She sent out a letter asking parents to require the same attendance and performance standards of their children at Hebrew school that they do at “regular” school. The letter also asked parents to sit down with their children and explain their reasons for sending them to Hebrew school.
To her surprise, it helped.
“Parents didn’t mean to be doing something that would sabotage the Hebrew school,” said Koller-Fox. “But kids pick up on it if they always have to do homework, but they do not always have to do Hebrew- school homework. If parents are not consistent, they’re sending a message I can’t fight.”
For decades, Hebrew school teachers and principals have been complaining about the lack of at-home reinforcement for what’s going on in the classroom.
Whether it’s because they don’t see Jewish education as a priority, lack confidence in their Jewish knowledge or both, many parents appear to view their responsibility to “teach your children” as ending once the car-pool obligations are fulfilled.
But around the country Hebrew school directors are starting to demand more. Some are simply speaking up and asking that their schools be taken seriously. Others are requiring or strongly suggesting that parents participate in certain family activities, classes or Shabbat services.
What they are finding is that if approached with respect, given choices and offered high-quality programs, parents are more willing to get involved.
“Parents don’t need to be dragged kicking and screaming,” said Vicky Kelman, director of the Jewish Family Education Project at the Bureau of Jewish Education in San Francisco. “Many were just waiting to be asked.”
While most congregational schools have implemented some form of family education — often just a special program or event — a number are engaging parents in more intensive experiences.
At Congregation Beth El in Baltimore, parents can choose between the traditional three-day-a-week Hebrew school for their kids and Project Mishpacha, a family education track.
In Mishpacha — which 90 percent of the families select — parents come in one Sunday a month for “parallel learning” classes in which they learn on an adult level what the children are covering.
They also commit to attending eight Shabbat services and several family programs each year. In exchange for the investment of parental time, children have to go to school only twice a week.
“Parents know what’s going on and can help their children,” said Ellen Budish, whose daughter Rebecca is in third grade. “It’s not, ‘Oh, it’s Sunday, I have to go to school, but it’s Sunday, we’re both going to school and Mommy will be in the classroom down the hall.'”
Intensive family programs can also strengthen the entire synagogue community, said Michelle Shapiro Abraham, who helped develop a series of family courses at the Reform Temple of Suffern, in suburban New York.
“It makes connections for parents to meet each other,” said Juliet Barr, a parent of three children and a volunteer teacher in the program.
The new program, which is required for students and parents in third to sixth grades, encourages parents — and other congregants — to help with the teaching.
Among the course offerings: tours of Ellis Island and the Lower East Side, making stained glass mezuzot, volunteering at a soup kitchen and — in perhaps the most unusual venue — learning about the 18 sections of the Amidah prayer by participating in special activities on an 18-hole miniature golf course.
At Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, parents can attend classes while their children are in Sunday school. Or they can participate with their children in a Shabbat school called Shabbaton, in which the families pray together and then study both together and separately.
For Lisa Langer, the Reform synagogue’s program coordinator, what’s important about the school is that it offers choices and that it’s not simply an isolated program but part of a larger congregational focus on education.
Beth Am is one of 14 Reform congregations around the country participating in the Experiment in Congregational Education, an effort to create a “culture that values learning,” said Isa Aron, the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion professor overseeing the project.
Participants are charged with infusing all synagogue programs with Jewish learning, and integrating the religious school into the larger workings of the congregation, engaging members of all ages in Jewish study.
Congregation Beth Am Israel in suburban Philadelphia is Conservative and not part of that experiment, but it has a similarly holistic approach in its Shabbat school, in which parents, children and other congregants all attend classes and services on Saturday morning.
Abby Stamelman Hocky, a Beth Am Israel parent, said she enjoys the “rhythm” of coming to synagogue each week and of having a family respite from the “hectic world we’re living in.”
The Shabbat structure also encourages family discussions about Judaism.
“On the car ride home, you’re naturally talking about the Torah portion of the week and some interesting lesson that was learned,” she said. “It’s not like usual, when you ask your kids what they did at school and they say, ‘Nothing.'”