With its total enrollment down to 35 students amid the economic downturn and changing local demographics, the Jersey Shore Jewish Academy (JSJA) will close its doors in Howell.
Formerly Solomon Schechter Academy of Ocean and Monmouth Counties, the school changed its name to JSJA for the final year of its 40-year existence in an attempt to draw a more diverse student body outside of the Conservative movement. But that initiative, in addition to the offering of sizable tuition discounts and fundraising support from the Jewish federations of Ocean and Monmouth counties, couldn’t keep the school alive.
“The lack of effort is not what closed the school,” said Herbert Birman, JSJA’s board president.
Dr. Ira Haimowitz, a board member for 15 years, past board president, and father of five children who attended the school, said the closing “takes away the last option for a high-quality secular and Jewish education in this immediate vicinity.”
In 2000, Schechter’s enrollment peaked at 137 students from pre-K through 8th grade. However, the school would have fielded only pre-K, kindergarten, 2nd, 4th, and 6th grade classes for the 2010-11 school year if it had remained open. Lakewood’s Jewish community is aging, and additionally, while there used to be Jews “of all different denominations” in the township interested in attending the school, the vast majority of the community is now ultra-Orthodox, Haimowitz explained.
“Just pure demographics played a big role in it for us,” he said.
The school had offered a 40-percent tuition discount to new students for 2010-11, and 50 percent off for full-day kindergarten, but during a recession, public schools proved to be stiff competition, Haimowitz said.
“Free wasn’t really an option for us because we had bills to pay as well,” he said.
Some “hardcore” families said “we’ll stick it [out] for another year” at JSJA, Birman said, but ultimately the school “didn’t have enough children to really sustain the financial obligations” and that opening for another year would not have been conducive to providing the remaining students with a quality education.
Birman said the school changed its name because “we wanted to become more of a community-based school instead of a Conservative-based school,” and made a serious effort to market itself to modern Orthodox and Israeli families. Since the marketing didn’t work, Birman concluded that there is a “disinterest in the community to send kids to Jewish day school.”
“I guess the Jewish community as a whole really has an identity crisis right now,” Birman, who sent two children to the school, said.
Dr. Ron Rotem, president of the Jewish Federation of Ocean County, said that contemporary Jewish families have “a lot more options with their time and where they can go to and what they do,” and that “unless you are piquing their interest, they are talking with their feet, they are going elsewhere.”
“They’re not ‘locked in’ as they might have been a generation or two ago,” Rotem said.
Comparing JSJA’s decreased enrollment to decreasing membership at local synagogues, Rotem said that the Jewish community is not addressing the needs of the younger generation, which are “not the same as they were a generation or two ago.” Asked specifically what those new needs are, Rotem said “That’s part of the million-dollar question.” If the community new the exact answer, “we’d be overflowing with people,” Rotem said.
Though JSJA’s low enrollment means that its closing doesn’t have an immediate impact on a large number of people, a Jewish day school is “one of the things we really want to have in a community,” Rotem, who sent three children to the school, said.
Regarding the effort to market JSJA to modern Orthodox families, Haimowitz said “We were willing to make the changes to make them comfortable,” but that “certain walls were just too big to overcome.”
Birman said another challenge for JSJA was that the geographic area from which it drew its student body was more spread out than that of other local day schools such as Solomon Schechter Academy of Greater Monmouth County in Marlboro and Hillel Yeshiva in Ocean. Some parents were reluctant to make the drive to JSJA, Birman said.
Outside of Marlboro Schechter and Hillel, Birman said he couldn’t think of other viable local options for former JSJA families who still want their children to have a Jewish day school experience.
“That’s basically it,” Birman said.
Haimowitz said that while many of the school’s board members, past presidents, and other supporters used to come from the Conservative rabbinic leadership in the area, “we lost that support with time” amid leadership turnover at local synagogues.
Rather than sending their students to Schechter, local synagogues grew to consider the school competition for their own Talmud Torahs, and that attitude became a “real barrier” for Schechter’s relationship with synagogues, Haimowitz said.
“The new rabbinic leadership that came in did not provide that same support for us,” Haimowitz said.
Birman called Schechter a “home away from home for the kids.” Some teachers served for as many as 35 years, he said. Haimowitz said the staff was dedicated and underpaid.
“They provided an extremely nurturing environment for our children,” Haimowitz said.
Eighteen-year-old Matt Haimowitz, Ira’s son, said Schechter’s small size allowed him to develop close relationships with classmates and teachers. While his 8th grade class at Schechter had 10 students, his graduating class at Toms River High School North this year had 500. In that way, public school was a “culture shock,” Matt said.
Matt said “it was heartbreaking when I heard that Schechter was closing.” While some of his peers who didn’t attend Schechter grew disinterested in Judaism, Matt said he became active in United Synagogue Youth (USY) and other community programs because of his Schechter education.
“It made me definitely want to expand on my Jewish background so much more,” he said.