Why I send my kids to Jewish day school

As this whole fuss over funding religious schools picked up heat, it got me pondering why sending my kids to Jewish day school (as opposed to afternoon school) mattered so much. There certainly is the utilitarian reason of not having to send them to afternoon school, which would complicate our lives further. The school also has small class sizes, which means shy Maya is more willing to participate and Asher is getting marvelous support for his handwriting problems and gnat-like attention span. But that has nothing to do with being in a Jewish school.

As I worked it out, I wrote a column about it, and here it is:

My kids attend T… [I edited out the name of the school for the blog]. As our third child prepares to enter kindergarten, this is starting to cost us a whole heck of a lot of money. I occasionally count up the thousands and dream of vacations and a paid-off mortgage. But despite the lure of all that freed-up money, I just can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to take my kids out of Jewish day school.

Lately, as kid number three brings our costs to an all-time high, I’ve been ruminating on why it means so much to me, to have my kids at T…. As a Jew-by-choice, it isn’t like I have any personal scars of having to stand out in the hallway at public school during the Lord’s Prayer, the way some of my friends have described.

Perhaps it is my position of always having been in the majority as a kid, going to a school where pretty much everyone was like me. It is a comfortable place to be, I must admit. I’ve been thinking back to my experiences when I first converted, and found myself in the minority for the first time.

The Christmas after I became Jewish, I arrived at work one day to discover that the ‘holiday planning committee’ had festooned the office with the traditional Christmas decorations. But whereas the year before every office door had some large decoration taped to it, this year, it was every office door but one: Santa, a Christmas tree, Frosty, nothing, a wreath, a candle. It mostly struck me as silly. It isn’t like I would have thrown a fit to find a snowman on my door and I realize it was their attempt to respect me, but it did rather single me out.

They also changed the ‘Christmas lunch’ to a ‘festive lunch.’ I wasn’t fooled.

It got stranger for me when my first child was born. I remember taking her to her daycare’s ‘winter party’ when she was three years old. Despite the caregivers’ sensitivity in giving her a dreidel cookie cutter to make decorations while the others got Santa Claus and trees, they had failed to mention that Santa himself was going to drop in. She had more than your average toddler’s reaction of shock when this huge red guy showed up, as she’d never seen him before and had no idea what he was doing there. I had not known how to explain him to her, so I’d never bothered, until we were confronted with him in person.

It felt like a relief when she started Jewish preschool the next year, and not just because I got to avoid Santa Claus. I really appreciated not explaining our every holiday and defining her vocabulary for her teachers when she talked about Shabbat or building the sukkah in the backyard with Dad. 

I have one friend who challenged my decision to send my kids to an all-Jewish school (she isn’t Jewish), saying that she loves that her kids are exposed to all different cultures at school, and that is the essence of Canada. While that may be true for her, I pointed out, her kids are still in the majority, getting a taste of this culture and that. If my kids went to her school, they’d be the ones her kids were being exposed to. I want them comfortable with their own culture and religion before it becomes their job to explain themselves to others.

As anyone who sends their children to Jewish day school knows, just because my kids go to school with other Jews doesn’t mean the live in a bubble. They still meet non-Jewish neighbours and make friends with kids through sports and other after-school activities, learning about other cultures that way. But they learn from a position, however briefly, of feeling as though they are in the majority.

The year my son went to Junior Kindergarten at T…, we took the kids to a craft program at the Art Gallery in the spring. They were helping the kids crate fancy Easter eggs and asked if my children wanted to join in. My son announced loudly, “We don’t celebrate Easter. We celebrate Passover, because we’re Jewish.” (He then consented to decorate an egg for the seder plate.)

The project leader laughed at his booming little voice and said to us, “He certainly has a strong sense of his identity, doesn’t he?”

Yes, we agreed, he certainly does.

Boo at her model seder at school. Check out the plague of frogs on the table cloth.