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| Former Schechter Queens, now the Queens Hebrew Academy (JTA) |
Last December the first-ever Solomon Schechter day school—part of what was once a thriving network of Conservative Jewish day schools—voted to rename itself the Queens Hebrew Academy. That decision meant that, for the first time in nearly 70 years, New York City had no Solomon Schechter school at all, following the closure of Schechter Manhattan in 2023 due to declining enrollment.
This is an astonishing development. Even for a skeptic like
me who has been noting the steady demise of heterodox Judaism in general, and
Conservative Judaism in particular, for quite some time. It is astonishing
precisely because of the very reason the Solomon Schechter system existed in the
first place. And because the Conservative movement itself understands, at least
intellectually, that education is the key to Jewish survival. Education is the
one factor that has any real track record of perpetuating the Jewish people
into the future.
The reasons for the demise of the Conservative educational
system are not difficult to identify. For starters, it amounts to the ancient
adage: too little, too late.
The Conservative movement has long claimed to be halachic,
while simultaneously tolerating - indeed normalizing - widespread
non-observance among its synagogue members. This tension has existed since the
movement’s founding at the beginning of the 20th century. It took decades
for its leaders to fully grasp an uncomfortable truth: Judaism without
meaningful observance is a prescription for the eventual abandonment of Jewish
identity altogether.
Seeing the success of the Orthodox day school system, the
Conservative movement created one of its own in the 1950s. But by then,
Conservative Jews were already assimilating so deeply into American culture
that it became increasingly difficult to motivate nonobservant parents to send
their children to schools that might introduce observance into their homes.
To be sure, the movement initially experienced some success.
Additional schools opened across the country. At the time, Jewish identity
still mattered. Even to Jews who were so assimilated that they observed little,
if any, recognizable halacha. Solomon Schechter schools survived because
parents wanted to instill in their children a sense of Jewish identity, pride
in their heritage, history, and culture.
That approach worked for a while. But what was taught in
school was rarely lived in the home, and what is not modeled at home is
unlikely to endure into adulthood. If a child does not see Judaism practiced as
an obligation, there is little chance that he or she will embrace it
independently later in life. Teaching Judaism primarily as a cultural identity
rather than as an obligatory way of life is simply not a formula for long-term
continuity.
Culture is optional. Obligations are not.
Anything optional can be discarded when something else seems more personally fulfilling...
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