I’m glad to see this newspaper highlighting the importance of Jewish day school education. No single factor is more important to the survival of the American Jewish community than this one. And yet for years, major communal organizations opposed or ignored day schools because they saw day school education as too parochial for their liberal, secular sensibilities. The sort of Jewish education they preferred – Hebrew school for four to six hours per week -â€“ has been a manifest failure in producing educated and committed Jews.
The Orthodox community built up the day school yeshiva system with almost no help from the organized Jewish community. If we look at the greater New York Jewish community today, including the one in Bergen County, [many] secular organizations are dying, and the liberal branches of Judaism are shrinking. This gives you an idea of why day schools are important. The growth and flourishing of the Orthodox community in greater New York, and the decay of liberal and secular Jewish identity, shows what the consequences are of having or not having an effective day school system.