Back to Basics

Earlier this year, Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs announced it will kick off 2025 by investing $4 million in Project Aleph Bet, a new initiative designed to boost enrollment in Jewish day schools in the United States. The original sum, officials said, was supposed to be larger, but more than a year of war and hundreds of thousands of displaced citizens led to budgetary constraints. And yet, the government decided to proceed with the initiative. It was, Paul Bernstein, the CEO of the Jewish day school group Prizmah, told eJewishphilanthropy, an important message and statement that the Jewish state was doubling down on Jewish education worldwide, seeing it as a crucial priority.

Among the grant’s chief recipients is Tamim Academy. Launched in 2020 with four schools—in Greenwich, Connecticut; Burlington, Vermont; Boca Raton, Florida; and Manhattan’s Upper West Side—the Chabad-affiliated network continued to grow rapidly, COVID be damned. It has since quadrupled in size, with 16 active schools and counting. Best of all, Tamim set up shop in cities not exactly known as hotbeds of traditional Jewish life, including Austin, Texas, and Salt Lake City, Utah.

It was designed to do just that. While each school is individually and independently run, operations—from lesson plans and curriculum design to teacher training and administrative support—are handled by the organization’s headquarters. This gives smaller Jewish communities that otherwise wouldn’t have had the resources to launch such an initiative the support and infrastructure to run a full-blown school. The unique franchise model has made Tamim one of the fastest-growing and most successful recent experiments in Jewish education, one that attracts Jews from all levels of observance.

When I visited the Upper West Side school recently, I was surprised—and delighted—to see children from a wide array of diverse backgrounds that don’t often cohabitate, even in the most robustly pluralistic institutions. Tzitzit and Taylor Swift T-shirts, long skirts and New York Mets-themed yarmulkes—the children were playing and learning together, occasionally breaking off into small groups that reflected their level of proficiency in a given subject.

This spirit, a charming hybrid of Montessori-style progressive education and Chabad’s joyous approach to Judaism, was born from the recognition that something was amiss in Jewish education.

Coming up with this approach, explained Bryna Leider, Tamim’s chief impact officer, was a matter of studying the past century of education—identifying strong models as well as their downsides, and mixing and matching to fill gaps. American Jewish education, she explained, focused on instilling the basics of Jewish life in Talmud Torahs set up for students who attended public school. A few generations later, the community, now feeling comfortable and firmly rooted in the United States, shifted its attention to texts, creating schools that were strong on academic excellence and religious literacy.

“But when you’re so focused on text and books, you sometimes lose the soul of those texts and books,” said Leider. “You won’t get as much out of them when you’re simply treating them the same way you would a novel.” A new approach was needed, she added, and that new approach involved doubling down on that most elusive—and most critical—component of any educational philosophy.

“Our driving force, really, is love,” Leider said. The school, she added, had a very strong viewpoint, one rooted in traditional Judaism. But that, she said, in no way meant imposing strictures.

“Our families,” Leider explained, “practice Judaism differently, but there’s never shaming. We’re not into finger-waving. We’re here for everyone, for all Jewish people. We love everyone the same. And that’s why Holly decided to work with Chabad: She felt like they had a very clear direction but also a strong sense of love and inclusion.”

The Holly in question is Holly Cohen, Tamim’s founder. Having previously spent more than a decade as the executive director of a family foundation dedicated to improving Jewish day schools, she had an opportunity to study everything and anything that makes them tick. Her insight came down to one simple idea: Instead of obsessing over how to fix schools, we should spend more time thinking about what children need in order to learn. When it came to day schools, the answer was as stark as it was plain: Children needed transcendence.

“We don’t see general studies and Judaic studies as two separate and siloed practices,” Cohen said. “We believe they both come from the same exact place: We want each child to have a constructive, lifelong relationship with HaShem and to understand that this relationship is the foundation for everything we learn, be it a page of Torah or a scientific formula. Because as our name, Tamim, or Hebrew for ‘whole,’ suggests, we believe that a child is a whole human being, and asking him or her to think of every subject matter separately doesn’t make for great education.”

A recent lesson proved Cohen’s point beautifully. A teacher was talking to a group of kindergartners about Pesach Sheni, the holiday we celebrate a month after Passover to give those who were unable to partake in the original festivity a chance to do so. It was decreed when a group of Israelites, unable to meet the stringent rules of purity at the time of the Exodus, appealed to Moses and asked for another chance at Judaism’s seminal holiday. After sharing the details of the story in a straightforward, clear way, the teacher began to pick it apart and bring it closer to the children’s world. What were these Israelites doing? They were advocating for themselves. They felt the situation was unjust and set out to find a solution. This is called a growth mindset. Accepting the status quo would have been a fixed mindset. The students then sorted other examples of growth and fixed mindsets and shared from their own experiences, making Cohen’s point that children learn best when everything they learn relates not only to their own experiences but also to some higher sense of virtue and purpose.

It doesn’t take an Orthodox Jew to realize the profundity of this insight: Dr. Lisa Miller, who runs Columbia University’s Spirituality Mind Body Institute, argues in her research that human beings are hardwired to have a “personal transcendent relationship” with some sort of higher power, a relationship that gives us a sense of purpose in the world and motivates us to learn and achieve more. Children who enjoy this sort of spirituality, Dr. Miller found, are remarkably less likely to engage in risky sexual behavior, abuse substances, or display signs of depression; instead, they often demonstrate signs of thriving, from personal happiness to academic excellence.

“The Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of blessed memory, taught that contrary to conventional perspective, which regards children as potential human beings who do not reach their full worth until maturity, Jewish tradition perceives children as worthy and deserving of our greatest resources of time and energy,” Cohen said. “At Tamim, the education is robust because we are creating Temimim, because every child, mind, body, and soul, is an entire world.”

“I firmly believe that anything is possible and that change is not always predictable or linear,” Cohen continued. “We’ve got our proof of concept. Now, we scale. How many schools can we build in the next decade? The moon shot is 100 or more in North America, and then there’s the rest of the planet!” Cohen and her team are on a mission. “We’re making our next generation invincible the old-fashioned way, the Jewish way, through education,” she said. “That’s how we protect our kids, ourselves, and our future.”