Education
Here’s How Jewish Schools Found Creative Ways To Maintain Community During Covid Lockdown By Sara Ivry
Eighth-graders from the Chicago Jewish Day School toss their caps in the air during the school's graduation parade and end-of-year celebration, June 11, 2020. (Jen Minkus)
As soon as it became clear in March that COVID-19 would force school closures around the country, Jewish day school administrators faced a conundrum that went beyond the question of how to continue educating students. The challenge: how to maintain a
sense of community at a time when everyone was shuttered at home. Community is one of the raisons d’etre of Jewish day schools, and often why families stretch themselves financially to afford them. With everyone apart, what could schools do to alleviate the sense of
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isolation and stress among staff, students and families? For Yeshivat Noam, a Modern Orthodox elementary school in northern New Jersey with some 800 students, the challenge of commencement exercises brought those questions to a head. “We didn’t want the class of 2020 to conclude as someone clicks ‘end meeting’ on a Zoom screen,” said Rabbi Chaim Hagler, the head of school. So the school built a parade float festooned with Israeli and American flags and labeled “Bringing Graduation Home” that traveled to the houses of each graduating eighth-grader for surprise commencement ceremonies. Family members, neighbors and friends gathered in lawn chairs to watch as their local graduate, decked out in cap and gown, received their diploma while “Pomp and Circumstance” played. “COVID-19 was trying to say: ‘Let’s not let these guys have a graduation,’” Hagler said in one of his speeches to a graduate. “But we said, ‘No way!’” Staff used a leaf blower to scatter confetti, loudspeakers to blast music and a Nissan Titan pickup truck to pull the “Class of 2020”
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float. To get around social distancing measures, each student posed for pictures with a life-size cutout image of the principal. “The kids were thrilled, so excited,” Hagler said. “Basically, each one had their own individual opportunity to be recognized as special.” The school conducted 85 of these ceremonies over two days. It was one of the myriad ways that Jewish day schools nationwide used the pandemic not just to adopt creative methods of teaching, but to maintain the sense of community that underpins the schools. “That’s a feature of day schools — that community is strong, that we connect a lot — and I think it’s been vital to how day schools have gotten through this successfully,” said Paul Bernstein, the CEO of Prizmah: Center for Jewish Day Schools. Bernstein’s own children attend the Leffell School, a two-campus K-12 institution in suburban Westchester County, New York. Earlier this year, Leffell turned its spring fundraiser into the Bathrobe Ball, a free online event with a live auction, an interview with comedian See COMMUNITY on Page
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