Rabbis, cantors confront preschool controversy
Maybe the problem was built in.
A decade ago, the South Orange-Maplewood school district had more toddlers ready for public preschool than space to provide them with that crucial early education. So it rented space from local institutions. Now seven public preschools meet in buildings that the town does not own; those universal pre-K programs are administered by those outside institutions, but adhere strictly and completely to the curriculum and guidelines that the school board gives them.
Each institution was thoroughly vetted before it was allowed to provide space for a preschool program. Each universal pre-K is walled off not only physically but also administratively and ideologically from the larger institution in which it is housed.
Three of those institutions are the three big synagogues in the district — Congregation Beth El, Oheb Shalom Congregation, and Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel. They’re all in South Orange.
Parents fill out an application, and children are assigned to a school by lottery.
There is nothing Jewish about any of the three preschools in those three shuls. It is an entirely secular school district, guided by the separation between church and state. That has never been a problem.
Until now.
Now, though, “parents are asking for ranked choice,” Rabbi Daniel Cohen of Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel said.
The issue became visible to members of the Jewish community who do not have preschoolers when he and six other rabbis and cantors — Rabbi Alexandra Klein and Cantor Rebecca Moses, both also of Sharey Tefilo-Israel; Cantor Eliana Kissner and Rabbi Abigail Treu of Oheb Shalom; and Rabbi Rachel Marder and Rabbi Jesse Olitzsky of Beth El — signed a statement that they posted on Facebook.
“There were a couple of Facebooks groups where people started asking if anyone knew if any of the preschool programs had security guards,” Rabbi Cohen said.
Those preschool programs would be the ones in the synagogues. Attacks on Jewish groups have become more common — although still thankfully rare — as antisemitism has ramped up, and as the murders of Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, the young Israeli embassy staffers gunned down outside the Jewish Museum in Washington, and the attempted murder by Molotov cocktail of Run For Their Lives participants in Boulder, Colorado, have made nightmarishly clear. (Run For Their Lives is a worldwide effort to remind people of the hostages Hamas still holds in Gaza by meeting, usually weekly, to run or walk holding signs and keeping awareness alive.) So synagogues now have guards. And according to the parents who raised the questions, having security means that the place being guarded is inherently unsafe.
In fact, “we’re very careful,” Rabbi Cohen said. “We reached out to the schools and we had a conversation with them; we went to the police department, to be sure that we were doing everything right.”
In those Facebook groups, Rabbi Cohen continued, posters “named all three synagogues, and they talked about the letter to Senator Kim” — that was the letter that 169 of the state’s rabbis, across all streams, sent to Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, in response to his April 3 vote to deny funding to Israel. “And someone took a line from one of my sermons that made it look like I was amazed that anyone could feel empathy.
“I was talking about how extraordinary it was that Rachel Goldberg-Polin could be so compassionate.” Ms. Goldberg-Polin is the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was held hostage and then murdered by Hamas; Rabbi Cohen was moved by her compassion in the face of such grief, produced by such evil. He did not know if he could be so empathetic in that situation, he said.
The initial discussion went nowhere particularly public, he added. Parents who complained were able to have their children moved, and the talk quieted.
But it came up again.
Next, “someone in the open comment section of the school board meeting said that she was not comfortable with her child being in a synagogue that had an Israeli flag and hosted someone she called a ‘genocidal soldier,’” Rabbi Cohen said. “She said she wanted to change schools.”
The “genocidal soldier” was an IDF member who had spoken at one of the shuls.
“We couldn’t not respond,” Rabbi Cohen said. “So we” — that’s the seven rabbis and cantors — “said that’s enough. If they are calling us hateful, they are being hateful. When they called us divisive, they said that we are isolating them. We are not. And we decided it was time to put out our own statement.
“We are living in a town that purports to be diverse and inclusive,” Rabbi Cohen said. Diversity and inclusion means that you’re going to have different perspectives. People will have different opinions.”
But only some opinions are acceptable.
So the clergy decided to make their position clear.
“It was important for us to make this statement for its own sake, and also because we have seen that when something is repeated often enough on social media, whether or not people believe it, it still will seep into their subconscious. We want to make clear, so that people understand what’s really going on, because the majority of people aren’t going to stand for it if they understand what’s going on.”
What’s going on is antisemitism, Rabbi Cohen said.
“I would be equally outraged if there were a universal pre-K program in a mosque, and people were making the same kind of claims, because it would be bias and hatred. This is antisemitism, clumsily hidden behind the veneer of discomfort with Israel’s actions.
“We are not the Israeli government. We are synagogues in South Orange, New Jersey.
“Everyone who lives here chooses to live here. We want the fabric of our society to be what we choose it to be. We are not disrupting it. We have to stand up to clarify that.”
As the statement the clergy posted said, “The call for residents to petition the district for this shift came along with vitriolic rhetoric about our synagogue communities. This approach contradicts the significant integration efforts made by the SOMA District and seeks to alter the social fabric of the towns we have chosen to call home. In a district that is working to overcome all that divides us, how can it be that ranking school choice be granted for only one purpose — to enable families to opt out of schools housed in Jewish spaces? How is this not a segregationist idea, designed to isolate neighbors based on religious, ethnic or even political differences?”
And it ends this way:
“As the violent conflict between Israel and Hamas continues, we are witness from afar to suffering that is hard to comprehend. Many in the SOMA community have personal connections to family and friends directly experiencing the effects of war and violence. Our hearts are broken for the ongoing suffering of so many.
“Let us not turn our pain into hateful rhetoric that incites us against each other. It is a mistake for us to incorporate this dehumanizing manner of speech and writing into our social media posts, daily interactions, and local politics. As SOMA synagogue leaders, we continually work to make our houses of worship home-bases for Jews and people who love them. We may differ widely across religious and political spectrums, but we remain committed to looking each other in the face and treating one another with respect. We ask the same from our neighbors.
“We must not accept hateful rhetoric aimed at our local Jewish institutions as the new ‘normal.’ We urge our neighbors to engage in respectful conversations, and refrain from inciting violence, whether directly or indirectly, against their Jewish neighbors. We also encourage the entire SOMA community to stay focused on and committed to the values of diversity, equity and inclusion so core to the values of our towns, starting with our youngest students who need every seat in every classroom available to them.
“It will always be easier to tear down and divide, than to build up and unite. We are committed, as we always have been, to working diligently with our local partners to build a safe, open, and inclusive community which celebrates and embraces its diversity.
“We implore all of our neighbors to join us in this sacred endeavor.”
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