Bergen County's Jewish high schools seeing record numbers of applicants

At an Oct. 29 open house for prospective students at Torah Academy of Bergen County, a standing-room-only crowd of more than 600 eighth-grade boys and their parents poured through the front doors of the newly renovated high school. The traffic into the Teaneck campus was so heavy that student volunteers stood in the rain directing cars to parking spots.

Several blocks away, on the same day, an overflow crowd of nearly 900 eighth-graders and their parents packed into Ma'ayanot High School for Girls, breaking what the school said was its record for an open-house turnout.

And the Frisch School in Paramus says it has had a record number of applicants from Bergen County and beyond in recent years. They expect this year to be similar.

With large eighth-grade classes graduating from eight area Jewish day schools, and more students matriculating from outside North Jersey, there are concerns that Jewish high schools won't be able to accommodate all the applicants.

"We've seen at least a 38 percent growth in the number of eighth-graders graduating yeshiva day schools in Bergen County over the past 10 years," said Lisa Glass, chief planning officer at Jewish Federation of Northern Jersey. "There is now a capacity issue. We need more high school seats for more students."

Embracing demand

Tikvah Wiener of Teaneck is attempting to capitalize on that demand. Wiener is leading the launch of a new Jewish high school called The Idea School — Idea being an acronym for Innovation, Design, Entrepreneurship and the Arts.

The school on Nov. 12 held an open house, which drew about 150 parents and students who participated in hands-on activities and sat in on model classes, such as an integrated humanities/Jewish history class that asked students to create a memorial for enslaved people and the Holocaust. Applications are being accepted for September 2018 for the school, which is searching for a facility in Bergen County.

Jewish high schools are booming in Bergen County. There are four in the Teaneck vicinity, but Lubavitch on the Palisades in Tenafly plans to open a new high school in about two years, and Naaleh High School for Girls (which will operate out of a Ridgewood synagogue) and The Idea School are opening next September. Torah Academy, which has 351 students, is considering options for growth to accommodate the rising number of applicants.

A small but growing faction of the Orthodox community also sends their children to Teaneck public schools. There are no figures available on how many students are Orthodox, but the number is significant enough that the district offers a kosher meal plan and an Israel Club at its high school.

Maury Litwak of the Orthodox Union in New York said he sees a correlation between the high birthrate in the Jewish community and the growth of the yeshiva day schools, which provide a rigorous dual curriculum of Judaic studies — such as Bible and Jewish history — and a secular education.

"In a strong Jewish community, a yeshiva day school is considered a must," Litwak said. "It's something that is part of raising Jewish children."

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While no hard statistics exist on North Jersey's Orthodox population, Jewish institutions and longtime residents say the observant communities around Teaneck, Bergenfield, Fair Lawn and Englewood have been growing over the past four decades. In the early 1970s, Teaneck had only one Orthodox synagogue, and there was one elementary school and one high school nearby. Today, Teaneck has nearly 20 Orthodox synagogues, and locally, there are eight yeshiva day schools and four high schools.

"Bergen County is now the place to go for Jewish school," said Rabbi Daniel Alter, principal of the Moriah School in Englewood. "There are students from other communities like Monsey and Riverdale [in New York] who commute here for school."

A larger picture

North Jersey is part of a larger picture. A 2014 survey conducted by the Avi Chai Foundation, which releases a census of Jewish day schools every five years, found that nationwide enrollment in Jewish schools had grown by 37 percent since 1998 and 12 percent since 2009, with 255,000 students enrolled in kindergarten through Grade 12. The survey also found that 59 more schools had opened since the study conducted five years earlier. The survey found that much of the growth was fueled by Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox students.

"In communities that are growing, you tend to have growing day schools. That's what's happening in Bergen County, where many families are moving in," said Yossi Prager, the executive director of Avi Chai of North America, a foundation that aims to perpetuate the Jewish people by supporting programs in North America and Israel.

In all, 37 states have Jewish day schools, with the greatest concentration in the New York-New Jersey area, where nearly 200,000 students are enrolled in Jewish schools, according to the report.

While most of the students come from modern Orthodox families, some of the day schools, such as Solomon Schechter Day School of Bergen County in New Milford, draw from Conservative, Reform and other Jewish movements, Prager said. Schechter does not have a high school, so some of its students end up in Orthodox high schools.

Prager said schools in Bergen County tend to be more innovative and less cookie-cutter. "You have different niches that offer different products and ideas," he said. "Each of these schools target a somewhat different population within the community. This way, parents have a greater degree of choice." What they have in common is that nearly all of their graduates attend colleges, and many pursue graduate degrees and professional careers.

The Idea School's mission is to incorporate students' creativity and talents into the curriculum, and to teach through project-based learning.

"I want my students to be curious and excited about learning, the way they are when they are really young and they bother you with a million questions," said Wiener. "Why does that stop?"

The nightly three-hour (or more) grind of homework has been shown to have a negative effect on the mental health of children, Wiener said. So does a lack of sleep. The Idea School will have a later start time of 8:30 to better accommodate the sleep cycle of teens.

"I look at kids today and I see high levels of anxiety and depression," said Wiener, the onetime chief academic officer at the Magen David High School in Brooklyn and former English Department chairwoman at the Frisch School. "I feel we are failing them."

Growth of choice

The area has clearly come a long way from 1973, when Steve and Pesh Katz moved into Teaneck.

"Our choices were limited," said Steve Katz, a retired college professor, adding that the Moriah School was the only local yeshiva day school, and Frisch was the sole local Jewish high school.

In the decades since, he's watched as his hometown has blossomed into a thriving community with numerous synagogues, kosher eateries, a mikvah (ritual bath) and an eruv.

As a community activist who was instrumental in the founding of several Jewish schools, he's gratified that his son, Teaneck Deputy Mayor Elie Katz, had tough choices to make when picking a school for his own children.

The Torah Academy, which Steve Katz helped establish and which had only 25 students when Elie was a student there, is now bursting at the seams.

"I never would have foreseen this growth," Katz said. "You come here and you plant a seed, and now there's a whole group of flowers."