial ceasefire took effect in October, Hamas has imposed a brutal crackdown, sparking clashes with rival militias as it seeks to eliminate any opposition.
The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) — an Israel-based research institute — released a report last month explaining how the US-Israeli war against the Islamic regime in Iran had disrupted the second phase of the ceasefire agreement in Gaza, which required Hamas to disarm in order for Israeli troops to withdraw.
Earlier this month, Hamas demanded that the Israel Defense Forces exit first before giving up weapons.
ITIC’s analysts warned that this delay could enable Hamas — which still controls approximately 47 percent of Gaza — to rearm. The Islamist terrorists are reportedly smuggling in guns from Egypt and creating weapons internally.
In late March, Turkey reaffirmed its longstanding support for Hamas when the terrorist group’s senior negotiator Khalil Al-Khaya and its political bureau delegation met with Turkish intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalın. Kalın had also met with senior Hamas leaders in Istanbul the previous week.
According to the Middle East Monitor, the Hamas delegation “expressed its appreciation to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for Turkey’s efforts to achieve peace in Gaza.”
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Boy George Defends Eurovision Appearance Despite Israel Controversy, Expresses Solidarity With ‘Jewish Friends’
Boy George singing at The SSE Arena Wembley, Dec. 14, 2016. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
British music legend Boy George said he will not turn his back on his Jewish friends in response to those criticizing his scheduled appearance at this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, amid controversy surrounding Israel’s participation in the annual competition.
“I played in Israel. I got a letter from [Pink Floyd co-founder] Roger Waters telling me not to go to Israel and I went, because I’ve got a lot of fans in Israel,” the 1980s music icon told Sky News. “Plus, in the UK, I have a lot of Jewish friends — and I know them to be beautiful, good, kind, smart, loving people. So expecting me to turn against my friends is a lunacy, and it’s not going to happen.”
He also told the Daily Mail on Sunday, outside the annual London Eurovision Party: “I have many, many Jewish friends that I’ve had since I was 15 or 16 years old. Are people asking me as a principled human being to turn my back on my Jewish friends? It’s not going to happen; it’s never going to happen.”
Boy George explained that from the start of his career, he has been wearing a Star of David. “Go back and look at pictures of Culture Club,” he added, referring to his band. “I am so affiliated with Jewish people. I am not necessarily affiliated with Israel. I don’t really have an opinion on that. But the job of music is to unite people.”
Boy George and Italian artist Senhit will represent San Marino in the Eurovision this year with their song “Superstar.” The competition will start next month and take place in Vienna, Austria. Boy George and more than 1,000 other members of the entertainment industry signed an open letter recently that expressed support for Israel’s participation in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest.
Late last year, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Slovenia announced they were pulling out of the 2026 Eurovision after its organizer, the European Broadcasting Union, approved Israel’s participation in the contest.
Boy George’s late mother was from Ireland. When asked how he feels participating in the Eurovision this year after Ireland withdrew from the competition, he replied: “Ireland is my mother’s home country. I hope they’re not too angry. But if they are, that’s out of my control.”
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Congress thinks my college is failing on antisemitism. My Jewish students disagree
When the House Education and Workforce Committee released its report on campus antisemitism last month, I learned about it from a news alert on my phone. That surprised me. The college at which I teach Jewish studies — Sarah Lawrence, a small liberal arts school in Bronxville, New York — is named in the report as one of five schools the committee investigated for failures to address antisemitism. Yet I never encountered anyone involved with this investigation.
I teach Jewish and non-Jewish students — bright, inquisitive young people eager to learn about Jewish history, Jewish thought and Jewish identity. I have worked with Jewish student groups. I am, professionally and personally, someone whose entire working life is oriented around Jewish life on this campus.
If this investigation was as thorough as Congress would have us believe, I probably should have heard about it at some point before it was released — or even, just possibly, been asked some questions as part of it.
That silence is not incidental. It is the heart of everything that is wrong with this report, which insists that Jewish students on campuses like mine are living under siege. The committee’s account of my institution was assembled without consulting, as far as I can tell, the faculty members best positioned to speak to Jewish life on campus or the range of Jewish students whose experiences directly contradict the report’s conclusions. What was assembled instead appears to be a file of curated incidents, selected to support a predetermined conclusion.
To be clear, antisemitism on campus is a serious problem. It takes forms both crude and subtle — casual conflations of Jewish identity with Israel, occasional slurs and social pressure on Jewish students to renounce affiliations or loyalties with Jewish groups seen as friendly to Israel. My own students have come to me with these issues, which are deeply troubling, and which campuses have yet to come up with clearly effective strategies for combatting.
But what the Education and Workforce Committee has produced is not a serious accounting of antisemitism. It is a political document dressed in the language of civil rights enforcement. It is yet more evidence that, when it comes to the federal government’s efforts against antisemitism, Jews are being spoken over, not spoken for.
Overlooked Jewish diversity
At Sarah Lawrence, I teach Jewish students who are passionate Zionists. I also teach Jewish students who are members of Jewish Voice for Peace, participate in pro-Palestinian organizing, and have complicated, evolving relationships to Israel shaped by family history, religious tradition and their own moral reasoning.
I teach students who grew up in Orthodox communities, students who grew up entirely secular, students for whom Jewishness is a daily religious practice and students for whom it is primarily an ancestral identity activated by encounters with bigotry. I teach Israeli students who came to Sarah Lawrence specifically because American higher education offered them an open intellectual environment that they value.
What these students seem to agree on — despite their many political differences — is that they do not recognize the picture of campus life being painted by this committee.
They broadly do not experience their Jewish identity as something requiring constant protection from their classmates. What many of them do experience, and what they have told me plainly, is profound discomfort at having their identity conscripted into political arguments they did not choose.
The committee’s report is such a conscription. It tells Jewish students what they are supposed to feel. It tells them who their enemies are. And it erases, wholesale, the significant portion of the Jewish campus community whose views on Israel, Palestinian rights, and the politics of campus speech do not fit the narrative the committee has advanced.
This is not how you protect Jewish students. This is how you exploit them.
The IHRA problem
The report specifically criticizes Sarah Lawrence for not adopting the IHRA definition of antisemitism, in a case study of this kind of overreach. As the single faculty member at Sarah Lawrence wholly committed to Jewish studies — making my scholarly expertise the most directly relevant to this question of anyone on my campus — I want to be unequivocal. The Jerusalem Declaration, which we have adopted instead of the IHRA definition, is the better tool.
The Jerusalem Declaration’s core definition of antisemitism — developed by an international group of scholars working in Holocaust history, Jewish studies, and Middle East studies — explains that antisemitism is discrimination, prejudice, hostility, or violence that targets Jews as Jews. It is accompanied by 15 detailed guidelines for understanding antisemitism, drawn up because the field recognized that context and nuance are not optional when identifying and addressing hatred.
This is how scholars in my discipline are trained to think, and it is the approach our students deserve.
The IHRA definition, by contrast, was drafted primarily as a data-collection instrument for European monitoring organizations. Kenneth Stern, the definition’s lead drafter, has said repeatedly that it was never intended to become part of disciplinary codes. He has even testified before Congress against legislation that would enshrine the IHRA definition as enforceable policy on campuses. Stern writes that the definition “was never intended to be weaponized to muzzle campus free speech.”
When the person who wrote the definition is sounding the alarm about how it is being used, perhaps Congress should listen.
The specific problem with the IHRA definition, as scholars in my field have documented extensively, is that seven of its 11 illustrative examples involve the state of Israel with language broad enough to characterize legitimate forms of political speech and academic inquiry about Israel as antisemitic.
I know from my own work that the chilling effect of IHRA on academic freedom is not theoretical.
One of the definition’s most contested illustrative examples declares that it may be antisemitic to draw comparisons between Israeli policy and the Nazis. I regularly teach the Israeli Orthodox scientist and philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz, one of the most important Jewish and Israeli thinkers of the 20th century, who warned persistently after the 1967 Six-Day War that the logic of military rule over another people would corrupt Israeli institutions and dehumanize both the occupied and the occupiers. He used the term “Judeo-Nazis” to describe what he feared that Israel risked becoming.
If Sarah Lawrence operated under the IHRA definition, my students would not have the opportunity to debate Leibowitz’s findings. Nevermind that he was eulogized by Israeli President Ezer Weizman as one of the greatest figures in the intellectual life of the Jewish people; his concern about his own country’s direction would make teaching him taboo, in turn making my students’ education in the full landscape of Jewish thought less complete.
I also couldn’t teach them about former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s 2026 claim that the ideology of Jewish supremacy now dominant in the Israeli government resembles Nazi racial theory. Or how Yair Golan, the former IDF deputy chief of staff and current leader of the Democrats party in the Knesset, has drawn parallels between trends in Israeli society and the processes that preceded the Holocaust in Europe.
These are Israeli patriots, soldiers, and statesmen engaging in exactly the kind of morally serious, historically grounded reckoning that higher education is supposed to teach students to undertake. Under the IHRA definition, my students would never have the chance to learn from them — or decide, for themselves, what they think about these arguments.
The committee’s report does not reckon with this kind of potential cost. Instead, it flatly recommends that every college across the United States adopt the IHRA definition. Conspicuously, it does not point to a single incident at any institution in its report that the IHRA definition would identify as antisemitic but the Jerusalem Declaration would not. If the committee believes IHRA is necessary rather than merely ideologically preferred, it should be able to demonstrate a gap — a real case in which alternate definitions of antisemitism failed.
The risks of chilling free speech
The absence of any such example is not a minor oversight. It speaks to the report’s failure to contend with the actual lived experience of students on campus.
In talking with students who have experienced antisemitism on my campus — American and Israeli alike — I have found they are not concerned by whether the school will adopt the IHRA definition.
They are not asking for less protection. They are asking for the right kind. What some of them have told me — and I take this seriously — is that they would find it chilling if political speech and classroom debate about Israel and Palestine were suddenly rendered even more risky.
The broader agenda behind this report is not difficult to see. Campus antisemitism is a genuine problem that has, since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, been manipulated by the American right as part of a sustained effort to delegitimize universities.
Jewish students are not the constituency this campaign is designed to serve. They have been made instruments of a broader ideological battle against the liberal values that gain purchase when people are educated in environments that reward independent thought.
Honest intellectual engagement with Jewish experience means studying the history of persecution and survival; the philosophy of identity and belonging; the ethics of memory; and the complexity of diaspora and national identity. These are not safe or comfortable subjects. They require exactly the kind of open, contested, sometimes painful intellectual environment that the House Committee professes to be protecting while actually working to undermine.
Sarah Lawrence is not a perfect institution. No college or university is. But it is one where Jewish life is visible, valued and genuinely diverse. My Jewish students learn by arguing with each other, challenging each other, and engaging across lines of political disagreement. The truth about Jewish life is almost always more complicated than people with clear-cut political aims would have us believe. That complexity is not a problem to be managed or a weakness to be exploited. It is at the very center of what a liberal arts education is supposed to be about.
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