THE
Education
JEWISH LIGHT
In Miami, A Selective New Jewish School Hopes To Attract Top Students By Andrew Lapin
Arendering of the beit midrash at the future Jewish Leadership Academy. (Courtesy Jewish Leadership Academy)
(JTA) – A brand-new, $50 million campus. A month in Israel every year. And a program to help students turn their social-service ideas into fully fledged nonprofits. These are just some of the perks offered by the Jewish Leadership Academy, a new Jewish day school in Miami that aims to merge traditional Jewish learning with the trappings of the nation’s most elite private schools. The new school plans to open in 2023 with middle school and high school grades of up to 45 students each, and will initially accept appli-
cations for 6th, 7th, 9th and 10th grades. Unusually for a Jewish day school, those students will be handpicked based on their standardized test scores and other measures of academic ability — part of the school’s effort to combat what its founders say is “brain drain” in local Jewish education. “Too many Jewish families in the Miami area with kids who are highly academically able, academically ambitious, were opting out of the Jewish day school world for the elite private schools,” JLA head of school Rabbi Gil Perl told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The school is the brainchild of Daniel Ades, a partner at the Kawa capital management firm, and his wife Gisela Ades, an immigration attorney. The couple, Brazilian Jews who met in college in Boston, are funding the school’s operations for now. On the new school’s website, they explain that they considered funding teacher training, perfor-
mance pay and student scholarships at existing Jewish day schools before determining that what Miami needs is a school that caters to “those few that wish [to], or can, achieve more” than the community’s Jewish schools offer. South Florida’s recent boom in young Jewish families would seem to aid the school, but Perl said the roots of the project actually began pre-pandemic. Some Jewish families already in Miami saw a choice, Perl said, between “getting the academic experience they were looking for for their kids, or having them in a pro-Jewish, pro-Zionist environment. How do we take that choice off the table?” Miami is home to multiple Jewish middle and high schools that boast college-preparatory academics, Judaic studies and travel to Israel for their students. The Posnack School in Davie enrolls students from a range of Jewish backgrounds; Scheck Hillel Community School in North Miami Beach, one
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of the largest Jewish schools in the country, is Orthodox in approach and offers merit scholarships in its high school. In Miami Beach, Hebrew Academy Miami (Rabbi Alexander S. Gross) is a Modern Orthodox school in the midst of building a new $15 million middle and high school. Requests for comment to heads of school at all three institutions were not returned. But Paul Bernstein, the CEO of Prizmah, a nonprofit that supports Jewish day schools and yeshivas in North America, said JLA’s launch should be seen not as a threat to other schools but as “adding to the strength of our community,” in part because of the rising demand for Jewish education in Miami. He said Prizmah anticipates that other area schools will expand and other new ones could be created as the Jewish population there grows.
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