chicago | The “December dilemma” — the annual tug-of-war between Christmas and Chanukah played out in living rooms across America — causes consternation in many Jewish homes.
But a group of Chicago kids in The Family School’s sixth-grade class don’t find it at all confusing.
“I like celebrating both,” says Sarah Liebreich, 11, who, like her classmates, has a Jewish and a Catholic parent. “I go to a lot of Chanukah parties, and if there are people who don’t know about the holidays, you can teach them.”
“Usually on the last night we invite people over,” says Anna Cohn, also 11. “Most of our neighbors are Catholic. They come over and play dreidel, they see we have a Christmas tree, and they think it’s really cool.”
The Family School is the oldest and largest of a small but growing number of interfaith religious schools in the United States. The schools are run by intermarried couples who meet on Sunday mornings to teach their children the basic values and traditions of both parents’ faiths.
Started in 1993 with nine children from seven families, The Family School today draws more than 120 children from 75 families to its twice-monthly classes, held on the campus of Old St. Patrick’s Church in downtown Chicago.
Similar parent-led programs have sprung up in metropolitan areas across the country. Some, like The Family School, are for Jewish-Catholic families. Others, like the Bay Area Interfaith Sunday School, draw Jews married to a broad range of Christians.
In all of them, the parents associated with these interfaith schools have decided to teach their children both traditions.
There is no hidden agenda, according to Family School founding members David and Patty Kovacs. “We do not advocate educating children in two faiths unless it is the family’s wish to do so,” they write in the curriculum’s introduction.
The notion of dual-face education engenders opposition from every Jewish stream. The goal here is different.
On one recent Sunday, Chicago Tribune reporters Blair Kamin and Barbara Mahany are in charge of their son Willie’s sixth-grade class at The Family School. The week’s focus is “The Jewish Jesus,” and Mahany has the children compare three of Jesus’ “miracle” stories from the Christian Bible.
Following Family School precepts, she highlights the universal aspects of the stories, finding the points at which Christianity and Judaism intersect. “We’re going to take these stories apart and see that they can still be really important when seen through a Jewish lens,” she tells the class.
“You’re not like me, a little Catholic girl growing up with no analyzing, where I just believed these stories as gospel truth. And you’re not growing up as Jews, where you just dismiss it all.
“Remember, the people writing down these stories were Jews,” she instructs. “They were looking at Jesus’ life as Jews, through the powerful Jewish symbols of their time.”
Those are pretty sophisticated concepts for 11-year-olds — but these children have been dealing with such subtleties for years.
“I think these stories are symbolic,” Anna Cohn says. “I don’t take them literally. When I was really little, I thought Jonah might be real. But now that I’m older I realize it symbolizes something important.”
“If you go to different churches and they read the same gospel, they change the story a little,” chimes in Lauren Kolaczkowski, 11. “So if it’s different in each church, how could it be true?”
Anna admits “it makes it a little less powerful if the stories aren’t true. And if one story is just symbolic, how do you know if any of them are true?”
Teaching about Jesus was the hardest thing to bring into The Family School curriculum, says David Kovacs.
“We were in existence five years before we could do it,” he admits. “When you start talking about Jesus and Paul and the Gospels, people have a visceral reaction. But there were just as many others who said, ‘How can we not?'”
Joy and David Hambourger have two young children in The Family School. Both had baby naming/baptism ceremonies this year, officiated jointly by a priest and a rabbi.
David Hambourger feels his girls “might choose when they’re 10, which is when you’d start thinking about a bat mitzvah.” But his wife suggests they might not have to choose — though she’d like them to experience the “spiritual comfort” she derives from going to Mass.
No matter which religious path the girls take, their father feels confident that he and Joy will have given them the religious tools they need, with love and honesty.
“The fact that we’ve committed to make both faiths part of their upbringing doesn’t put one of us in the background,” he says. “That’s the most important thing: We both get to play a part in this, without either feeling a sense of betrayal.”
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