It’s Friday morning at San Leandro’s Temple Beth Sholom preschool, and teacher Diane Acquistapace is helping a dozen toddlers get ready for Shabbat.
“You put your challah in, you put your challah out, you put your challah in, and you shake it all about,” they sing, arms high above their heads as they turn slowly, doing their own rendition of the hokey-pokey.
Then they crowd around a pint-sized table to light candles, eat fresh-baked, chocolate-chip challah and sing Shabbat songs in English and Hebrew.
Acquistapace, who is Catholic, knows all the songs. She should, after eight years teaching in this Conservative congregation’s preschool.
Of the eight teachers at this preschool, seven are not Jewish. So are many of the children they teach.
According to 2004 figures from the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education, 15 percent of the more than 122,500 children in Jewish preschools in this country are not Jewish: about 10 percent are in Reconstructionist and Conservative preschools, 20 percent in Reform schools, and 44 percent in preschools run by Jewish Community Centers and YMCAs. Virtually all children in Orthodox preschools are Jewish.
This isn’t referring to children of intermarried parents, rather the children of two non-Jewish parents.
And many of their teachers aren’t Jewish either: 30 percent in the JCC preschools, 10 to 25 percent in Reform schools, and 12 to 20 percent in Conservative schools, according to the CAJE figures. The percentage is highest in the western United States, where almost 40 percent of preschool teachers are not Jewish.
That sets up an interesting scenario: plenty of classrooms in which non-Jewish teachers are introducing non-Jewish children to Jewish history, values and customs.
Jewish early childhood experts are asking: Does it matter?
On one hand, these experts acknowledge that they’d rather have Jewish teachers to be role models for the children, but finding Jewish teachers is becoming increasingly difficult.
Lyndall Miller, coordinator of the Jewish early childhood education certification program at Gratz College in Melrose Park, Pa., says that few younger Jews are going into the field because of low salaries and benefits.
“Synagogues will find themselves in trouble keeping their early childhood programs,” she says. “We’re all in our 40s and 50s. Who will be coming in? It’ll be almost all non-Jewish teachers. And the community will miss this amazing opportunity to acculturate children to Jewish life at a time when children are learning how to do Jewish, which translates into being Jewish.”
On the other hand, every preschool director interviewed insists that non-Jewish teachers are dedicated and hardworking, and often know more about Judaism and the holidays than their Jewish colleagues.
Rabbi Jan Katzew, director of lifelong Jewish learning for the Union for Reform Judaism, points out that non-Jewish women have a long history of educating Jewish children, dating back to biblical times.
Shiphra and Puah, the two midwives who defied Pharaoh and refused to drown Jewish male infants, “might not be Jewish,” he says. “And Pharaoh’s daughter, who was clearly not Jewish, was pivotal in rearing Moses.
“Without explicit support from non-Jews, we would have had no Moses, no Torah and no Judaism, at least as we now know it,” he says.
Jewish preschools have changed radically over the past 20 years. According to the Jewish educational nonprofit JESNA, most Jewish preschools in the early 1980s were synagogue nursery schools, half-day programs that sought to socialize children and introduce them to a few basic Jewish concepts. Teacher retention was high, and most were certified in early childhood education and had bachelor’s or master’s degrees.
Today, preschools are run by a variety of agencies and synagogues. The booming student population of children up to 6 years old has outstripped the supply of qualified teachers, who are less educated and less likely to stay in the field than their predecessors. This is worrisome for educators such as Ina Regosin, founding director of the Early Childhood Institute and dean of students at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., which has offered a teaching certificate in early Jewish childhood education for 20 years.
“You can’t have a Jewish school of excellence without excellently trained early childhood Jewish educators, people who speak Hebrew, who model Jewish values, who are living microcosms of what that means,” Regosin says. “If a non-Jew can do it, fine, but it’s not what I would choose.”
Jewish education expert Lois Shenker, author of “Welcome to the Family,” told a recent convention of Reform preschool educators that it’s crucial for Jewish teachers to “live their Judaism” all the time, not just in the classroom.
That doesn’t mean they all have to be Jewish, she says.
When she directed the JCC preschool in Portland, Ore., none of her teachers were Jewish. She says she’d rather have a skilled non-Jewish teacher than an unskilled Jewish one.
But, in her view, it’s crucial that the directors of Jewish preschools be Jewish, particularly when there are large numbers of non-Jewish teachers.
Eloise Hull, director of the preschool at The Temple, Congregation Ohabai Shalom in Nashville, Tenn., would disagree. One of the few non-Jewish preschool directors in the country, Hull is a practicing Christian who attended a fundamentalist church growing up and went to Bible college for her early childhood education degree.
Now she’s on the national board of the Early Childhood Educators of Reform Judaism, the professional body for Reform Jewish preschool teachers and directors, and is deeply committed to educating Jewish preschoolers.
Hull doesn’t see any conflict between her personal beliefs and heading a Jewish preschool, although she admits it would be “more difficult” beyond the preschool level, once teachers get into the realm of theology.
“We were always taught Jews are God’s people, and what I do at the temple isn’t that different than being an educator in a Christian school — the values, the stories, the heritage, it’s all something I’d want children to know, Jewish or not. I feel very comfortable advocating for these things.”
About half the 106 children and three-quarters of the teachers in her school are not Jewish. She had to chastise some of those teachers, she admits, when she found out they were bringing Christian Bibles to class and even taking their pupils to Sunday school.
“When I hire teachers, I say ‘this is a Jewish school, this is what we talk about and this is what we don’t talk about, so are you comfortable with that?’ And I tell my parents, ‘we’re celebrating Jewish heritage here.'”
Open-door policies — plus a reputation for high-quality early childhood education — have attracted many non-Jewish families to these preschools.
When Edna Vaknin was hired as the preschool director at San Leandro’s Temple Beth Sholom eight years ago, the school was on the verge of collapse with just seven children, all of them Jewish. In an effort to bolster enrollment, she decided to advertise as a “strictly Jewish” school that was available to anyone.
“I said, ‘We don’t celebrate Halloween or Christmas and we keep kosher, but we want you to be part of us, to show you what we’re all about.'”
Today the school has 60 children of mixed backgrounds. Last year, a couple who were both Christian ministers sent their child, and used to show up every Friday for the school’s Shabbat program.
Another parent, Carol Orth, is a practicing Christian who enrolled her 2-year-old daughter, Carmen, because she heard good things about the school from friends.
“It’s a loving environment,” she says as she balances her daughter on her lap during pre-Shabbat festivities. “I’m raising my child Christian, but I want her to grow up in a God-loving environment. She can learn the Old Testament here.”
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