“I’m really excited about school starting.”
How many parents are fortunate enough to hear those words a week before school begins?
Shira Aitchison of Los Gatos was the one who spoke them, but as she did a group of her peers stood around and nodded in agreement.
Next week, Aitchison and her friends will make up the class of 2006 at Kehillah Jewish High School in San Jose — the second Jewish high school to open in the area in two years’ time.
Last September, the Jewish Community High School of the Bay opened in Marin. And this September, it is moving into its brand new multicolored home in San Francisco.
Between the two high schools, that’s almost 100 kids who are furthering their Jewish education in the Bay Area, and that number will only continue to increase.
For more than two decades, Hebrew Academy has been the only Jewish high in the Bay Area. There were no options for parents looking for a non-Orthodox Jewish high school.
No longer.
Both the Los Gatos and San Francisco schools are dual curriculum, meaning that in addition to the secular subjects taught in a public high school, students will also learn Hebrew, Jewish history, Jewish text and prayer.
At the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, a phrase from Proverbs hangs above the ark: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”
Said Arthur Fried, a school trustee, “That’s the spirit the school is endowed with.”
Said Len Lehmann, a founder of Kehillah, “We want [our students] to be leaders in our Bay Area Jewish community and in the community at large.”
Laurence Myers, a past president of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation who died last week, was a vocal supporter of Jewish day schools at a time when many of his predecessors were not. One can only hope that the graduates of these new institutions will take Lehmann’s words to heart, following in Myers’ footsteps.