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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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Iran Soccer Federation President Uncertain on Country’s Participation in FIFA World Cup After US-Israel Strikes
Soccer Football – FIFA World Cup – Trophy arrives in Mexico – Felipe Angeles International Airport, Zumpango, Mexico – February 27, 2026 General view of the FIFA World Cup trophy. Photo: REUTERS/Luis Cortes
It remains unclear if Iran’s national soccer team will participate in the 2026 FIFA World Cup this summer following Saturday’s surprise attacks by the US and Israel on the Islamic Republic, Iran Football Federation President Mehdi Taj admitted over the weekend.
“What is certain is that after this attack, we cannot be expected to look forward to the World Cup with hope,” Taj told the sports portal Varzesh3, according to the Associated Press.
Iran is set to compete in Group G at the World Cup and is scheduled to face New Zealand on June 15 and Belgium on June 21, both in Los Angeles, before going head-to-head against Egypt on June 26 in Seattle.
The World Cup will be held across the US, Canada, and Mexico from June 11 to July 19.
Soccer fans from Iran are already barred from entering the United States for the World Cup as part of a travel ban that the Trump administration announced in June.
FIFA has not commented on Iran’s participation in this summer’s World Cup. Speaking on Saturday at the International Football Association Board’s annual general meeting in Cardiff, Wales, FIFA Secretary General Mattias Grafstrom reportedly said: “We had a meeting today and it is premature to comment in detail, but we will monitor developments around all issues around the world.”
The US and Israel launched joint airstrikes against Iran on Saturday that led to the killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and several other high-ranking Iranian officials.
Iran has retaliated with strikes against Israel as well as US military bases and civilian areas across the Middle East, including in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain. Israel is also carrying out strikes in Lebanon and the Israel Defense Forces announced that it has eliminated Hussein Makled, the head of Hezbollah’s intelligence headquarters.
On Sunday, the Qatar football federation announced that it was suspending all competitions, tournaments and matches “until further notice” following the US-Israel strikes on Iran. It added that “new dates for the resumption of competitions will be announced in due course.”
It remains unclear what will happen to the “Finalissima” match between Spain and Argentina, a friendly game that was scheduled to take place March 27 in Doha with potential well-known players including Lionel Messi and Lamine Yamal.
The Asian Football Confederation has similarly postponed continental club championship playoffs set to take place in the Middle East this week, and the AFC Champions League Elite games will be rescheduled.
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Iran’s Supreme Leader Is Dead. Now What?
A demonstrator lights a cigarette with fire from a burning picture of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei outside the Iranian embassy during a rally in support of nationwide protests in Iran, in London, Britain, Jan. 12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville
The strike that killed Iran’s supreme leader over the weekend has split opinion over whether it speeds a regime collapse, keeps the Islamic Republic intact under a new figurehead, or produces a tougher, security-run version of the same system.
Israeli officials are projecting confidence that the war is not stopping at the killing of Ali Khamenei and several dozen regime leaders under him. “[US President Donald] Trump intends to go all the way with this move,” one senior official told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. “He wants to replace the regime, and he has no intention of taking his foot off the gas.”
US officials familiar with intelligence assessments have voiced a more cautious view, pointing to serious skepticism that even if Iranians took to the streets, the country’s battered opposition would not have the power to topple the regime.
Publicly, Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have framed the war as a moment of political opportunity. “I call upon all Iranian patriots who yearn for freedom to seize this moment and take back your country,” Trump said in a video posted on Truth Social. Netanyahu struck a similar note, saying Israel would create the conditions for “the brave Iranian people to liberate themselves from the chains of tyranny.”
Raz Zimmt, an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said that the success of the US-Israeli strikes so far would not guarantee the end of the regime.
“You cannot topple a regime through aerial strikes alone,” he said during a briefing with reporters on Sunday, adding that “millions of Iranians” were needed to do that.
But after weeks of suppression during last month’s anti-government protests, he said, the Iranian public is “very much traumatized,” and it is hard to imagine mass demonstrations resuming while “missiles and jets are above their heads.” Even if crowds return, he said, a protest movement is still unlikely to succeed as long as the security forces preserve cohesion and the determination to fight.
“The majority of the Iranian people are not organized, have no leaders,” he said, adding that many potential leaders are “in jails and prisons all over Iran.” The security elite, he argued, has every reason to hold the line because many of its members believe that if the regime collapses it will not only destroy their interests but “might actually kill them as well.”
The Islamic Republic “probably enjoys the support of perhaps between 15 to 20 percent” of the population, Zimmt said, adding that that minority is still large enough in a country of roughly 90 million people to sustain a committed base, fill institutions, and provide manpower for coercion.
Zimmt called Khamenei’s death “the end of an era,” describing him as “the last Iranian revolutionary” and, in recent years, a bottleneck blocking real change.
The larger question, in Zimmt’s view, is whether Iran now moves toward constitutional change – of the kind seen after the death of Khamenei’s predecessor, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989 – and a different governing model, that might pave the way for some kind of political transition.
“Perhaps not a regime change as all of us would like to see but perhaps some kind of a change from within the regime,” he said.
Zimmt said that after the 12-day war with Israel and the US in June, pragmatic voices in Iran argued the regime should adjust strategic objectives and prioritize domestic problems over regional commitments.
“But at the end of the day, Khamenei made a decision to change almost nothing,” he said.
According to The New York Times, Khamenei made a short list of figures he viewed as acceptable successors in the wake of the June war. It included Ali Asghar Hejazi, his long-serving chief of staff and who Israel said it killed in Saturday’s strike; Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i, the head of Iran’s judiciary; and Hassan Khomeini, a grandson of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The younger Khomeini is seen as more moderate than Khameinei’s own son and potential successor, Mojtaba.
Zimmt said that while Mojtaba has support in the security establishment, “a hereditary succession would only deepen the [regime’s] crisis of legitimacy,” because the Islamic Republic was founded against dynastic succession.
Alireza Arafi, a senior cleric who was named to Iran’s interim leadership council after Khamenei’s death, is also in the mix.
But the identity of Iran’s next supreme leader may matter less, Zimmt argued, than who controls power around him.
He singled out the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as “a very, very influential player” not just in security and the military sphere but also in politics and the economy. In that environment, Zimmt suggested, the succession could preserve the appearance of continuity with another senior cleric far weaker than Khamenei as the public face while the IRGC and other security circles are the driving force.
Former Israeli Ambassador to Germany Jeremy Issacharoff, whose work has focused on strategic policy and arms control, cautioned it was too early to know how events would unfold and said Tehran’s next leadership could yet prove “even more fanatical” than the Khamenei-led one but expressed hope the events of the past few days could reshape the region’s long-term trajectory.
“This is an opportunity for Iran, it’s an opportunity for the region, and above all, it’s a major opportunity for Israel,” Issacharoff told The Algemeiner.
He added that, in the near term, he expects the military campaign to keep targeting the pillars of Iranian state power, including missile and nuclear infrastructure, as well as core internal-security nodes such as IRGC headquarters, the affiliated Basij milita, and the Interior Ministry.
“At the end of it we could see a very different type of relationship with Iran, with the Iranian people,” he said.
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At this Dallas synagogue, Purim comes with fog machines, zip lines and Broadway flair
(JTA) — Excited chatter and the rattling of noisemakers echoed throughout the halls of Congregation Shearith Israel as 900 people streamed into its Purim spiel Sunday morning.
But as similar festivities commenced at synagogues around the world, the congregants of the historic Conservative shul in Dallas knew they were in for something far more ambitious than the average holiday festivities.
A Purim spiel, Yiddish for “play,” is the comedic retelling of the Book of Esther for the holiday of Purim. At many synagogues, the production features a costume parade, Jewish parodies of popular songs and the annual megillah reading.
For the past eight years, however, the Purim performance at Shearith Israel has taken the form of a high-octane theatrical performance, featuring intricate set designs, original music, and a yearly stunt that has included its rabbi riding into the sanctuary on horseback and ziplining onto the stage.
This year, the performance featured confetti canons and a mechanical rig that lowered a child onto the stage behind a giant disco ball.
The congregation’s annual performance did not always resemble the elaborate, effects-laden production it is today. The spectacular is the brainchild of one of the synagogue’s senior rabbis, Adam Roffman, whose second act in the clergy followed an earlier stint in a musical theater in New York City.
“The Purim spiel is a love letter to the community,” Roffman said. “I work on this for, you know, close to 200 hours … it’s tedious, it’s difficult, but ultimately, what gets me over the hump of like, okay, it’s 11 o’clock at night, and I’ve been staring in front of my computer for the last five hours making a video, is I love these people.”
Melissa Goldberg, a congregant whose husband’s family had been members of Congregation Shearith Israel for five generations, said the spiel had become her family’s “favorite time of year.”
“I love it because it gives Rabbi Roffman a chance to create, to flex his creative muscles, so we don’t lose him to Broadway, because he can have his moment every year,” said Goldberg.
Roffman grew up in Baltimore attending a Jewish day school where he said he “idolized and worshiped” his rabbis before he was “bit by the bug” of musical theater in high school.
After graduating from Amherst College, Roffman studied musical theater at Circle in the Square Theater School in New York City and began his stint as an actor and director.
But a few years into the scene, Roffman said that he began to question whether the profession suited him.
“In my mid 20s, I found myself kind of realizing, like, it didn’t matter how much talent I had as an actor, the industry was not for me,” said Roffman. “When you’re an actor, you’re the president of Adam Roffman Inc, you have to fight for yourself all the time, and that just isn’t my personality, and what I was missing, I think, was sort of connection and community.”
So Roffman reengaged in the Jewish community, saying he became “addicted in the same way that I was when I started acting in high school.” His rediscovered passion soon inspired him to seek rabbinic ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City.
After coming to Dallas to join Congregation Shearith Israel’s clergy with his wife, Rabbi Shira Wallach, in 2013, Roffman said the pair soon discovered that the local Jewish community had “tremendous institutional loyalty” and a unique commitment to Jewish life.
“They’re very cognizant of the fact that they are the minority here in the Bible Belt,” said Roffman. “This is a Christian place, and that gives them even more incentive to commit to their Judaism and to commit to being here, being present here.”
Roffman said he spent his first few years adjusting to the role before beginning to think about how to get back on the stage — even though, for him, the parallels between the two professions were endless.
“I think a lot about the overlap between Jewish practice and theater,” said Roffman. “I think of the prayer book as a script. It’s one of the oldest scripts written, I think, in human history, because it is a book of words written by somebody else that you have to open up and personalize and process.”
During his time at Shearith Israel, Roffman has performed two self-written autobiographical one-man-shows at local theaters, including “On Sunday the Rabbi Sang Sondheim” in 2017 and “Songs the Rabbi Shouldn’t Sing,” which he took a sabbatical to write in 2023.
In 2019, Roffman told his fellow rabbis that he would be taking over preparations for the Purim spiel.
It began fairly simple, with Roffman pulling off a Broadway-themed performance that featured him and Wallach singing songs from “Phantom of the Opera” as they rolled into the sanctuary in a canoe surrounded by fog.
Things escalated from there, with Roffman incorporating a “stunt” every year to outdo the last, including standing atop a cherrypicker for a “Lion King”-inspired spiel, riding into the sanctuary on a horse and ziplining above congregants’ heads for last year’s “Wicked” theme.
“We try and do something that nobody’s really ever seen before in a synagogue,” said Roffman. “But there’s a primary goal, really, which is that the people see their rabbis, all four of us on stage, really putting it out there and doing crazy stuff to show that we’re people too, and also to really build a connection between us and the people who are here.”
The buildup to the Purim spiel is a monthslong affair, with Roffman beginning to work on his concept in December. In the weeks leading up to the extravaganza, he said his colleagues rotate him out of leading Shabbat so he can focus his efforts on crafting the performance.
“Starting in January, I start to work on lyrics, and then four weeks out, basically what I do is I do lifecycle events, I teach on Shabbat, and that’s it,” said Roffman. “I’m spending another 40 or 50 hours a week just on Purim.”
Roffman said the performance was largely unconstrained by a budget, noting that “it could cost $20,000, and then it could be a lot more than that, and people would be OK with that.” He and others declined to say what was being spent on this year’s production.
“The people here are just extremely committed to Judaism and Jewish life and Jewish continuity, so the fact that this Purim show costs what it does, and people don’t blink an eye,” said Roffman.
During this year’s spiel, the congregation screamed and applauded as Queen Esther descended onto the stage in a giant disco ball suspended on a mechanical lift, a fog cannon blasting as she made her entrance.
Later in the performance, the clergy danced to Roffman’s parody of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.,” complete with the lyric “It’s fun to pray to the yud hey vav hey,” a reference to the Hebrew name for God. Audience members lifted coordinated signs to spell out the letters in unison.
Rabbi Ari Sunshine, Roffman and Wallach’s co-senior rabbi, said the attendance to the spiel had more than doubled since the first year Roffman took over.
“We like to joke ‘we take our Purim fun seriously’ because we think that this is a great opportunity,” said Sunshine. “We know it’s one that people look forward to, we know it’s a great community-building experience.”
The spiel is not the only place where the synagogue has seen a surge in participation. Over the past five years, Shearith Israel’s religious school has gone from 60 students to 250.
“When we first came, the shul was kind of in a little bit of a downturn in terms of energy and membership,” said Wallach. “One of the things that was really important to Adam and me when we came is that we changed the culture so that it was really warm and embracing.”
Debbie Mack, who has belonged to Congregation Shearith Israel for 48 years, said the synagogue “wasn’t always as lively and as fun and youthful” as it feels today.
“Our children don’t live here, our grandchildren are not here, but we love coming to see all that the synagogue is now, and remember the difference between how it was and the way it is,” said Mack.
But even amid the spectacle, the story’s darker themes were not lost on congregants.
For Shiva Delrahim Beck, a Persian congregant who has attended the Shearith Israel Purim spiel for 12 years, this year had a special significance in the wake of joint U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran.
“For us, the story of Purim and the way that they did it at the spiel really brought to life the significance of Purim and modern day Purim, as it happened yesterday,” said Delrahim Beck. “So this was great for my family, and I could not be happier to be here.”
During the opening prayers for the performance, Wallach, Roffman’s wife and co-senior rabbi, drew parallels between the story of Purim and the burgeoning conflict in Iran.
“In that same way, our heroes of today are risking their lives so that we can continue to do what we are doing here, showing our love for and pride in Judaism and the Jewish people in Israel and all over the world,” said Wallach.
This year was not the first time that the spiel intersected with heavier themes. Last year, when the spiel’s theme was “Wicked,” Roffman played a montage of images of the Israeli hostages coming out of Gaza as the congregation’s cantor sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
“I think it really moved people,” said Roffman. “They weren’t expecting it, because they were there to laugh, but, you know, that’s the thing about theater. It sort of hits you in places that you don’t expect.”
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