Missed opportunities that Klal Yisrael cannot afford

Achassidic friend of mine, who held important positions in a government ministry for a number of years, recently received a phone call from someone with whom he had become friendly in the course of his public service. His friend primarily worked in the security services. And each of his three daughters works in the high-tech sector. In short, a stereotypical secular north Tel Avivian.

Thus, my friend was surprised when his longtime acquaintance began the conversation by asking, “Moshe, does the six-hour waiting period between meat and milk also apply to chicken?”

In the course of their conversation, the fellow with the three daughters admitted with some chagrin that his two unmarried daughters have both begun to keep kosher. So, he had to know some of the basic rules.

But that wasn’t the worst of it, he told my friend: “My married daughter has become shomer Shabbat.”

Another story. As I mentioned last week, my rav recently lost a son, who passed away suddenly at home at night. My rav very much wanted to make the levayah immediately. But in Israel, one must first receive a certificate from the police before the chevra kaddisha will even discuss arrangements.

My rav feared that because his son was not in a medical facility or receiving medical treatment at the time of his petirah, the police report might be delayed for several days, and that the police might even seek to send the body for an autopsy. His fears were scarcely allayed when a young policeman arrived wearing a number of ear piercings and with his head uncovered.

But the rav need not have worried. When he asked the policeman where his partner was, he replied that his partner was a Kohein and could not enter the home. The policeman filled out the requisite forms quickly, and as he was about to leave, he told the rav that he needed to wash his hands after being in proximity to the niftar. He then asked whether he needed to do so outside or whether he could do so in the house. The sh’eilos multiplied until the rav told him that he could not discuss Torah with him, as he was then an onein.

I’m telling these stories not to prove that Jews in Eretz Yisrael are being drawn to mitzvah observance in large numbers. That has already been established in numerous public opinion polls. Rather my purpose is to give some examples of what the trend represents in concrete terms.

THAT TREND imposes responsibility on the Torah-observant community. Our achrayus is to do everything possible to further the current trends and to do nothing to set them back. Above all, that means keeping in mind a mandate about which the late Rav Yosef Shalom Elyashiv spoke frequently: Torah-observant Jews have no higher educational imperative than to make the Name of Heaven beloved through our actions.

Unfortunately, we have, as a community, only imperfectly succeeded in instilling that imperative. In part, that is a function of a communal attitude of extreme isolationism that took hold in the early days of the state, when the Torah community was a small and beleaguered minority. That attitude continues to characterize some segments of the Torah community today, though the community is no longer small nor in danger of disappearing.

My own guess is that none of the young participants in the demonstrations that have repeatedly tied up traffic in Jerusalem and Bnei Brak in recent weeks have given a moment’s thought to what impact those demonstrations have on the larger community of Jews in Israel and their feelings about Torah. Even Torah-observant Jews, whose sons will almost certainly spend years learning in advanced yeshivos, express fury at the demonstrations when they are prevented from reaching their destinations or are caught in traffic for hours at a time. How much more so those who have no sympathy for the cause of the demonstrations.

Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the great Mirrer mashgiach, described refinement as the distinctive mark of a yeshivah bochur. There is nothing refined about physically blocking traffic, fighting with the police, or shouting vicious insults — “Nazi,” chief among them — at all and sundry. That falsification of Torah is something that should concern us all.

If the sponsors of the demonstrations are not worried about the impact of the demonstrations on nonobservant Jews, they should still worry about their impact on the young participants themselves. They are at risk of becoming another sect defined solely by their opposition to anything connected to the IDF. And as Rav Shach used to say, the elevation of any single mitzvah, such as yishuv Eretz Yisrael, above all others is a distortion of the Torah. And so too does a single-minded focus on opposition to Zionism or the state lead to a distortion of the Torah.

When my wife and I first came to Israel in 1979, every Shabbos afternoon, a group of youngsters from Meah Shearim would pelt cars on the Ramot Road with stones from the hills above. At least two of my earliest rabbanim tried to convince them to stop: Rav Nachman Bulman and ybdlch”t the Ner Yisroel Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Aharon Feldman. The youngsters ignored them entirely. Somehow, I doubt that the early derision shown to great Torah scholars led to those youngsters growing into refined tzaddikim.

Finally, and perhaps most important, any lack of concern with the spiritual state or physical safety of the majority of Jews in Eretz Yisrael undercuts the argument most frequently made for a draft exemption for those engaged in full-time learning — i.e., that learning is the source of the Divine protection that has preserved the Jewish community of Israel since its inception.

For only if we identify with our fellow Jews as fellow members of Klal Yisrael, whose spiritual and physical well-being is always in our minds, can we expect our Torah learning to benefit them. If we lack concern for them, then we reveal ourselves to possess a truncated conception of Klal Yisrael, and that will be felt in the power of our mitzvos to benefit the entirety of the Klal.

Missed Opportunities

In polling by leading firms since October 7, over 70 percent of Israeli parents expressed a desire for more religious content in their children’s education, and a full quarter said they would prefer schools with an equal emphasis on religious and secular studies. None of those parents, however, said that they would be willing to sacrifice the quality of their children’s secular education.

Fortunately, a model for religious education combined with a high level of secular studies already exists. Thirty-five years ago, the late Torah Vodaath Rosh Yeshivah, Rav Avraham Pam, issued an impassioned plea, at a convention of Agudath Israel of America, for the creation of schools in Israel for the children of the mass Russian-speaking aliyah of the early ’90s. In response, the Shuvu school system came into existence.

For close to twenty years, those schools have been open to native-born Israeli children as well as to first- and second-generation children from Russian-speaking families. These are precisely the type of children for whom Rav Aharon Kotler created Chinuch Atzmai to rescue kids from going to secular schools.

To attract nonobservant Russian-speaking parents. Shuvu ensured that the secular studies would be a very high level: Its schools covered close to 25 percent more math material per year, and they were the first to introduce into Israel sophisticated programs for teaching English as a second language.

The quality of secular studies has long since proven itself. At a time when only 70 percent of the students in Netanya received their high school bagrut certification, 89 percent of the students in the Shuvu high school did. Shuvu schools in Netanya and Lod were designated model schools by the Education Ministry.

A Shuvu elementary school in Nof Hagalil placed first nationally in a cyber competition from among 1,300 schools. And Shuvu-Ashdod placed second nationally in another cyber competition from among 1,071 participating schools. Pavel Kovalev, a student in Shuvu’s Jerusalem high school, won the national Intel competition.

At a time when Israeli students in the state school system reported the lowest levels of satisfaction of any OECD country, 84 percent of Shuvu parents reported that their children are very satisfied. A team of researchers headed by Ben-Gurion University’s Professor Tamar Horowitz found that Shuvu had the highest level of teacher accountability of any school system in Israel and high levels of student self-esteem, despite the rigorous dual curriculum.

Just one example of that teacher involvement with students: When Devorah Sofer, the principal of the Shuvu school in Rishon L’Tzion, where hostage Bar Kuperstein studied, found out that a former student was living with an abusive stepparent, she brought the girl into her home, married her off, and raised funds through Shuvu donors to get the young couple started in life.

I’m a great believer in the power of one-on-one chavrusas between religious and nonreligious study partners. But the impact of a once-a-week chavrusa is not generally as great as that of a teacher in love with her students and the material, who is a role model for her students for hours each day, especially in an environment in which students are surrounded by classmates growing in their attachment to Yiddishkeit.

I have visited a dozen or so Shuvu schools over the years, and I have always felt that the “secret sauce” for the warm feelings for Torah instilled in the students is the idealism of the young Bais Yaakov-trained teachers for the girls and the yeshivah graduates for the boys. I have witnessed a classroom of boys reciting entire chapters of Mishnayos by heart. In at least one case, the idealism of the Shuvu staff inspired a former Shuvu student so greatly that she went into chinuch and was recently installed as the new principal in Shuvu’s Bat Yam school.

Bar Kuperstein was the guest of honor at a Shuvu dinner in Jerusalem this past week, and he told the interviewer, Yinon Magal, that his teachers were like parents to him. One of the emotional highlights of the evening was when he was reunited with his former principal and his sixth-grade teacher, Ruti Gadassi, who vividly recalled a Shabbos that Bar and some of his classmates spent in her home.

Bar related that all the basics in emunah that gave him the strength to survive two years in captivity came from Shuvu. As has been widely reported, he led fellow captives in reciting Selichos for 40 days leading up to Yom Kippur, and those Selichos were ones he learned in Shuvu. He also related how even when he transferred into a secular school for high school, he often corrected his Tanach teacher based on what he had learned in Shuvu. He described his strongest desire in captivity as being to once again be able to put on tefillin, and he has been doing so daily since his release.

Bar Kuperstein is one example of the impact of the feelings for Yiddishkeit developed in Shuvu schools, even if the student does not become fully observant while at Shuvu. (Remember, most students come from homes in which neither parent is fully observant.) The mayor of Yerucham, Nili Aharon, recently implored Shuvu to establish a new school in her city, and she cited the impact of an earlier school on the strong Jewish identity of the local Russian Jewish population. She also told the visiting delegation that she needed such a school for potential American olim, who will require a day school for their children such as they had in the States. (Ofakim mayor Itzik Danino has also sought a Shuvu school for his city.)

MK Evgeny Sova, number three on the list of the antireligious Yisrael Beiteinu party, sends all three of his daughters to Shuvu schools. But he stipulated in advance that they were not allowed to tell him what to do religiously. One of those daughters, however, recently confided that he now makes Kiddush every Shabbos. Investment in religious schooling, it turns out, can also be is investment in reducing anti-Torah animus.

Given what Israeli parents say they are looking for in their children’s education, and given the successful model Shuvu has developed over more than three decades, there should be tens of thousands more students in such schools.

That there are not yet represents a missed opportunity that Klal Yisrael cannot afford.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1099. Yonoson Rosenblum may be contacted directly at rosenblum@mishpacha.com)