Paramus school celebrates its history as parents and administrators
remember where they’ve been
BY JOANNE PALMER
Successful institutions seem like they’ve always been there,
since the beginning of time. It’s somehow wrenching to think of a school that
seems so firmly a part of the landscape as once having been brand-new, a tiny
creation, made of hope and connection and door-to-door student solicitation, put
together in a small space above a deli. But the Yavneh Academy in Paramus
hasn’t always been there. It’s 75 years old, and is celebrating its origins
this year. It wasn’t created in a vacuum, of course — nothing is. The school’s
history is part of the history of the modern Orthodox Jewish community in
northern New Jersey, as it grew from its immigrant roots in the region’s small,
separate working-class cities to merge into the large, complicated, vibrant
world it is today. Yavneh is a prominent, brightly colored strand in that
tapestry. But Yavneh also is a school made of smaller, more intimate, personal
moments. Pamela Scheininger of Teaneck has seen some of them. Today, she is the
president of the school’s board of directors and the mother of one Yavneh
graduate and three Yavneh students — a 10th, eighth, and first grader. But 12
years ago, she was just the mother of a prospective student. She was school
shopping then, Ms. Scheininger remembers, so she made an appointment to talk to
Rabbi Jonathan Knapp, who is now the school’s head. “When I went to meet with
him, he wasn’t there,” she said. “He wasn’t in his office, and they told me to
look for him in the lunchroom. So I went to the lunchroom, and he was standing
there, and he said ‘Give me a minute, please. I like to spend some time in here
every day, to see who is talking to who, who is sitting with who, how they are
interacting with each other, to see who is smiling and who is not.’” And she
watched him watch the kids, seeing them as whole children, hoping to educate
them as people and as Jews as well as students. THE JEWISH STANDARD |
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of personal concern that makes the school what it is, Ms. Scheininger said. It
is teachers and administrators and even the head of school understanding that
educating isn’t only about teaching subject matter — although certainly it is
also and very much about that — but also about seeing each child as an
individual, and teaching each individual child. Yavneh began in 1942, during
World War II, with six children, its assistant principal, Rabbi Aaron Ross, who
has spent a great deal of time researching its history, said. Paterson, the
Silk City, was home to European textile workers, many of them Jews; in fact,
one of its mayors, Nathan Barnert, also was an active philanthropist both
inside and outside the Jewish community, giving his name (as well as large sums
of money) to both Barnert Hospital and Barnert Temple. But unlike Jersey City,
in Hudson County, which had a day school, and certainly unlike New York City,
which had many, Paterson had only Talmud Torahs, where children would go after
school. Basically, the Talmud Torah was the precursor of today’s Hebrew
schools. These Jewish leaders thought it was not enough. “So to ensure the
future of the Jewish community, a group of 18 people — not couples, 18
individual people — who really thought that something more was needed, put
tremendous effort in putting together a school. They’d go door to door,
canvassing the community, looking for kids.” The school opened with six
students. Rabbi Ross tells the story of a woman who reported that in October of
that first year, a month after school started, that “the principal came
knocking on her door, asking if she had or knew of a Jewish child who would be
eligible.” She did — her own child — and she was so impressed with the outreach
that she moved her daughter to Yavneh. It was of course hard for people in
Paterson to afford day school. It was on the whole not a wealthy town, and
public school is free. “But no one should be turned away for finances; they
weren’t then and they still aren’t now,” Rabbi Knapp said. “Admission was and remains
needblind.” Like many new schools, Yavneh started with just a kindergarten, and
then added grades until it reached the eighth, when it stopped; along the way
it also added preschool classes. Jerry Rubinowitz, who now lives in Little
Falls but then was in Paterson, was in one of those first classes; he began
kindergarten at Yavneh in 1943. His grandfather, Ruben Rubinowitz, owned
Carroll Bakery, a well-known place to go for kosher bread, rolls, and cake.
“When people who were organizing the Yavneh Academy were getting ready to open
it, they said that it would be very good if we could tell other parents that
Ruben Rubinowitz’s grandson was one of their students,” he said. He started
school when he was 3 1/2; “I always say that I am the smartest dumb kid,
because I flunked kindergarten,” he said. “They kept me there for a year and a
half.” It wasn’t that he was dumb, needless to say, but that he was young; “I
was the youngest kid in the school,” he added. Mr. Rubinowitz’s memories are
the memories of a very young child; in 1947, his family moved to Florida, “and
I was in the second graduating class of the Hebrew Academy of Greater 2/7/2018
Yavneh turns 75 | The Jewish Standard
http://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/yavneh-turns-75/ 3/8 Miami,” he said. But
he does have memories. “I remember my teacher, Miss Sakis,” he said. “I
remember that we had nap time, and I remember that everyone brought their lunch
in a lunch pail. I remember that Mr. Silverberg used to pick us up in his brown
wooden-sided station wagon. “He wasn’t a teacher or a parent. I don’t know who
he was. I just know that he was Mr. Silverberg, and that he drove us to school.
“I remember one of the Hebrew teachers, Mr. Raichel, and that the rosh yeshiva
was Rabbi Harry Bornstein, who was also the rabbi of the Hebrew Free School,”
Mr. Rubinowitz continued. “And he always smoked a cigar. It was always in his
mouth.” He does not remember whether or not the cigar was lit during classes,
or just stayed cold in Rabbi Bornstein’s mouth, but “the teachers always smoked
in high school,” he said. “They didn’t smoke in class, but even in high school,
they all always smoked.” When Mr. Rubinowitz lived in Florida, he came back to
New Jersey for Yavneh’s first graduation, in 1952. It was the class that would
have been his. As an adult, he moved back to New Jersey in 1965; he lived in
Wayne for two years, and then in Elmwood Park for 40. He thought Yavneh’s
education was so good that he sent his own children there. “It was very
intense,” he said. “They made sure that you got as much of a secular education
as a religious one. And in the Hebrew division, they didn’t teach strictly from
the religious standpoint. And although this was pre-state of Israel, we still
were taught Hebrew as a modern language. We studied grammar and spelling. And
we also studied history and prophets, and all the additional part of a Jewish
education as opposed to what they do even today in a yeshiva, poring over the
books. “In Yavneh, we strictly spoke Hebrew in the Hebrew section, so we spoke
English half a day, Hebrew half a day. I went to school 60, 65 years ago, and I
have been to Israel twice and I was able to conduct a conversation there in
Hebrew, from what I remembered. “The education at Yavneh was phenomenal,” Mr.
Rubinowitz concluded. Rabbi Eugene Kwalwasser worked at Yavneh from 1977 until
2008; during most of that time he was the head of school, although he did not
begin at that level and he ended his career there as a consultant. After he
retired, he and his wife, Edna, made aliyah, but from Israel he remembers
Yavneh with great love (and he is coming back for the school’s gala dinner). “I
loved going to school every morning,” he said. “It was a pleasure jumping out
of bed and getting ready to go to Yavneh. I look back at my professional life
there with only the fondest of memories. I don’t think there are many people in
the position I was in, as head of school, who feel as I do. Many of them
couldn’t wait for the day they retired. It was enough. But for me, it was
wonderful. They were wonderful years. It was under Rabbi Kwalwasser’s
leadership that the school both expanded and moved; in 1981, after having been
in a three buildings in Paterson, Yavneh followed most of its students 2/7/2018
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4/8 to Bergen County. Rabbi Kwalwasser grew up in Chicago, as some of his
vowels still make clear. “I left for Yeshiva University when I was 17, and I
never looked back,” he said. He had grown up in Hollywood Park, a neighborhood
that once had been Jewish but had become increasingly less so during his
childhood and adolescence. During his undergraduate career and then as he
studied for smicha, Rabbi Kwalwasser wasn’t sure about the direction he wanted
to take. Did he want pulpit work? Youth work? Full-on education work? He and
Edna moved to the Taylor Road Synagogue in Cleveland in 1969, where “I created
and built up NCSY” — the National Council of Synagogue Youth — “which in those
days was just in its infancy,” he said. “We were there for three years, and
then it was time to move on. That was not the end of where we wanted to be.” He
realized that he wanted education; a short series of jobs led him from
California to Long Island and then to an interview in Paterson. Although he,
his wife, and their growing family were living in Far Rockaway, on Long
Island’s south shore, and Paterson was basically the back of beyond from there,
Rabbi Kwalwasser was tempted into going to Yavneh for an interview. And that was
it. He fell in love with the school — and the feeling was mutual. For the first
six years, Rabbi Kwalwasser lived in Far Rockaway. “Edna and I made a critical
decision,” he said. “We didn’t know how it would work out, and our kids were
settled there. I didn’t want to hopscotch all over the map, so I said that I
would commute, and if need be I will find a place to stay overnight if there
are meetings.” In 1983, his children at easily movable points in their
education, his wife working in Manhattan, and his love for Yavneh in full
bloom, the family moved to Fair Lawn. The Kwalwassers now live in Beit Shemesh,
“not the neighborhood in the news, but in a wonderful Anglo Jewish community,”
he said. “We have fantastic friends. Everyone supports everyone. It has been
wonderful.” Rabbi Kwalwasser looks back at his earliest years at Yavneh, when
the school was in Paterson, and draws some comparisons with his adolescence in
Chicago. “The Jewish community in Paterson was dwindling quickly,” he said.
“People were just leaving. By the time we moved the school, in 1981, I would
park my car inside the gates of the school. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be sure that
it would still be there, if I would leave on a winter’s night, when it was dark
outside.” It wasn’t a frightening environment, he said, just a poor one, but
the dangers were real. “You never stayed alone in the building,” he said. “If
you stayed for a meeting, the last ones out would be me, the president, and the
chair of the board. We put the chains on and locked the gates. You never went
out alone.” But that was a dangerous time in many cities. “Paterson wasn’t the
only place where we would have been afraid of being mugged,” he said. “And we
were already looking to move. We knew we had to get out of there.” Another
impetus for moving was the need to attract families. “The recruitment was
getting tough when we were in Paterson,” Rabbi Kwalwasser said. “There were
Jewish families then living in 2/7/2018 Yavneh turns 75 | The Jewish Standard
http://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/yavneh-turns-75/ 5/8 Teaneck, in Fair
Lawn, in places like Wyckoff and Wayne and Franklin Lakes, and they wanted some
form of Jewish education for their children. And Yavneh was there to provide
it. We even recruited in places like West Orange and Passaic and Clifton. And
the moment we announced that we were actively looking to move, we became more
desirable. It was very important for people to know that we were leaving that
geographic area.” Yavneh was about much more than geography, however. “My vision
and mission was to put together a faculty that shared my approach to Jewish
education,” Rabbi Kwalwasser said. “That approach was an education that would
be dynamic, conceptual as well as textural, filled with warmth and love and
understanding. It would know that Judaic studies and general studies need to be
integrated, and it would know and teach the importance of the state of Israel.
It would be an outstanding academic institution, with tremendous concern for
the individual child. “That was my mission and my mantra throughout all my 31
years. It took on different forms as time went on, but it was very important to
me that I never lost the mission and vision that I set out to achieve.” He is
enormously proud of the school’s reputation. “We were seen as the school where
graduates would have the textural skills, the thinking skills, the conceptual
skills, so that high schools really vied for them. I believe that is still the
case. “I see sometimes when graduates come to Israel and I see for myself, and
I say to myself that I feel very personally fulfilled because of what we
achieved at the Yavneh Academy.” When you talk to Rabbi Kwalwasser, you often
hear the words warmth and love. “Those are very important to me,” he said. “And
it is terribly important for children to be seen as individuals. “In the same
way, my wife and I have three children. They come from the same genetic pool.
But they are very different from each other. Each child must be seen as an
individual. “One thing that always made me shudder would be when I would hear
someone say something like ‘I know your brother’ or ‘I know your sister’ or
‘You are like him’ or ‘You are not like her’ or ‘You are better at’ or ‘You are
not as good at.’ That is unacceptable to me. “Each child has to be seen as that
child and only that child. Jake was Jake and Donna was Donna and Elie wasn’t
Jake and Jake wasn’t Donna.” Another subject about which Rabbi Kwalwasser is
passionate is the school’s co-educational structure; all its classes are open
equally to boys and girls. “That’s a part of my belief system,” he said. “There
are not many schools in the modern Orthodox educational movement that are. I am
a very big believer in God having created male and female, and there is no
reason to separate them in the educational system, because they will learn to
understand each other, to respect each other, and to appreciate each other. “If
you do separate them, you see the results when you walk the streets in Israel.
In the ultraOrthodox world, they do not know how to relate to each other. They
create a wall between the 2/7/2018 Yavneh turns 75 | The Jewish Standard
http://jewishstandard.timesofisrael.com/yavneh-turns-75/ 6/8 genders. I do not
want to do that. “That was one of the biggest battles I had to fight, because
in the traditional Jewish world, girls never learned Talmud. I will tell you
that I had some female students who would be able to put male students into
their back pockets, without even trying. That is how bright they are. “There
was no way that Dean Kwal-wasser would deny those girls a Talmud education,” he
said. Pamela Scheininger, the school board president, also is struck by the way
that each child is treated as an individual, a separate person, his or her own
person. “The most spectacular thing about Yavneh is that they are truly
committed to finding a way in which individual children will succeed, in the
context of their family, their specific upbringing, and their specific
personality,” she said. “Yavneh tries to identify not only how each child will
learn, but also how each one will succeed emotionally, intellectually, and in
terms of ensuring their physical health, so each of the children will be at
their very best. “They do it by committing resources in a very smart way,” she
continued. “That’s by hiring the best teachers, with the best training, so they
can respond to each child.” Technology is used carefully, as a means rather
than an end; “we use money in a smart way, to make sure that every penny is
spent to further our larger goals,” she said. “And the goals are the emotional,
social, religious, academic, and physical development of each child.” Since
2013, the Yavneh Academy has been accredited by the Middle States Association
of Colleges and Schools. The school has continued to grow since it moved to Paramus;
it’s added wings to the excessed public school building at its core. It now
teaches about 750 children. “It’s larger than it ever has been,” Rabbi Knapp
said. “We are at capacity.” Most of the students come from Teaneck,
Bergenfield, New Milford, Fair Lawn, Paramus, Tenafly, and Englewood.
“Admission is inclusive,” he continued. “The goal is to stretch ourselves and
to accommodate as many types of learners as possible. We’re also needs blind,
and we take everyone we can, as long as we can meet that child’s needs. “We
constantly reevaluate what we are doing, to make sure we are using best
practices, and staying on top of theory as it changes,” Rabbi Knapp said.
“Every school navigates the fine line between holding on to what’s working and
investigating what’s new. And we too have changed. We have incorporated many
cutting-edge programs in the areas of social and emotional growth, character
development, and sensitivity to diversity. “As the population has shifted to
reflect the broader Bergen County Jewish population, at this stage the majority
of our families would identify as being observant,” he said; Rabbi Kwalwasser
had said that in the early years, that was not necessarily the case. “When we
moved, Teaneck had two shuls. Now it has 22.” 2/7/2018 Yavneh turns 75 | The
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Another value dear to the school is its American-ness. “We want to deepen our
children’s commitment to Judaism,” Rabbi Knapp said. “That is our primary goal.
At the same time, our unique engagement with the broader community is important
as well. We continue to emphasize to the children what it means to be a citizen
of this country. There is a tendency to be insular,” but the school does not
give into it, valuing pride and knowledge over knee-jerk tribalism. Barbara
Frohlich of Teaneck loves Yavneh. She sits on its board, she has sent her
children there, and she has watched it change and grow. “I have been active in
the forefront of Yavneh for just about 40 years,” she said. When her oldest
daughter began at the school, when she was 3 1/2, Ms. Frohlich, who was 24,
quickly became involved. That was due mainly to Irving Gelman, a man whose name
is mentioned, with reverence, by many people who talk about Yavneh. He was one
of those men who formed the institutions that now are so natural a part of our
surroundings that it is hard to imagine that they have not existed since
creation. “There was a group of men in their 60s, who created so many
institutions, including the JCC, and including Yavneh,” she said. “And then
there was a big gap. Irving — who was a legend, and an inspiration — saw that
gap and realized it had to be filled, if we were to have any kind of future. So
he took people like me, in our 20s — I became a vice president right away, at
24.” It was Mr. Gelman who taught her to fund-raise, she said. “When we decided
we were going to buy the building, we raised all the money,” she said. “We’d go
out to two or three families a night, and ask them for money personally.” The
school was different then, she said. It was less professionalized. “Lay leaders
really had to do everything. When we moved, we lay leaders physically moved
things. We’d literally put things on the truck. There was food in the freezer,
and we knew that it would be a while before there would be a freezer in the new
school, so we put the food in our own freezer. “People say I bleed Yavneh, I am
so committed to the school,” Ms. Frohlich continued. “I truly feel that we have
an obligation to give back — and what better or more appropriate place to give
our energy than the institution that is providing our children with the
foundation they need for the future?” When it comes to giving back, she
continued, no matter what school your child goes to, “that child’s schools
should be your first and top priority. I have four children — Gayle, Elana,
Michael, and Daniel — and they are each in different places, educationally and
religiously, but the education they received at Yavneh was second to none. “It
gave them the foundation to accomplish anything they wanted. I am a very proud
former parent of Yavneh, and I would choose Yavneh again if I were at that
crossroad.”
