On its face, it is the quintessential story of American Jewish success: a public school where Hebrew will be at the center of its core curriculum.
But behind this façade, the founding of the Ben Gamla School in Broward County, Fla., has generated controversy and criticism.
As reported by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and The New York Times last month, the opening of the Ben Gamla School has sent civil libertarians into a tizzy.
The problem is that Ben Gamla, which was founded by former Florida Democratic Congressman Peter Deutsch, is a charter, not a private or parochial school. It is run privately; but it is funded publicly and therefore must abide by the rules of all government-run schools.
Strict church-state separationists, who oppose anything that smacks of government-funded Jewish schools, think charters might be a way around that logjam that has heretofore doomed efforts to advance school choice or vouchers plans.
The American Civil Liberties Union and public school advocates are up in arms. They believe Ben Gamla’s orientation will inevitably lead to the school’s preaching religion on the government’s dime.
With these concerns in mind, three proposed courses of Hebrew instruction have already been canned because they contained texts or statements that related to Jewish observance.
But such concerns are misplaced. While knowledge of Hebrew is essential to a meaningful Jewish education, it is possible to teach the language without inculcating Jewish values of any sort, as some observers of many Israeli schools can attest.
Teaching Modern Hebrew by itself constitutes no more an unconstitutional establishment of Judaism than the teaching of Latin does of Catholicism, or Arabic does of Islam.
Israeli expatriates
The real problem is that the school won’t serve well its primary market: parents unable or unwilling to employ a private Jewish school.
Ben Gamla has revealed that 37 percent of the students say that Hebrew is their first language. That means that more than a third of the student body is probably composed of expatriate Israelis.
No doubt most of these people are, like most Israelis, largely secular.
Many former Israelis living here have told me about their desire to retain some sense of their “Israeli” identity rather than to become Diaspora Jews.
They don’t want religious instruction, but do worry about their kids not retaining the language. Thus, a tuition-free school where Hebrew is taught and Judaism avoided appeals to them.
But Hebrew alone can’t sustain an identity. A sole focus on Hebrew is as viable as the old Socialist Bundist belief in secular Yiddish culture.
Devoid of faith and a connection to a living civilization, and its heritage and values, neither Yiddish nor Hebrew alone is what the sociologists term a transmissible value.
So if American Jews are actually interested in an education that will give children Jewish literacy in all aspects of our complex religious and ethnic identity, charters like Ben Gamla are a dead end.
In fact, they are more than that since, as Deutsch admits, religious day schools are his scheme’s competition.
Lamentably, Deutsch plans to duplicate his formula elsewhere by creating 100 similar schools around the nation. Ben Gamla therefore must be viewed not as a mere curiosity, but as a direct threat to the one institution proven to be our best investment in our future.
Day schools are not a magic formula for continuity. Summer camps, trips to Israel and Jewish involvement in the home are also important.
But despite the day schools’ proven success that led to exponential post-World War II growth, enrollment has stalled in the last decade.
One problem is that a large proportion of American Jews are so averse to Jewish particularity that a specifically Jewish school is abhorrent to them. There may not be much we can do to market day schools to such people, though it must be said that no one has given such an effort a real try.
But the other crippling drawback for day schools is that a large number of those who would send their children to them can’t because tuition is so high that it has become virtually prohibitive for middle class families, especially those with more than one school-age child.
Unless we support this sector of the population that wishes to affiliate, then American Jewry will be shooting itself in the foot.
In response, some have proposed campaigns to fund an across-the-board lowering of tuitions, a measure that is bound to increase enrollment.
But even in areas like Philadelphia, where communal leaders appear to have recognized that day schools must be our priority, such campaigns have yet to materialize because the large amount of money needed for such a project is not available.
The initial popularity of the Florida charter scheme must be understood in this context. When communities fail to invest in the right choices, foolish alternatives will prosper.
Funds apparently are available for other Jewish causes, such as $100 million raised for building a National Museum of American Jewish History that will rise on Independence Mall in the near future.
If it goes up while measures to lower day school tuitions continue to fail, we will have to wonder about our priorities.
While the appeal of Jewish museums, which have sprouted around North America, speaks volumes about American Jews’ desire to create monuments to our own communal vanity, it can at least be said that the new Jewish history and Holocaust museums at least contribute to education.
But talk of funding education via museums is as much a dodge as the illusion that a Hebrew charter school can accomplish what a full-time comprehensive Jewish day school can.
If we would rather fund monuments to our past than schools which are a platform for our future, then perhaps we might as well just slip inside a diorama and smile for the visitors who will one day have to visit museums to see what a Jewish community looked like.
Like Hebrew charter schools and other attempts to change the subject, the failure to create a Jewish education safety net will be our ticket to oblivion.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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