The call came at 9 p.m. on a recent school night, caller ID informing me that it originated from SAR High School in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, where my youngest child is a freshman. Expecting a pre-recorded message, I was surprised to hear a familiar voice on the other end: It was the…
“Will you miss being a day school parent?” asked the head of school at Milken Community High School of Stephen S. Wise Temple, the largest non-Orthodox high school in the United States. This was last June. My youngest son, Danny, was about to graduate. “I am so done,” I replied. The words flew from my…
The first time I set foot in a day school, the principal, a soft-spoken man named Mr. Fishman, gave me a big black yarmulke to wear on my bare head, and I promptly threw it to the floor. At the time, my family was checking out the Orthodox yeshiva where I would start kindergarten a…
In 1985, I made a Rupert Holmes-style escape from the ghetto known as Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I had been deeply immersed in Jewish life, from conception until college, but as a freshman at Brown University, I was encouraged to explore, even fetishize, the secular world — to such a degree that I boasted about…
The decision to send the three of us kids to the Solomon Schechter School was, I’m told, a difficult one. My mother, who is a daughter of Holocaust refugees and a staunch Zionist, pushed for us to attend. My father, who came from a more typical American Jewish background, worried that we’d emerge from such…
Things have gone from bad to worse for the Hasidic Jews living in New Square and a few other Hasidic enclaves near the Catskills. A few weeks ago, we told you about the battle in Rockland County over a proposed kosher slaughterhouse that would be built less than a hundred feet from a residential neighborhood…
As Jewish day schools prepare to open their doors for the 2009–10 school year, there is only one thing beyond the well-being of their students that is on the minds of those in charge: the economy. The recession “has been devastating,” said Marc Kramer, executive director of RAVSAK: The Jewish Community Day School Network, which…
Leon Chameides was an undergraduate at Yeshiva University in the early 1950s, taking all the required courses so he could apply to medical school right after graduation. But he knew that his chances of getting in were slim because of the unwritten rule that he and all his pre-med classmates understood. “If you wanted to…
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