Religious School

  Take a long walk. Read a good book. Make a new friend.-Rabbi Robert J. Schur's annual advice to students  

Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.-Proverbs 22:6

            The Temple filled with teachers on December 29, 2000 , yet the day of the week was not Sunday. No faculty meeting or training seminars were scheduled. The educators had gathered for the funeral of their mentor-Lilaine Goldman, 87, a teacher's teacher, a pedagogue who had transformed scores of altruistic, untrained teen-agers and adults into teachers imbued with the biblical mission of teaching Judaism "diligently unto thy children."

            Here was Livia Levine, the Holocaust survivor who had yearned to be a teacher until the war interrupted her education. "I thought I would have to give up this dream," she recalled. "Lil Goldman gave me the opportunity to help out in Sunday School. I came in as a substitute and stayed for 28 years."  

            Here was Edie Yentis, a psychotherapist who was surprised when Lil Goldman encouraged her to begin teaching Religious School . "I was a new Jew, a convert to Judaism." Yentis became a long-term faculty member, a popular teacher who built a strong rapport with high school students. "With Lil Goldman, you taught and you learned."

            Also paying respects were Rita and Ted Hoffman whom Goldman had nurtured as classroom teachers. Rita Hoffman taught kindergarteners, and Ted Hoffman taught the teens. "Lil was the ignition," said Ted Hoffman, an aeronautical engineer who began teaching Religious School in 1963 when he moved to Fort Worth from Chicago . "She started me on the whole idea of working with youth. I haven't stopped."

             Lil Goldman, Beth-El's Religious School educator from 1959 to 1976, nurtured the gift of teaching in adults and the yen for learning in thousands of children. She not only elevated Beth-El's curriculum to a plane parallel with that of the public schools, she was founding director of Fort Worth's oldest nursery school, which carries her name and at the millennium was operated by the Jewish community as a whole. A pioneer in early childhood education, Goldman created Camp Shalom , a summer day camp in operation since 1953 and by 2002 under the purview of the Jewish Federation of Fort Worth and Tarrant County .  

            The morning of Goldman's funeral, dozens of  part-time, full-time, and sometime educators who had taught under her direction embraced, reminisced, and spoke of her legacy.

            Goldman's longest-serving successor at Beth-El, the talented Ellen Mack, had built on that legacy. Mack, Beth-El's Religious School educator from 1978 to 1992, had elevated the school another rung, turning it into a model among Reform congregations and a pilot site for a new UAHC curriculum. Under Mack, students probed controversial topics such as cults and addictions; they explored the plight of the homeless; they opened Beth-El Books, a synagogue store selling Jewish books and tapes. The school radiated energy. That was the second heyday of the Religious School .

            The first heyday was under Goldman.   

            When Goldman moved into Beth-El's makeshift principal's office in a corner of the chapel in 1959, the school was on split sessions. The building was so crowded that one class met in the powder room leading to the ladies' lavatory. Another class convened in a stairwell. The post-war baby boom had more than doubled enrollment to 225 students.

            An education wing was on the drawing board, set for completion in 1961. Rabbi Schur needed a professional to help plan and run the proposed new addition. Goldman, a master's degree graduate of  New York 's Banks Street School of Early Childhood Development, had the credentials. She had the experience to work with the architect, the assertiveness to politic among the board, and the twinkle in her eye to communicate with the students.  

            Before Goldman's takeover, the Religious School was a loosely coordinated effort. Well-intentioned congregants, some with educational credentials, most without, managed the school, taking on the title of   Religious School superintendent. Selflessly, these untrained administrators did their best. The curriculum came straight from the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), which sent out teaching guidelines. "We took whatever the UAHC sent," recalled Corrine Jacobson, superintendent during the two years preceding Goldman's appointment. "I kept track of attendance, of   registration, of tzedakah money, and I found substitute teachers.  We didn't do anything creative. We didn't develop anything like Lilaine did."          

            Beth-El's Religious School lagged far behind others in the Reform movement.  The Temple 's previous rabbi, Milton Rosenbaum, had been appalled at the outdated textbooks. Before Rosenbaum, interim wartime Rabbi Eugene Lipman had called the Religious School "rotten" and described the classrooms as "filthy."   The Depression years and the rapid turnover of rabbis during World War II had contributed to the Religious School 's neglect. Yet, historically, providing children with a Jewish education had been a priority.

            Efforts to organize a Jewish Religious School in Fort Worth predated the creation of  Beth-El Congregation and Ahavath Sholom. A circuit-riding rabbi, visiting Fort Worth in 1878, had established a Religious School , but it dissolved within a year. At the turn of the century, fifty Jewish youngsters enrolled in a short-lived Reform Sunday School that offered instruction by two women-public-school teachers Sarah Carb and Bessie Brown-and three men, future Temple founders Henry Gernsbacher, Theodore Mack, and Isidore Carb.

            When Beth-El's second rabbi, Joseph Jasin, arrived in Fort Worth in 1904, he reorganized the Sabbath School -so called because it convened on Saturday mornings. Many of the faculty were volunteers from the local section of the National Council of Jewish Women. Jasin began Beth-El's first Confirmation class, enrolling three boys and six girls, one of the them from Ahavath Sholom. The girl from Ahavath Sholom was Jennie Levenson. Her younger sister, Rose, enrolled in another Beth-El Religious School class. Many shul members began to place their daughters in Beth-El's Sabbath School , where the curriculum was more New World than Old World . At Ahavath Sholom, the Religious School was an after-school cheder that taught Jewish youngsters to read Hebrew from the siddur, the Torah, and the prophets in preparation for bar mitzvah.

            At the Temple, religious education focused on contemporary socialization rather than ancient customs. The goal at Beth-El, and in the Reform Movement as a whole, was to absorb Jewish values and to shape American Jewish children into good citizens. [i]  Classes were taught in English, with scant attention paid the alef bet except for learning the Shema and Ein Keloheno, the rousing closing hymn. Students studied English translations of  biblical verses (such as the Ten Commandments) and memorized commentaries (such as Maimonides'articles of faith and levels of charity). Such texts stressed ethics for daily living. Similar Religious Schools at Reform congregations in Galveston and Beaumont also drew children from Orthodox shuls.  

            Teaching methods were far different a century ago. Lessons were learned more by rote than reasoning. Discussion was discouraged; memorization encouraged. Children were preferably seen and not heard. Pageantry was emphasized, with floral offerings at Shavuot and harvest baskets at Sukkot. Confirmation students, generally age 13 or 14, enrolled in the first class; the age group following them was called the second class, and so on.

            When Beth-El's third rabbi, George Zepin, arrived in the autumn of 1908, the congregation had just constructed its first building, a two-story synagogue at 601 Taylor Street with upstairs classrooms heated by a wood-burning stove. The Sabbath School 's 40 students traipsed upstairs for classes at 9:30 a.m. , then downstairs at 10:30 a.m. to the sanctuary for a half-hour children's service. The class schedule, typical of Reform Sabbath Schools of that era, lengthened over the next decade, expanding to 90 minutes.

            Deportment, the schoolhouse term for discipline and behavior, was always a problem. Youngsters who attended public school Monday through Friday had little desire to sit still during weekend classes.  Marion Weil, who dropped out of the confirmation class, got in trouble in 1920 for a range of mischievous behavior-from hiding in the empty ark when the second Temple was under construction to playfully knocking down  pews not yet fastened to the sanctuary floor. He was not the only prankster. 

            Beth-El's new Temple at Broadway and Galveston streets, completed in the autumn of 1920, had a basement stage, ideal for student assemblies. During Hanukkah in 1925, eight kindergarteners-Jane Gernsbacher, Jeanette Ginsberg, Bernice Gressman, Helen Klar, Charlotte Miller, Janice Nicolson, Mildred Roddy, and Elaine Zimmerman-dressed in tutus to perform the "Dance of the Candles."   The holiday assembly continued with tableaux-still-life scenes in which costumed children portrayed "The Spirit of Hanukah" and a "Family Before a Menorah."   

            Between the World Wars, the Religious School "adopted" a war orphan, sending money to a Czechoslovakian girl named Mania Rejman. In a thank you note, transmitted and translated by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the girl told her "dear providers" that their gift had paid for "warm clothing and linen" and a doctor's appointment. "I feel all right and do not have any want," she wrote in 1923.      

            About this time, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR) adopted a new Religious School curriculum. To implement it, Rabbi Harry Merfeld   told the board he needed to attach "slates" to student desks and pews. The board approved a $125 expenditure.   

            Cecile Friedman Ritzwoller attended Religious School during those years, but she scarcely recalls the new curriculum. "We learned about holidays and the Abraham and Isaac stories," she said. Her clearest memory involves the rabbi's aborted attempt to split up her large, sociable class by age, separating her from her lifelong friend Dana Mehl Levy. Ritzwoller protested by dropping out until the rabbi bowed to student pressure and put all 16 students back together. Much later, when she married David Ritzwoller and moved to Oklahoma City , she taught Sunday School in her new community.        

            Beth-El's Religious School continued to attract daughters of Orthodox families. Among them was Joy Goldstein Spiegel whose "old world father" was the High Holy Days chazzan at Ahavath Sholom. During the mid-1940s, she and her girlfriend Honey Schwartz Brenner pleaded with their adult brothers to join Beth-El and enroll them in its Religious School . They did. "We wanted to leave the synagogue with the old men and their long beards and tallises," Spiegel recalled. "We wanted to be at Beth-El. That's where the action was. That was where all the kids were."  Part of  Beth-El's draw was the handsome, clean-shaven rabbi, Samuel Soskin. Brenner used to drive by his house on Willing Avenue in hopes of catching a glimpse.  The Confirmation teacher at Beth-El  was Jenny Moses Winkler, who had also transferred to Beth-El from Ahavath Sholom, the congregation where she had grown up.

            Far more than the classroom lessons, Joy Spiegel remembers the social aspects of  attending Sabbath School at Beth-El. "There was no real connection with who we were as Jews," she remarked. "Nobody gave us the meat and the bread of it."

            With war raging in Europe , students wanted more substance. So did national Jewish leaders. The Reform movement was becoming less comfortable with the melting-pot theory, less convinced that America was Zion . Hitler's rise to power eroded the insular self-confidence and self-assuredness of American Reform Jewry. It was time to teach the younger generation of American Jews that Judaism was more than a denomination, more than a Jewish church that met once a week for services. Reform leaders began promoting a curriculum that explained Judaism as a way of life, a religion encompassing customs, rituals, roots, and brethren stretching around the globe.

            Rabbi Milton Rosenbaum, who served at Beth-El from 1949-56, worked with Religious School committee chairwoman, Lila Letwin Tuchin, to introduce Hebrew classes, albeit on a voluntary basis. The first bar mitzvah boy, in 1954, was Sherwin Goldman, whose father Mickey Goldman had dual membership in the Temple and the shul. The boy's  bar mitzvah was a controversial innovation. "People said, 'We don't do that. We're Reform,' " recalled Sherwin's sister Carol Minker. The young man had to petition the board, explaining why he wanted the ceremony. When it was held, there was no announcement in the Beth-El Bulletin, no invitations mailed, and no party thereafter-just a simple oneg Shabbat with home-cooked desserts provided by his Aunt Mary. Others slowly followed Goldman's example, with a second bar mitzvah in 1954 and three in 1955, including the February 7 ceremony for Martin Frost, a future U. S. congressman.

            Change was afoot in this far corner of the Diaspora. Children were learning things unfamiliar to their parents. Rabbi Rosenbaum, ahead of his time, initiated open houses, where parents met the Religious School faculty. To discourage Christmas trees in Jewish homes, he launched a Hanukkah home decorating contest. Each innovation provoked factionalism, making change all the harder.  

            It would take the 1956 arrival of Rabbi Robert Schur, who proved to be a better consensus-builder, and the 1959 hiring of professional educator Lil Goldman to move the Religious School forward in its thinking and teaching.

            The new Religious School director understood trends in education and psychology. For adolescents, she introduced a social ethics course called "Meeting Life's Problems" and hired Bernice Meyerson to teach it. She added a year to the Religious School curriculum, moving Confirmation from the ninth to the 10 ^th grade, as the UAHC had long recommended. Faculty meetings featured guest speakers

            Goldman managed to pry $1,000 from the Temple board in 1963 to raise teacher salaries. Base salaries for teachers rose from around $2 to $5 per session.   Faculty members with teaching degrees earned $7. Those with the most seniority earned $8. While the pay levels remained relatively low, the increase was a vote of confidence in the school. Lil Goldman's staff and her reputation grew.

            "Our standards have been raised and we are operating our school as an educational institution," Goldman wrote in autumn of 1963. "We have reached a new threshold of learning."

            Hebrew, a controversial innovation under Rabbi Rosenbaum, became more palatable under Goldman. She scheduled optional, 45-minute Hebrew classes on Monday afternoons, at  no additional charge except for textbooks. In typewritten letters promoting the class to sixth-graders, she described the teacher, Meyer Sankary, as a "very popular instructor." She emphasized that Hebrew classes were a "pre-requisite for bar mitzvah . . . . (although) bar mitzvah is optional."  More than half of Beth-El's sixth-graders enrolled.

            Goldman encouraged girls to sign up for Hebrew lessons, although it took more than a decade to persuade Rabbi Schur to permit a bat mitzvah. "Rabbi Schur wouldn't allow it," recalled longtime congregant Loesje Blumberg. The student who broke that  gender barrier was Tami Hoffman Jara, daughter of Religious School teachers Rita and Ted Hoffman. Because she had mastered the prayers so well, and because her parents were stalwarts on the faculty, Rabbi Schur relented, allowing her the coming-of-age ceremony in May 1972. He called it a bas Torah, Hebrew for daughter of the Torah. Jara  remembers how much she enjoyed the weeks of private tutoring with Rabbi Schur leading up to the ceremony and how special it was to hold the  yad, the silver Torah pointer, as she read from the sacred scroll. She remembers wearing a blue-and-white checked dress and getting her hair done at the home of congregant Adele Echt Niger , a professional beautician. "I used to joke that there should have been a plaque up there for me and this milestone," she recalled. A second girl, Robin Cooper, crossed the gender line to the bimah with a bas Torah in May of 1973.  These two girls had proved to the rabbi and the congregation that their level of learning was equivalent to the boys'. Change had come gradually, but it had come, signaled by the announcement in the Beth-El Bulletin that on Friday evening, April 19, 1974 ,   Jill Pearlman would celebrate her bas mitzvah.  The rabbi had relented and allowed use of the more common term for the ceremony. Robin Blumberg followed in 1975. ( Bas is the Ashkenazic pronunciation of the word daughter; bat is the Sephardic or Israeli pronunciation that soon came into vogue.)

            Hebrew was becoming well integrated into the Religious School curriculum. Since 1962, third graders had begun using the Alef Bet Activity Fun Book. Mid-week Hebrew had expanded in 1963 to include fifth graders who were encouraged to purchase a $3 set of  phonograph records called, Hebrew, the Audio-Lingual Way. A  Modern Conversational Hebrew class was instituted for post-bar and bat mitzvah students. Hebrew lessons  were in demand. Lil Goldman had gradually accustomed the congregation to Hebrew and to bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies.

            Lil Goldman retired as Beth-El's Religious School educator in 1976. She remained one more year as director of the lower grades. She continued her work at the Jewish Community Center's pre-school and on educational boards throughout the county.  The Religious School that Goldman retired from in 1977 was far different from the one she had transformed starting in 1959. And it is far different today.

Then and Now

            One hundred years ago, just about every Jewish child in Fort Worth lived within walking distance of the Temple . By the millennium, Beth-El's students were scattered in nine public school districts and four private schools. A preponderance lived in two southwest Fort Worth ZIP codes-76109 and 76132.

            A century ago, the Religious School enrolled 30 to 40 youngsters. Attendance   peaked with 251 pupils in 1963, reflecting the post-war baby boom. By the millennium, the number of students had fallen to 120. After Beth-El moved to southwest Fort Worth , within two years enrollment increased to 150.

            The Religious School used to convene on Saturday morning and therefore was called Sabbath School . Sessions lasted 90 minutes. In the third Temple on Briarhaven Road , Sunday School spans 2 ½ hours.

            When Beth-El launched its first Religious School , kindergarten was an innovation championed by one of the charter teachers. Most Confirmation students completed their Jewish education by age 14. Today Religious School extends from pre-kindergarten through 10th grade, with the average confirmation student age 16.  

            Instruction used to be rigid, with lesson plans and fliers barely changing from one year to the next. First-graders memorized the 23 ^rd Psalm. Confirmands memorized the Ten Commandments. Today's teachers encourage "experiential" methods, with students learning through creative activities: They make tombstone rubbings at Hebrew Rest Cemetery , write their own services, and create pottery in an art room equipped with a kiln. Last year's confirmation students read essays on Jewish role models, selecting personalities from diplomat Golda Meir to pop singer Bob Dylan.  

            Dress has changed. At the turn of the last century, students wore their best clothes to Religious School . That meant starched dresses for the girls and knickers for little guys. Today, Religious School Director Loretta Causey observed,   "You see belly buttons, T-shirts, toe rings, and rubber flip-flops on their feet." Bluejeans are the norm. Teachers used to wear hats, gloves, and high-heeled shoes to school. Nowadays, teachers dress casually in slacks and sandals without hose. None of the male teachers wears a tie. 

            Discipline remains a problem, mainly in the adolescent grades. In the early years of Beth-El Congregation, students who pulled pranks were expelled. After World War II, they were sent to Rabbi Rosenbaum's study, where the sympathetic rabbi often put an understanding arm around a naughty child. During the 1960s, Religious School Director Lil Goldman advised teachers that if a child "pops off," try incorporating his wisecracks into the class discussion. Child psychology has changed over the years, but concerns with behavior and deportment remain a constant. Discipline problems still wind up on the agenda of the Religious School Committee. Back in 1902, the first chairman of the "Committee on School Board" was David Brown. In 2001, the Religious School Committee chairman is Terry Siegel. 

            In the early decades, one aim of the Religious School was to turn Jewish children into good citizens. As recently as the 1970s, closing exercises ended with the singing of America the Beautiful. Fallout from the Vietnam era and concern over "separation of church and state" gradually curtailed displays of patriotism.  

             Ironically, today's Religious School students celebrate Israeli Independence Day. A century ago, that would have been heresy. Classical Reform Judaism denounced Zionism. The birth of Israel in 1948 was opposed by at least 27 families at Beth-El who belonged to the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group. Acceptance of Israel has evolved, with Israel 's Six-Day War in 1967 a turning point at Beth-El and   among Reform congregations throughout the South.

            In line with the old attitude against eretz Yisrael, Hebrew instruction was non-existent a century ago. Midweek Hebrew classes, instituted in the 1950s, were 50 minutes long. Today midweek Hebrew classes last 90 minutes, and instruction in the Hebrew alphabet begins in pre-school. Hebrew is emphasized as the language of prayer, a link with Jews worldwide, and the living language of   Israel . The Temple awards $500 youth scholarships to students spending the summer in Israel .

            Tzedakah-in this context the donation of coins for charity-provides   another index of changing educational trends and student concerns. The Religious School  superintendent used to decide where students' accumulated pennies, nickels, and dimes were directed. After World War II, Rabbi Rosenbaum instituted a charity council with student representatives weighing requests for donations and "experiencing the joy of giving."  For several decades, students divided these donations among three dozen charities. For example, $10 went to the Jewish Braille Society, $7.50 for the Red Magen David ( Israel's Red Cross, later referred to as the Magen David Adam), $3 for cerebral palsey, $5 for Goodfellows, and $3 for Santa Pals. In the 1960s, students added the NAACP to the list with a $10 donation. The American Indian Project received $3. In 1975, the students earmarked $7.50 for the Wilderness Society, reflecting awareness of current events.

            In recent years, the Tzedakah Council whittled the recipient list to a half-dozen causes. Last year, all of the $1,200 raised through the Religious School went to Israel . The sum was divided between the Jewish   Federation's Israel Emergency Campaign and the Magen David Adam's drive to purchase new ambulances. The ongoing crisis in the Middle East feels far more immediate to American Jewish youth than our ancestors could have imagined.

            A century of   Jewish instruction shows that demographic trends play a major role in the size of the student body, with convenience and location as secondary factors. Religious School spans more years and more hours, indicating that a Jewish education has become a higher priority for Reform Jews. Instruction is less rigid, and students are more involved in shaping the meaning of Reform Judaism today.