Milwaukee native Brad Shovers remembers that, as a child, his parents battled with him to get him to attend synagogue religious school.
He and his wife, Marilyn, have no such battles with their youngest child, Daniel, 9.
Daniel attends the Milwaukee Community Cheder for his after-public-school Jewish education; and while “he doesn’t talk a lot” about his experiences there, “the fact that he’s anxious to go and enjoys going says enough,” Brad said.
The three children of Julie and Roger Siegel — Nick, 14, Robin, 11, and Andrea, 8 — seem to be more talkative about the school; “They love it,” Julie said.
“The biggest thing I hear them say is that everybody’s really nice there, the teachers are really nice and make a lot of things fun,” Siegel said.
Yet they come away from the school with real Judaic knowledge, “much more than I did when I was in Sunday school,” said Siegel. “They know all the prayers, and the holidays and their meanings” and bring back Hebrew terms that “they blow me away with.”
That these parents would send their children to a school run by Lubavitch of Wisconsin may seem a bit odd in that they all grew up Reform Jews.
But “most of the parents and students are not Orthodox,” said Brad Shovers. “The Lubavitch organization as a whole accepts all Jews, no matter what their level of observance is.”
“They take us for who we are, with no expectation for us to become more observant,” said Julie Siegel. “If you do, then that’s fabulous.”
Nurturing the soul
According to Rabbi Mendel Shmotkin, the cheder’s executive director and whose wife, Devorkie, is the principal, the idea for the school came from a group of parents who had participated in Lubavitch adult education efforts (among them Roger Siegel) or sent their children to the Children’s Lubavitch Living and Learning Center nursery school (among them the Shovers).
“They said, ‘Can’t you guys do Hebrew school better?’” Shmotkin told The Chronicle. He said he had often heard about a “culture” in many supplementary schools in which the kids do not enjoy going and Jewish education often ends with a bar/bat mitzvah ceremony, after which kids feel “we’re done and free.”
So these parents were wondering, “Can’t there be a way for Hebrew school to be dynamic and have kids enjoy it” and still absorb serious Jewish knowledge, Shmotkin said.
And while the usual Orthodox approach is to favor Jewish day school education, most Jewish children in the Milwaukee area will not or cannot attend the area Jewish day schools, he said.
“We try to meet the need of the parents, where they’re at,” and try to “provide the highest level of Jewish education that we can,” Shmotkin said.
So the Shmotkins organized the first Milwaukee Community Cheder class in the 1999-2000 school year, with an enrollment of eight. It now has “almost 80 kids” attending in grades K5 to seventh and will be adding an eighth grade this year.
Part of the way cheder leaders have rethought the idea of Hebrew school has to do with scheduling. Most Hebrew schools take place during weekday afternoons and evenings after public school ends. But, said Shmotkin, “after a full day of classes, to start learning a language is tedious” for many children.
So from third grade and older, the cheder runs two days a week, Sunday mornings (9 a.m. to noon, which is also when the younger grades meet) and Wednesday evenings (4-6 p.m.); and it schedules its Hebrew study on Sunday mornings, when the children are more fresh and focused, Shmotkin said.
Shmotkin also said that another “unique” feature of the school’s educational approach is its focus on spirituality. “We believe that is the driving force, that children have an innate spirituality that needs to find expression,” he said. “Often in the quest to give knowledge, this part [is] overlooked.”
So “we spend time talking about God and the soul, about purpose — giving expression to spiritual ideas,” he said. “We look at the totality of the child, the totality of Jewish experience, with the idea of helping nurture that soul part, that spiritual part, giving it expression within the context of Judaism.”
In addition, according to Shovers, the school “also tries to involve the entire family in the program and helps build the Jewish awareness of the entire family.” It does this through such events as Shabbat dinners for parents and children, holiday parties and other events through the year, he said.
For more information, call Milwaukee’s Chabad Lubavitch House, 414-961-6100; or visit www.milwaukeecommunitycheder.com.
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