Though some secular parents criticize the Montessori schools as expensive and elitist, too unstructured or even cultish, the philosophy of allowing children to learn at their own pace and develop personal responsibility through individual learning tasks gels well with the Jewish tenet of educating each child according to his or her own way, its advocates say.

“We’re not just educating for academics, we’re trying to bring the child for God,” said Yocheved Sidof, the executive director at Lamplighters. “It’s all one world.” (Chabad-Lubavitchers also embrace the Montessori method because the movement’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, endorsed it before his death in 1994.)

The interest in the Montessori method reflects what some Jewish educators say is a broader trend toward innovation and opening up to the secular world. Once focused on perpetuating Jewish religious identity, educators, like the leaders of the Solomon Schechter Conservative school network, are adopting buzz words like “engagement” and “cosmopolitanism,” said Benjamin M. Jacobs, a professor of Jewish studies at New York University.

The economic downturn prompted soul-searching about the high cost of most Jewish day schools, which are concerned about losing students to public schools, other private schools or new alternatives like Montessori or Hebrew charter schools, Professor Jacobs said. Day-school tuitions can be $15,000 to $20,000 per child — or higher in the New York area — and Jewish Montessoris seem comparably priced. Lamplighters’ yearly elementary school tuition for new families is $12,000; Luria’s is about $15,000 a year depending on the age of the child.

“There are a ton of people out there who think they’re too stifling, who want their kids to have a broader perspective on the world,” Professor Jacobs said of the traditional schools. The question is, he said, how are students “going to be served, Jewish educationally, so that they could still want to quote on quote ‘stay in the fold,’ but have their differing, more contemporary needs met?”

A founder of Luria, Sam Boymelgreen, grew up ultra-Orthodox but now identifies as “open Orthodox.” Recalling that he “spent a lot of time sleeping at my desk” as a student, he said he started the school after finding that there were few options in Brooklyn for parents looking for progressive, yet Jewish educations.

Luria may embrace diversity, but many new Jewish Montessoris are the only such schools in town and draw a heterogeneous array of students by accident.