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IN-DEPTH
FEATURES by M. Samsonowitz Part II Reform and Conservative Jewish Education While I wasn't able to obtain statistics of temple attendance for Reform, we can get a glimpse at the situation concerning their continuity by studying available figures of Jewish education. The crux of Jewish identity is of course Jewish knowledge and participation in Jewish organizations and synagogues. While there are 120,000 students throughout the U.S. in the various Reform Jewish schools, the vast majority of them are in Sunday or supplemental schools. ("Toward a Coherent Curriculum for Our Reform Schools," Reform Judaism, 1998, pg.36) Compare this to 160,000 children in Torah Umesorah affiliated day schools and another 25,000 in Chassidic schools, and remember that the Reform claim a membership of more than three times the size of the Orthodox movements. Jewish Education per se does not guarantee Jewish continuity. As researcher Sylvia Barack Fishman writes in her highly-regarded work, "Negotiating Both Sides of the Hyphen: Coalescence, Compartmentalization, and American- Jewish Values": "Only extensive formal Jewish education has a positive link with the propensity to marry a Jewish mate, to establish a Jewish household, and to raise Jewish children." What is considered sufficiently "extensive"? Say Mordechai Rimor and Elihu Katz from the Louis Guttman Israel Institute of Applied Social Research: "Nine years of Jewish education (by implication, into high school) appears to be the turning point in connecting Jewish education with Jewish involvement." We can get a sense of what percentage of Reform and Conservative youth receive Jewish education from draft statistics sent to me by the New York Board of Jewish Education (BJE) for 1997-1998. Whereas only 14% of all New York Jews are said to be Orthodox, the elementary school enrollment for Jewish day schools in the metropolitan New York area is as follows: Orthodox: 57,502 (and another 15,000 in the Chassidic sectors), Conservative: 2438, and Reform: 264. As for the crucial high school Jewish day school enrollment, Orthodox: 17,722, Conservative: 38, and Reform: 0. Concerning the afternoon and Sunday supplemental schools -- nearly all of whom are Conservative or Reform, or geared to non-religious Jews -- in New York, the enrollment for such schools was 81,889 in 1970, 52,796 in 1980, and 47,693 in 1990 -- significantly less than the enrollment in Orthodox day schools. The Orthodox enrollment was more than the combined enrollment of Reform and Conservative. As we see from the first set of statistics, only a very small percentage of the Conservative and Reform youth attend day schools, so the falling numbers of Reform and Conservative receiving even cursory Jewish education reveal (at least in the New York area) that despite constant calls by Reform and Conservative leaders about the importance of Jewish education for Jewish continuity, fewer of their youths are receiving any Jewish education. Relatively speaking, Jewish awareness in the New York area is high, and the figures for other areas are not likely to be better. It is self-delusion to imagine that the situation will seriously improve. Reform parents would almost never prefer a private Reform high school with a small student body of several hundred at most -- at a steep cost of $8,000 per child or more -- over the social and scholastic advantages of a first-rate public school high school with numerous electives, clubs and sports facilities -- all at zero cost. Moreover, studies have found that many Reform Jews object to any Jewish education. A survey of a Reform temple in Louisville, Kentucky found that 21% of the members oppose their children learning any Hebrew at all. As Mr. Wertheimer astutely notes about non-Orthodox Jews in a recent article in Commentary, for them "not Judaism, but the values of the larger culture [are] sacrosanct." ("The Orthodox Moment", Commentary, February 1999.) Katz and Rimor's estimate that nine years of Jewish education is a dividing line in future Jewish involvement is not accurate either. Yosef Abramowitz, ("In Search of the Magic Jewish Teen Bullet," in Jewish Spectator, Fall, 1998, p. 19) writes: "The dirty little secret of Jewish education is that twenty-eight percent of the [Jewish] Baby Boomer graduates of nine years of Jewish education have married out." Even worse, those with two or three days a week of Jewish schooling and no informal Jewish experiences intermarried at rates well above the NJPS's average (which was over 52%). Dr. Steven Cohen of the Melton Center in Jerusalem contends that Jewish kids who didn't have Jewish schooling were more likely to marry someone Jewish than those who attended Sunday school. So much for Reform and Conservative Sunday and supplemental Jewish education. One reason for this may be the insipid Reform and Conservative curriculum, which generally emphasizes universal values with a bit of Hebrew and lately some Zionism, none of which has much interest to the non-Orthodox Jew today. Samuel K. Joseph, a senior educator in the Reform Day School system laments, "It is no accident that the students and most likely the teachers also, have no idea as to what their schooling means. The students are like the simple son at the seder, but with no Haggadah and no knowledgeable parent to instruct them. I suggest that our students have no idea about the purpose of what they are studying . . . How would we answer the students' question, "Why are we doing this?" ("Toward a Coherent Curriculum for Our Reform Schools", Reform Journal of Education. p.36) He fails to appreciate the inherent difficulty in establishing a convincing educational curriculum when one's spiritual weathervane spins every which way without fixed, immutable values. The fact is that there are Reform schools that are headed by non-Jews and where even most of the teaching staff is not Jewish. What sort of values can they be expected to transmit? Projected Growth of the Orthodox Community Here too the savants have erred concerning predictions of our present numbers. A leading demographer recently wrote in Jewish Action (Fall 1998, p.33), "Overall, the size of Orthodoxy does not seem to be bound to dramatic growth . . . while on the one hand Orthodox Jewry offers crucial services to all of Jewry, on the other hand it is dependent on a wider constituency to insure its viability." He suggests that even in the most optimal hypothesis of Orthodox Jewry having 100% retention, the community will only total 550,000 in 2020, and over 900,000 in 2050. The fact is that the Orthodox population is spiraling at a dizzying pace. The projections made by Gordon and Horowitz in 1993 which we commented on several years ago (Yated Ne'eman, "American Jewish Demographics -- Is There a Future for the Non- Orthodox?" August 1, 1997) are the closest to describing the actual situation although it may be an underestimation. The study showed that for every hundred modern Orthodox Jews, the second generation will have 151 Orthodox Jews, the third generation 228, and the fourth generation 346. For Chassidic/yeshiva Jews, the growth statistics cited are even greater. Assuming a 4.6 fertility rate, the study projects the second generation at 295, the third generation at 874, and the fourth generation with 2500. In fact, even these impressive numbers may be an understatement. Although Gordon and Horowitz's private studies in 30 Jewish day schools across the country led them to conclude that the Orthodox have an overall 4.6 fertility rate, there are large segments of Orthodox Jewry in America, particularly in metropolitan New York, which have a far higher fertility rate. Yeshiva families and Chassidic families typically have seven children or more. They are similar to yeshiva and chassidic families who live in Jerusalem, on whom a study was done by the Jerusalem municipality in February 1993 by Dr. Sara Hershkowitz of the Strategic Planning Department of the Jerusalem Municipality. From a survey she conducted of 750 families who live in the Orthodox neighborhoods of Har Nof, Ezras Torah, Kiryat Sanz, Kiryat Belz and Shikun Chabad (neighborhoods, by the way, with a high percentage of American and European Orthodox Jews), she found the following (p.23): 24% of all families had four children or less 26.5% had 5-6 children. 24.9% had 7-8 children 24.5% had 9 children or more. In other words, nearly 50% of the Chassidic/yeshiva community in Jerusalem had seven children or more. Menachem Friedman, a sociologist in Bar Ilan who has written extensively about the chassidic/Yeshiva community, told me that the fertility rate of the strictly Orthodox population in Israel is 7.5 births per family -- almost three times that of the secularists in Israel, whose fertility rate stands at around 2.7 births. (The secularists in Israel, by the way, are doing much better than American Jews, with approximately 1.6 births per woman.) Mr. Friedman mentions that demographers in Israel have projected that the Orthodox (chareidi) community in Israel will triple within 25 years, reaching close to a million by 2025. Other Orthodox groups in Israel also have a higher than usual fertility rate: the Modern Orthodox/Mizrachi - 3.5 children per family; "Chardal" (Strictly religious National Religious) - 6-7 children. Mr. Friedman says that a birth rate of 4.7 is required for a community to double itself every generation. If so, it is clear that the strictly Orthodox are more than doubling themselves with each passing generation. The fact is that they have among the highest birth rates in the world. Some Statistics Since to my knowledge, no such authoritative study was done on the Orthodox community in the U.S., we must rely on the statistics that we can glean about the schools. We decided to study the statistics of New York Orthodox schools rather than Orthodox schools throughout the U.S., since the latter tend to have a large number of students from non-Orthodox homes, many of whom do not continue in Orthodox high schools and do not become Orthodox, and would give us a less accurate projection of the natural increase of Orthodox Jewry. Also the statistics of New York City represent the largest Jewish community in America, and they are extensively gathered. Torah Umesorah sent me statistics of new Orthodox schools that opened in New York in the past eleven years:
Thirty-nine new elementary schools and thirty-one new high schools over eleven years in one geographical location is a remarkable statistic no matter how one views it. Even if we were to assume that not every one of these schools remained open, and taking into account that most schools begin with just a grade or two and add a grade each year, these numbers are still impressive and they signal rapid growth. Even more telling are the figures supplied by the New York Board of Jewish Education (BJE). According to their figures, day school enrollment has grown as follows (includes pre- elementary through high school level): We note that within a 27-year period, the number of New York Orthodox students has approximately doubled. Actually, Torah Umesorah gives even higher estimates of between 110-120,000, probably because they include Orthodox schools in neighboring New Jersey, many of whose student body comes from families that originated in New York, whereas the BJE estimate concerns only current residents of metropolitan New York whose children attend New York schools (including the Chassidic sector). Assuming the estimate of the Orthodox community by the NJPS in 1990 as a total of 450,000 (all over America) is correct (we explained above that it probably is an underestimation), we may expect the Orthodox community to double within the next 16 years and reach close to one million, based on the statistics provided by Torah Umesorah and BJE. In fact, the numbers above suggest that the New York City community alone is around that figure, since school children generally comprise no more than 25% of the community. This will, of course, completely change the Jewish world as we know it today. Conservative and Reform will quickly lose their influence and power because of their muted numbers. Orthodoxy will be the powerful (and only) element left in Jewish life. That will take place not a century from now, but in a mere 16-20 years. The age distribution of the various populations makes this clear. Professor Charles Leibman of Bar Ilan University told Yated that his studies in the 60's showed that Orthodoxy was in for a decline since much of the Orthodox population was old. The Reform and Conservative groups were relatively younger. Today the situation is drastically reversed, as the Orthodox population is very young and the other denominations are aging fast. An example of where this is already happening is Jerusalem. The religious education network formed only 17.5% of the total Jewish student population in Jerusalem as recently as 1987. Look at what happened in the eleven years since (includes nursery until high school, besides 1987):
^ nursery until eighth grades only * Statistics provided by Jerusalem Municipality Educational Administration Yearbook 1998-1999, pg.5 ** Statistics provided by Jerusalem Municipality Chinuch Chareidi Yearbook 1998-1999, pg.5 ^ Statistics provided by Jerusalem Statistical Yearbook of 1987, pp. 233-235 In 1998 the chareidi sector was more than half of the Jewish education system in Jerusalem! The astonishing growth of the religious community in Jerusalem may be accounted for by reasons other than natural demographic growth: the thousands of religious families who moved to Jerusalem from abroad, thousands of chozrim biteshuva who switched their children out of secular schools and placed them in religious schools, and most recently, the impressive growth of Shas religious schools that joined the religious education division and offer a religious school environment with some features of secular schools, thereby attracting large numbers of traditional Jewish students. However, Shas is a larger factor outside of Jerusalem than in the Jerusalem area. Today, the strictly religious (chareidi) educational network (which does not include the government religious (mamlachti dati) and the private national religious school (Noam) networks) comprises over 50% of all Jerusalem's students. Neither does it include the educational religious schools affiliated with the independent Eida HaChareidis, which is another 12-14,000 students. Together, they include 62-65% of all Jerusalem's Jewish students. Although the number of students in the religious network grew continuously over the past 30 years, Mr. Fishman, head of the Chinuch Chareidi Division in the Jerusalem Municipality, says that this year the number finally stabilized because many young religious couples who have married in the past few years cannot afford housing in Jerusalem and the majority are moving to the periphery (Beitar) or to new communities (Kiryat Sefer, Elad, Beit Shemesh). Growth in One Chassidic Community Coming back to New York, it is difficult to catalogue the exact growth of the Orthodox community in New York over the past 50 years. However, we were able to get statistics on one insular, homogeneous community -- the Satmar chassidim -- which can give us some idea of the overall growth of the religious community in the U.S. According to the principal of (Satmar) United Talmudical Academy (Torah Veyirah) and Beth Rochel Schools for 40 years, the Satmar Rov founded his day school in 1947 with seven boys and the girls' day school in 1949 with a dozen girls. Bolstered by the children of Holocaust survivors who settled in New York over the next decade, the Satmar Williamsburg school had 700 girls and 700 boys in their schools twelve years later in 1959. The school is composed almost exclusively of Satmar chassidim, with other chassidic groups in Williamsburg forming their own school networks. In the 1960's, the Satmar community was centered exclusively in Williamsburg. By the 1970's, satellite communities were founded in Monroe, Monsey, and Boro Park. In 1974, there were 3,500 students (until age 18) in all the New York Satmar institutions. This is an increase of two and a half times in fifteen years. In 1998, 18,000 students (until age 18) are spread throughout various Satmar schools in the greater New York area. In these 24 years they multiplied five times. The Williamsburg Satmar school for girls has 4,500 students and is the largest religious girls' school in all of New York. In addition, there are another 3,000 Satmar youths who study in other schools such as Spinka, Erlau, Krasnoff, Shaarei Yosher, London Mesivta, Lucerne yeshiva and Rabbi Atik's in Jerusalem. The number of Satmar students in the New York region alone exceeds the total number of all Reform day school students in the entire U.S. The principal divides up the New York Satmar community as 30,000 living in Williamsburg, 17,000 in Monroe, 15,000 in Boro Park, and 5,000 in Monsey. The problem of obtaining living space for its young couples has become one of the community's major problems, and it was recently announced that a new Satmar satellite community is planned for Far Rockaway. In the meantime, the community is building apartments on the fringe of Williamsburg, and has reclaimed housing that was once considered blighted real estate. The community's political clout in New York is considerable. The principal says that every Friday night in Williamsburg, the community celebrates between 8-10 sholom zochors, and the same number of girls are born. Every year the community celebrates between 300 and 400 weddings. Taking in all their communities in New York, the community gives birth to two new classes (one boys and one girls) each week. The community's retention rate is also high -- approximately 98%. Rabbi Frankel estimates that in the forty years he is running the educational system, perhaps 20 of the girl graduates became nonobservant. There is a small group of 15- 20 Satmar youth who in the past decade broke off and settled in Greenwich Village. The majority of Satmar families have 7-9 children (similar to the findings on the religious community in Jerusalem), although families with over ten children are not uncommon. A teacher was taking information from each child about his family, and one child refused to answer. When the teacher called him over privately during the morning recess, the child confessed, "We have only four children in my family. I was embarrassed to say it in front of the class." Families like Mrs. Brauner's are not unusual. Mrs. Brauner was a Holocaust survivor who passed away a few years ago when she was 77 years old. At her death, she had twelve children, 98 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren -- all of them staying within the fold. Another such case is an elderly Satmar chossid living in Williamsburg today who has 140 descendants, most of whom live nearby. Since it would have been too hectic for his 70 sons, grandsons and great-grandsons to visit him in his small home, the family developed a custom that all the male descendants line up after prayers on Friday night and wish the grandfather/great-grandfather a "Gut Shabbos." One of the teachers in the school brings almost weekly a plate of pastries to share with the other teachers in the office. These are the leftovers from a sholom zochor, pidyon haben, upsharin, bar mitzva, or sheva brochos of one or another of her descendants. Satmar is admittedly an extreme example of the growth of the Orthodox community; however, the yeshiva community reproduces at a similar rate. Moreover, since together they comprise at least a half of all New York Orthodox students, their growth rate will substantially affect the general growth rate of all the Orthodox. While the New York Orthodox community may not grow as fast overall, it definitely more than doubles in 25 years. We can safely predict, given our estimate of the current community at about half a million, that the New York Orthodox community will reach one million within 25 years. New Jersey and Beyond These statistics are likely to hold true for Orthodox communities outside of New York. Mr. Anthony Gordon mentions that the student body in Los Angeles religious schools numbered 1,862 students in 9 Orthodox day schools in 1978-79, and in 1997-1998, the number was 4,911 in 20 Orthodox schools. We must emphasize that outside of New York, a substantial part of the increase can be attributable to reasons other than natural increase (ba'alei teshuvah, migration, certain number of non-Orthodox students whose parents don't want them to attend public schools) but here again the pattern of the Orthodox community approximately doubling itself in 20-25 years still appears to be the case. Dr. David Kranzler, a sociologist, reported in the Spring 1999 Jewish Action that, "Torah Umesorah alone has now about 600 institutions and almost 160,000 students ranging from nurseries to kollelim. And this does not include the many hundreds [and thousands] of students in the large and constantly expanding schools of the old and new Chassidic and non-Chassidic." What Will the Future Look Like? What will the Jewish world look like 25 years hence? There will probably be 1,250,000-1,500,000 Orthodox Jews in the U.S. and Canada, another 2 million Orthodox in Israel (the spectrum of the Orthodox from the most modern to chareidi), perhaps up to another half million from all other locations in the world (France, England, Belgium, Switzerland, C.I.S., South Africa, Mexico and Argentina). Today, Reform and Conservative are significant only in North America, and Britain to a lesser extent. Elsewhere, Jews are either Orthodox or assimilated. As for Reform and Conservative Jews, they will comprise together perhaps half a million barely affiliated Jews in the U.S., and perhaps another one hundred thousand elsewhere in the world. All others of Jewish ancestry will have vanished in the suffocating embrace of their native surroundings. These are projections and they are becoming increasingly evident to everyone. Some explain the Reform leaderships recent attempts to establish a foothold in Israel by the realization of those leaders that they have no future anywhere else. They think that their best prospects for growth are in the secular Israeli community. By the year 2050, the Orthodox community may number between 6 and 8 million worldwide -- barring nuclear war, worldwide epidemic, massive migrations or a comet hitting the earth. If Moshiach comes it will probably be bigger. Outside of Israel, all other Jews will have vanished. There will be tens of millions of non-Jews in the world with Jewish ancestry. It will be interesting to see what will happen to Israel's secular Jews. We would venture that polarization will take place -- a large segment of the present-day traditionalists will return to Orthodoxy. The hard-core secular will probably leave Israel or intermarry with the Arab and Christian population. Thinking About This This picture of the Jewish world twenty-five years hence obligates our community to think over our strategies even now. To what degree should we confer legitimization and strategic joint cooperation with these movements that will soon fade from the scene -- and who are responsible for the self- destruction of such a large portion of Jewry? With these projections, why should the weaker members of Orthodoxy feel that they must cooperate with the Reform and Conservative? Has the time come to say that the emperor has no clothes? Should we openly eschew and delegitimize the Reform and Conservative movements as non-Jewish at least in ideology, to clarify to the world what is genuine Jewish identity and to eliminate the confusion created by their "everything goes" redefinitions? Are contemporary secular Jewish organizations and leaders usurping political authority and influence without justification? With our tacit approval? |
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