Moriah dedicates new building
Zahava and Moshael Straus Early Childhood Center opens in Englewood
Young children are complicated. So much about them is straightforward — if they’re unhappy, usually they’ll let you know it, and their joy radiates.
But they have a whole range of sometimes conflicting needs — for freedom and security, exploration and explanation, free-range games and focused listening, excitement and calm, structure and play. And as our understanding of early childhood, small children’s needs, and the way they learn continues to develop, so do educators’ plans and architects’ blueprints.
That means that designers of new early childhood buildings in existing schools play with space and light in ways that earlier designers did not. It means that educators have the opportunity to use those new understandings as they develop new teaching methodologies that dovetail with the old ones.
It means that if little kids and their parents are lucky, they’ll end up in a preschool that looks like the new building at the Moriah School in Englewood, which has been in use since September and was dedicated officially as the Zahava and Moshael Straus Early Childhood Center with a chanukat habayit on Sunday.
Divsha Tollinsky of Teaneck is the director of the early childhood program at Moriah; she came to the school in 2011 with a wide-ranging background that has prepared her for the excitement and challenges of the new space.
“I started out wanting to be a doctor,” she said. “I majored in biology at YU. But my mom, Passi Rosen-Bayewitz, was the head of a special ed school in north Riverdale, the Herbert G. Birch Early Childhood Center. I wanted to help people, so I subbed there, and I followed her around, and it was wonderful.
“So I went to Bank Street for a master’s in early childhood special ed” — that was the first of her two masters degrees, both from Bank Street, which specializes in education; the second was in educational change leadership — “and then I started teaching first grade at Ramaz.” That’s the Ramaz School, the modern Orthodox institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Then, because her love for science never went away, and she did have a background in biology, “I became a science teacher, and the head of the lower school’s science department, and I started running the afterschool program there.”
The great thing about teaching science in a lower school is that you’re a specialist, so instead of seeing the same children every day for a year and then seeing them only when you run into them in the hall, you get to see them once a week for years. You can follow their progress, you can take pride in them when they flourish, and if they’re not doing well, you can recognize a problem and step in to help because you’ve known them for so long. It was great, Ms. Tollinsky said. But then “I realized that I was done.”
She wanted to be closer to home. And she wanted to work with younger children.
And there was Moriah.
The school, which will turn 60 next year, has the luxury of being community based; because there are so many modern Orthodox yeshivot in Bergen County, each one can develop its own personality. Moriah’s students overwhelmingly come from Englewood, and many of them are the children of Englewood alumni; there are already three third-generation families. So when the school, as all longstanding educational institutions do, saw a dip in enrollment a decade or so ago, it was able to deploy parent ambassadors — many of them parents of children in school now, others who are alumni, and still others who are both — to spread their enthusiasm for it.
“When I first came here, we had three kindergartens and one pre-K,” Ms. Tollinsky said. “We started the first nursery group. Now we have 16 classes.” The youngest students are 2 years old, and the oldest are in kindergarten, which serves as a transition between the early childhood and the lower school. There are three teachers in every class, and at least one of the three is Israeli.
The school went through another transition when covid hit; until then, families moved from their suddenly-too-small Manhattan apartments at a fairly predictable rate, but the pandemic sent them scrambling to the suburbs earlier and in greater numbers.
The plan to construct the early childhood building began about 10 years ago; the pandemic accelerated it.
The building is full of windows; they start fairly low and go up higher to the ceiling than usual; the goal is to have as much light as possible. Ceilings are high. Most of the views are of trees; the school is on a small hill, and because it’s next to Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, in the fall nothing but brightly colored leaves on massive brown trees are visible. When the wind blows, the trees move, and if you’re inside looking out, you see it. That’s not accidental, Ms. Tollinsky said.
Inside, the colors are fairly muted. They’re mainly “hunter green, maroon, and a yellow that’s like muted sunshine,” Jessica Yunger of Englewood, the president of Moriah’s board, said. “They’re happy colors, but they’re not bright. They’re warm.”
The building is quieter than most early childhood schools; that’s because the children are inspired by the look and feel of their surroundings to be more calm and less shrieky than they might be in other places.
The building is full of things — built-in objects, toys, stuff — that children want to touch — for that matter, so do adults — and they’re there to be touched. There’s a big common room with a huge stylized wooden tree in the middle of a green grassy-style rug; the room’s walls are lined with interactive devices that draw kids in. There are fewer opaque walls than you’d expect, and more walls made of glass. The clear point is transparency.
The surroundings matter immensely, and so does the way children are placed in the classes that meet in that building. Ms. Tollinsky and her staff spend all summer working on it, she said. “We have a tremendous number of people on staff, and each one has her own teaching style,” she said. “We value that. We meet once a week, and no classroom is its own island — the doors are always open — but each teacher uses her own individual style.
“We match teachers in teams and students with the teachers to be sure they’re in the right classroom.
“There are parameters, but some classrooms are a little more structured, and some a little more artsy. A lot of it is intuitive. You walk into a class, and you know.
“You have to have the children fit in with the other children, with the teachers, and the parents have to fit with the teachers too,” she added. “Parents also sometimes make their requests.
“And then there are friends. We want to make sure that they play nicely together. We also want to put kids together who live close enough to each other that they can be with their friends on Shabbat.”
That’s easier to do with children who’ve already been in the school for at least a year, but how do you place new students? “I go to the programs that they’re coming from,” Ms. Tollinsky said. “I see them in their environment.”
A benefit of working so hard over such a long time to put together classes is that parents are involved with the process. “I talk with them all summer,” Ms. Tollinsky said. “I always feel that talking to people removes anxiety. We communicate a lot with parents and with teachers. We want parents to feel the warmth that we feel.”
There are about 300 children in the early childhood program, and about 55 staff members, Ms. Tollinsky said. “And the new space is so calm. It feels like everything can go on at once, in its own space.”
She described a recent day. “We had the kindergarteners practicing a song for the grandparents’ Thanksgiving program. They sing five songs to grandparents and special guests; they’re all related to Thanksgiving or Israel, or about thankfulness. We do a special program; we create a booklet for the children and their grandparents.
“They were in the big new space, singing with the music teacher. And one of the nursery classes was watching the kindergarteners. At the same time, I was in my office, with a child who needed a little break. She was helping me sort Legos, and she was watching the show. And I had my weekly meeting with the teachers.
“So it was all going on at the same time, and nothing felt overwhelming.
“We try very hard to build the kids up from year to year, to give them a feeling of community. As a school, we’re very focused on family. We have a kindergarten-fifth grade buddy program, and those kids feel connected to each other forever.”
Moriah also is a school; it’s also about education, even though education is informal in the early years. “When kids learn, they feel invigorated,” Ms. Tollinsky said. “If you create an environment where kids are learning and growing, they want to come back for more. Because remember, kids are sponges.
“They take it all in. When they look at trees and changing colors and acorns, or the parsha, or science experiments, or math — everything is about learning and growing. When they make connections, it’s exciting. And the new building gives them the opportunity to explore more, to have a safe space to grow and learn.”
The Jewish community in Englewood historically has included many Holocaust survivors and their descendants; Moriah is vigilant about teaching about the Shoah, but not in the early school.
So when October 7 happened, Ms. Tollinsky and her staff had to decide what to do. They couldn’t ignore the massacre if they’d wanted to — the Israelis on staff had personal connections to it. “We had to quickly create a feeling where we understood that people were suffering and scared, and we shared that feeling, but because we work with little kids, we also had to be uplifting.
“So we decided that it would be about loving Israel. It would be Yom Ha’Atzmaut” — Israel Independence Day — “every day.
“We made pictures for families in Israel. We ordered stuffed animal pieces and we stuffed them and sent them to an organization that sent them on to displaced families. It was beautiful and it was meaningful.”
When do you start talking about October 7? “There’s a little bit of talk about it in kindergarten, and first grade is probably the first real exposure.”
There is a family of schlichim — emissaries, representatives of Israel — at Moriah, so the lower and upper schools were closely attuned to the situation. “It’s a couple, Yonit and Adiel Mhazri and their six children, and he was called back to Israel on October 7,” Ms. Tollinsky said. “He went, and it made it real. He was sending videos. You could see that we all were family, and we were connecting to it. It was scary, but in a weird way it was beautiful.”
Meanwhile, while her husband was off at war, Ms. Mhazri stayed in Englewood. “She was always very positive, very uplifting,” Ms. Tollinsky said. “I’d ask, ‘Are you stressed?’ and she’d say, ‘No, I’m Israeli. I’m fine!’
“It was incredible to see how the community came together, and they became the heroes of the community.”
Mr. Mhazri was called back to the IDF twice, but he’s back in Englewood now. The family was supposed to return to Israel after three years of shlichut, but they’re staying for an extra year.
Ms. Tollinsky told the story of how Mr. Mhazri came back for an unexpected visit while he was still on active duty. He walked through the school, collecting each one of his children, one at a time, and then all seven of them went to surprise their mother, his wife. “The whole school was crying,” Ms. Tollinsky said.
Rabbi Daniel Alter of Englewood, Moriah’s head of school, explained its early childhood philosophy. “We are play-based,” he said. “We are proud of our academic program; we also are proud of the social-emotional piece.
“The world that we live in today is changing, and who knows what will happen with the development of AI. I really believe that emotional intelligence is going to be the differentiator, and it’s even more important now than before for children at age 2 or 3 to develop it. That will really set them up for life.
“Social-emotional development has always been Divsha’s focus; the emotional intelligence part is newer.”
Rabbi Alter did not go to Moriah — he’s from Toronto — but his wife, Rivka Carmel, did, “and our kids are second generation here,” he said.
“We have four children who all were at Moriah, but now we have only one left,” he said. “Elisha now is in Gaza with the IDF, Ezra is studying in a yeshiva in Israel, Avigail is in 10th grade in Ma’ayanot, where my wife teaches, and Shayna is in sixth grade here.
“A tradition that started just before we came here was that any parent who went to Moriah hands the diploma to the graduate. It’s often about 20 to 25 percent of the graduating class who are handed a diploma by their parents.”
Families are drawn to Moriah, or back to it, for its warmth and its combination of tradition and innovation, Rabbi Alter said. “Some things at Moriah never change. Not long ago, a parent who had gone to Moriah came to school when his son was putting on tefillin for the first time. It was rosh chodesh, so they said Hallel, and the father said that they used the same tunes for Hallel that they did when he was a student there. It’s the Moriah tune.
“The fact that some things are constant, that we have that rootedness, but we’re at the forefront in education — it’s an interesting balance.
Rabbi Alter moved to Manhattan from Toronto to go to Yeshiva University; after that, he and his family lived in Denver for 15 years. He was a congregational rabbi at the only modern Orthodox shul in the city when the only day school there started going through heads of school at an unsustainable rate. Rabbi Alter felt strongly that the community could not survive without a day school, so he undertook to run it while keeping his pulpit as well. That’s how he became an educator; that’s also how he came to understand, on a visceral level, the connection between school and community.
Moriah now draws most of its students from three shuls; now a fourth is opening, near Englewood Cliffs, and there is some talk of another one on its way in Leonia. Still, it’s a tight, close community. “That’s exciting,” he said. “I recognize that school is only one partner in raising children, and it is the junior partner, so the ability to work with the community is very powerful.”
Ms. Yunger, the board chair, graduated from Moriah, and she’s deeply committed to the school.
She talked about its long-term goals, and how it has been affected by October 7.
“Our goal always has been to marry Torah and Jewish education with secular education, and to nurture and educate Jewish children in Jewish tradition, Jewish wisdom, and Zionism. That hasn’t changed, but since October 7 the responsibility feels a little more heavy.
“I am just a lay leader. I have no expertise or training in education. I just love Moriah, and this is what I am called upon to do, but I think that now we feel even more emotion when we think about how important it is to give these Jewish children a safe, nurturing environment, and to teach them where we come from, where they belong, why we fight for it, and why we defend it. We have to teach them why we send 20-year-old boys to stand on the border of Gaza, and why we send other 20-year-olds to Columbia, even if it is uncomfortable.
“I think that everything we do now is just a little more emotional, and it feels a little more different.”
The chanukat habayit was a great success, Ms. Yunger said. “The joy was amplified, because of our sense of achdut, togetherness. The motivation to overcome whatever evil exists is so strong that it translates for our kids to more joy. More happiness. I don’t say let’s dance and celebrate because there are people who are trying to kill us, but let’s dance and celebrate because that is what we do as a people. We are grateful for our togetherness.”
Ms. Yunger is a prime example of Moriah as a family tradition. She is one of four siblings; all of them went there. She has four children. They’re all in Moriah. The oldest, Murray, will graduate from eighth grade this spring; the twins, Phoebe and George, are in sixth grade, and the youngest, Juliette, is a fourth grader.
And it doesn’t end there.
Her two brothers don’t live locally, but her sister, Bianca Pineles, does. Three of Bianca’s four children — Serena, a first grader, Jack, in pre-K, and Nicole, in nursery — are in Moriah now. The fourth, baby Dylan, will start there as soon as he’s old enough.
That’s family. That’s connection. That’s community.
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