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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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Lebanon Heads to Historic Israel Talks as Hezbollah Strikes Continue
Smoke rises after an Israeli strike, amid escalating hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, as the US-Israeli conflict with Iran continues, in southern Lebanon, March 24, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
Lebanon‘s President Joseph Aoun has called for historic direct talks with longtime foe Israel since war erupted a month ago – a month in which Israel‘s military has waged an escalating campaign against the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
Now that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has answered the call to talk peace, Lebanon is in its weakest position to deliver it, experts said.
Hezbollah, which is locked in clashes with Israeli troops in south Lebanon, is opposed to direct negotiations – throwing into question whether it would abide by any ceasefire agreed by the state.
“The talks that will take place between Lebanon and Israel are frankly pointless, because those conducting them in the name of Lebanon have no leverage to negotiate,” a Lebanese official close to the group told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
MORE THAN 300 KILLED IN DAY OF STRIKES
Israel intensified air attacks on Lebanon after Hezbollah fired missiles into Israel on March 2, three days into the US-Israeli war on Iran. It has since widened a ground offensive.
Shi’ite Muslims, the community from which Hezbollah draws its support and which has borne the brunt of Israel‘s strikes, have told Reuters they have little faith in a state they see as failing to defend them.
Netanyahu’s instructions to his cabinet to prepare for direct talks came a day after Israeli strikes across Lebanon killed more than 300 people, one of the bloodiest days for Lebanon since its civil war ended in 1990.
Israeli bombardment has destroyed public infrastructure across southern Lebanon and killed several Lebanese state security forces on Friday.
STATE’S STANDING DETERIORATES
Many Lebanese, including two officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity, said they saw Netanyahu’s belated acceptance of talks as a fig leaf, aimed at generating goodwill in Washington as the US begins talks with Iran this weekend, while ultimately keeping the war in Lebanon going.
“Just because Israel agreed to negotiate with us doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. The problem is that we don’t have any other option,” said Nabil Boumonsef, deputy editor-in-chief of Lebanon‘s Annahar newspaper.
Lebanon‘s state has historically been weak, hamstrung by corruption, a sectarian power-sharing system that is frequently deadlocked, and cycles of internal fighting and wars between Hezbollah and Israel.
Lebanese have repeated the refrain of “there is no state” for decades, but recent crises have degraded the government’s standing even further.
Lebanon‘s financial system collapsed in 2019 and a 2020 chemical explosion at the Beirut port killed more than 200 people. No one has been held to account for either.
In September 2024, an Arab Barometer survey found that 76% of Lebanese had no trust at all in their government.
The following month, Israel sent troops into Lebanon and escalated its bombing campaign after a year of exchanging fire with Hezbollah. More than 3,700 people were killed in Lebanon.
A HOUSE DIVIDED
Even after a US-brokered ceasefire in November 2024, Israel kept troops in Lebanon and continued its strikes against what it said was Hezbollah terrorist infrastructure. Those who returned to demolished southern Lebanese towns spent their own savings to rebuild their houses without state help.
Thousands more who could not return home said their own government was at fault for failing to secure Israel‘s withdrawal through diplomacy.
The US and Israel, meanwhile, blamed the Lebanese state and army for failing to fulfil a promise under the 2024 ceasefire deal to fully strip Hezbollah of its arsenal.
Lebanese officials said disarming Hezbollah by force would trigger civil strife and talks to convince the group to abandon its weapons were failing as Israel still occupied Lebanese land.
After Hezbollah entered the regional war on March 2, Lebanon outlawed its military activities. But the army did not stop the group’s missile launches, with officials again citing the risk of internal conflict.
Netanyahu has said talks would focus on Hezbollah’s disarmament and a historic peace agreement between Israel and Lebanon, who have technically been at war since Israel‘s founding in 1948.
But both are hard to imagine after such a deadly week.
Lebanon was heading into talks as a house divided, said Michael Young of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center.
Disarming Hezbollah “means entering into a confrontation with the entire Shi’ite community, which will not accept Hezbollah’s disarmament because they feel they are surrounded by enemies,” he said.
“We’re weak because we’re unclear on the terms of reference of negotiations, divided over the question of negotiations, because our demands will be rejected and because we cannot do what we need to do to secure an Israeli withdrawal.”
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Trump’s Peace Board Faces Cash Crunch, Stalling Gaza Plan, Sources Say
USPresident Donald Trump, Indonesia’s President Prabowo Subianto, Albania’s Prime Minister Edi Rama, Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Cabinet Member, and Climate Envoy Adel Al-Jubeir, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, and Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi attend the inaugural Board of Peace meeting at the US Institute of Peace in Washington, DC, US, Feb. 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque
Donald Trump’s Board of Peace has received only a tiny fraction of the $17 billion pledged for Gaza, preventing the US president from pushing ahead with his plan for the shattered Palestinian enclave’s future, sources told Reuters.
Ten days before US-Israeli attacks on Iran plunged the region into war, Trump hosted a conference in Washington that saw Gulf Arab states pledge billions for the governance and reconstruction of Gaza after a two-year pulverization by Israel.
The plan envisages large-scale rebuilding of the coastal enclave after the disarmament of Palestinian terrorist group Hamas – whose attacks on Israel triggered the assault on Gaza – and the withdrawal of Israeli troops.
The funding pledges were also meant to pay for the activities of a nascent National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG), a US-backed group of Palestinian technocrats intended to assume control of Gaza from Hamas.
‘NO MONEY CURRENTLY AVAILABLE’
One of the sources, a person with direct knowledge of the peace board‘s operations, said that out of ten countries who pledged funds, only three – the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and the US itself – had contributed funding.
The source said funding so far was under $1 billion but did not give more details. The Iran war “has affected everything,” exacerbating previous funding difficulties, the source said.
NCAG could not enter Gaza due to both funding and security issues, the source added. Even after a ceasefire was agreed last October, Israeli attacks have killed at least 700 people in Gaza according to Hamas-controlled health officials there, while terrorist attacks have killed four soldiers according to Israel.
The second source, a Palestinian official familiar with the matter, said the board informed Hamas and other Palestinian factions that NCAG is unable to enter Gaza right now due to a lack of funding.
“No money is currently available,” the official cited board envoy Nickolay Mladenovas as informing Palestinian groups.
Hamas has repeatedly said it is ready to hand over governance to NCAG, led by Ali Shaath, a former deputy minister with the Palestinian Authority, which currently exercises limited self-rule in parts of the West Bank.
Shaath’s committee is meant to assume control of Gaza‘s ministries and run its police force.
He and his 14 committee members have been cloistered in a hotel in Cairo under supervision by American and Egyptian handlers, said a diplomatic source.
Representatives for the Board of Peace and NCAG did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Rehabilitation of Gaza, where four-fifths of buildings were destroyed in two years of Israeli bombardments, has been projected by global institutions to cost around $70 billion.
The stuttering plan for Gaza‘s future echoes other ambitious initiatives by Trump, who has sought to project himself as the world’s peacemaker but has struggled to end the Ukraine war as he said he would and is seeing this week’s truce with Iran come under immediate severe strain.
DISARMAMENT TALKS
Egypt, which has been hosting the disarmament talks, invited Hamas for more meetings on Saturday, according to a source in the Islamist group.
The ceasefire halted full-blown war but left Israeli troops in control of a depopulated zone comprising well over half of Gaza, with Hamas in power in a narrow coastal strip.
Trump’s board has been leading negotiations with Hamas and other Palestinian factions on disarmament. Israel says Hamas must lay down arms before it pulls troops out of Gaza; Hamas says it will not comply without guarantees of Israel’s withdrawal and a halt to firing in Gaza.
The diplomatic source familiar with the disarmament talks said they remained in deadlock and feared Israel was looking for an excuse to relaunch a full-scale offensive on Gaza.
Israeli military officials have said they are preparing for a swift return to full-scale war if Hamas does not lay down its weapons.
The Gaza war began with Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel that killed 1,200 people.
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Iran Demands Lebanon Ceasefire, Unfreezing of Assets Before Peace Talks
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi speaks during a press conference following talks with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in Moscow, Russia, Dec. 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramil Sitdikov/Pool
Iran said on Friday that blocked Iranian assets must be released and that a ceasefire must take hold in Lebanon before peace talks can proceed, throwing last-minute doubt over negotiations scheduled for Saturday in Pakistan.
Iran‘s parliament speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said on X that the two measures had been previously agreed with the US and warned that negotiations would not start until they are fulfilled.
His post was echoed by Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who also called for the Israeli airstrikes on Lebanon to stop. Both Qalibaf and Araqchi are expected to be at the talks, Pakistani sources said.
There was no immediate comment from the White House.
US President Donald Trump told the New York Post earlier on Friday that US warships were being reloaded “with the best ammunition to resume strikes on Iran if peace talks in Pakistan fail.”
“We’re going to find out in about 24 hours. We’re going to know soon,” Trump said in a phone interview when asked if he thought the talks would be successful.
Vice President JD Vance, who will lead the US delegation to the talks, said he expected a positive outcome as he headed to Pakistan. But “if they’re going to try to play us, then they’re going to find the negotiating team is not that receptive,” he added.
Iran has been unable to obtain tens of billions of dollars of its assets in foreign banks, mainly from exports of oil and gas, due to US sanctions on its banking and energy sectors.
TENUOUS TRUCE
Trump announced a two-week ceasefire in the six-week war on Tuesday, just hours before a deadline after which he had threatened to destroy Iran‘s bridges, power plants, and other infrastructure. However, the truce is tenuous with Israel’s continuing campaign against the Iran-backed terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iranian regime’s ongoing closure of the Strait of Hormuz proving key sticking points for both sides.
The ceasefire has halted the campaign of US and Israeli airstrikes on Iran. But it has so far done nothing to end the blockade of the strait, which has caused a major disruption to global energy supplies, or to calm a parallel war waged by Israel against Iran‘s Hezbollah allies in Lebanon.
Iran was doing a “very poor job” of letting oil through the strait, Trump said in a social media post. He also warned Tehran against trying to collect fees from ships crossing it. “That is not the agreement we have!”
Israel and Washington have said the campaign against terrorist group Hezbollah in Lebanon is not part of the agreed ceasefire.
Israeli forces launched the biggest attack of the war hours after the ceasefire was announced, killing more than 300 Lebanese in surprise strikes, Lebanese authorities said.
Israeli strikes continued across southern Lebanon on Friday, with more than a dozen people reported killed in various towns. One strike on a government building in the southern city of Nabatieh killed 13 members of Lebanon‘s state security forces, Lebanon‘s President Joseph Aoun said in a statement.
Lebanese authorities say at least 1,830 people have been killed in Israeli strikes since March 2.
IRANIAN HARDLINE
The hardline taken by Iran‘s leaders ahead of the negotiations followed a defiant message from its new Supreme Leader Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei on Thursday.
Khamenei, yet to be seen in public since taking over from his father who was killed on the war’s first day, said Iran would demand compensation for all wartime damage.
“We will certainly not leave unpunished the criminal aggressors who attacked our country,” he said.
Although Trump has declared victory, the war did not fully achieve the aims he set out at the start: to deprive Iran of the ability to strike its neighbors, dismantle its nuclear program, and make it easier for its people to overthrow their government.
Iran still possesses missiles and drones capable of hitting its neighbors and a stockpile of more than 400 kg (900 pounds) of uranium enriched near the level needed to make a bomb. Kuwait’s army said on Friday that, despite the ceasefire, an Iranian attack targeted several vital National Guard facilities, wounding a number of personnel and causing significant material damage.
Iran’s clerical rulers, who faced a popular uprising just months ago, withstood the US-Israeli onslaught with no sign of organized opposition. Earlier this year, however, the regime crushed nationwide anti-government protests by killing and imprisoning tens of thousands of people.
Tehran’s agenda at the talks now includes demands for major new concessions, including the end of sanctions that crippled its economy for years, and acknowledgment of its authority over the strait, where it aims to collect transit fees and control access in what would amount to a huge shift in regional power.
As has been the case throughout the war, Iran‘s own ships were sailing through the strait unimpeded on Friday, while those of other countries remained hemmed inside.
Among the handful of vessels to cross on Friday was an Iranian supertanker capable of carrying 2 million barrels of crude. Before the war, 140 ships would cross in a typical day, including tankers carrying 20 million barrels.
The disruption to energy supplies has fed inflation and slowed the global economy, with an impact expected to last for months even if negotiators succeed in reopening the strait.
US monthly inflation data released on Friday, the first to show the impact of the war, showed consumer prices rose by 0.9% in March, the fastest rate since the mid-2022 inflation shock that eroded support for Trump’s predecessor Joe Biden.