When Ruth Jampel goes into mainstream schools to talk about Judaism, she often starts by a showing a gallery of different Jewish faces. There’s one in particular that usually elicits a gasp of surprise: the American rapper, Drake.

“‘Drake’s Jewish?’ they say. It’s a big thing,” she says.

It’s a simple way to illustrate that diversity exists among Jews, just as it does among every group. Her gallery includes a picture of her Chasidic sister, beside a beshtreimelled husband.

For eight years since setting up her company Judaism for Schools, the itinerant teacher has been visiting schools across the capital and beyond to talk about Jewish custom and practice.

Her work was recently recognised with a community award from the Faith & Belief Forum. At the award ceremony, a woman from Stamford Hill said to her, “No one knows anything about us”. 

But Ms Jampel begs to differ. “People are interested in us. They have misconceptions, but why wouldn’t they, because there aren’t many of us?” Children, she says “really like learning about other faiths.”

A former primary teacher who taught outside the Jewish sector, save for a couple of terms at Wolfson Hillel in Enfield, she went on to work as a freelance educator for the Jewish Museum in London, sometimes teaching 300 children a day in workshops. But she saw there was an opportunity to go out to schools rather than expect them to come in. “If you are in Hammersmith, you are not going to shlep over to Camden,” she says.

The Muswell Hill United Synagogue member now visits 70 to 80 schools a year, most of them primary and threequarters in London. Many are regulars, inviting her back annually. She travels to Kent and Surrey and sometimes further afield. “My most exotic [destination] has been the Isle of Wight.”

Her schedule ranges from a half day, starting with an assembly and then sessions with a few year groups, to a fuller, two-day programme. If she is out of town, she’ll often stay overnight so she can get in to school early next morning.

While these days we are preoccupied with rising antisemitism, she is at pains to point out “I don’t get much negativity from students at all”. She is aware that it is a self-selecting group of schools that open their door to her — and who are willing to pay, which given the pressures on schools budgets, is no small thing.

Religious education remains part of the statutory curriculum even for sixthformers and children are meant to know something about the main faiths in the UK besides Christianity. “In lots of secular schools, teachers are wary of teaching religion because they are scared of getting things wrong.” And while textbooks and videos can help introduce a subject, there is no substitute for a living representative of a faith who can field questions from inquiring young minds.

“It’s fun what I do,” she says. “They don’t write things down — they make a candle, they eat food, they draw a mezuzah, they try on a tallit.” 

Ruth Jampel

Ruth Jampel receiving her community award from the Faith & Belief Forum

Many of her schools are Catholic, which reflects the Church’s commitment to put centuries of antisemitic teaching behind it and instead encourage understanding of Judaism — an example, she observes, that progressive change is possible; in Catholic secondary schools, the second religion taught for GCSE is Judaism.

Such was the level of attention to detail that at one Catholic school, they asked her to demonstrate how the baby was brought in for a brit using a doll.

Catholic schools don’t only take Catholic children; she has seen a rising number of pupils from Africa. “There are a lot of Eritrean and Ethiopian Coptic Orthodox children in Catholic schools.” They wear white prayer shawls in church, girls swathing them around their head. “They don’t eat ham, or bacon, or pork. They have names like Kadosh or Shalom.”

“Embedded in all my sessions is referring to commonalities. For example, when I do a session on synagogues, I will say in a synagogue and a mosque you won’t see any pictures of people, you won’t see any statues. Or on kashrut, I will ask what kind of meat do many Jewish people and many Muslim people not eat.”

Making these connections is often easier in London which is, she says, “a faith city”. “When you’re with Catholic or Muslim children, you can ask can you think of a time when you might give up a certain kind of food. They’ll say Lent or Ramadan.” That can be harder in a school with a largely secular pupil body.

But as evidence of interest in Judaism, she cites a secular academy in Daventry with a predominantly white pupil population, which chose to learn about “Jewish values” for its year-7 tutor groups during the Christmas term.

After her session, a couple of the few Muslim pupils in the school were keen to approach her. “They wanted to make a connection with someone who was different, who they could relate to.” 

It is an experience repeated elsewhere. “At one school, one of the Muslim students at the end said to me, ‘You don’t celebrate Christmas, do you?’ And I said, ‘Personally, I don’t’. And she said, ‘We don’t, either’. Another Muslim child thought that a mezuzah was a really good idea and said, ‘We should have one’.”

Sometimes her sessions uncover a Jewish connection off the beaten track. When her husband came to collect her at the end of her Isle of Wight visit, he noticed one of the pupils giving the Shabbat candle they had made in class to an adult, whom he overhead saying, “Grandma is a little bit Jewish”.

On another occasion, a girl brought in a mezuzah and explained, “My mum was Jewish.” And poignantly, a little girl recently gave “me a little piece of paper folded up and said, ‘This is from my daddy’. I opened it up and it read, ‘Willy Stern, Bergen-Belsen survivor, died of Covid, aged 84’.”

“I think lots of people want repositories for their stories and they want to make a connection. People might have lived next door to someone Jewish and wanted to share that,” she says. “In one of my schools, a teacher — who obviously grew up in Stamford Hill and was a Shabbos goy —loves telling her children those stories each time I am in.”

In one school, a headteacher of the school always attends her session because he had a friend who was Jewish. In another, one teacher came up to her, like the neighbour in Friday Night Dinner, and said, “I just want to say Shalom.”

With younger children, she’ll get asked questions like, “What would happen if I didn’t wear a kippah or if I did touch a Torah?”

But among older groups, she will encourage them to shed their inbition and invite questions that can help her correct misconceptions about Jews. In one North London school where a majority of pupils came from another borough, Hackney, one wanted to know why Orthodox Jews in Stamford Hill were all rich. “Why do you think that?” she said. “Because they wear suits,” the pupil replied. Another wondered if they kept money under their hats.

Sometimes the misimpression might be more subtle. Among the objects she will bring in are football-themed kippot. “I’ve got a Liverpool one, a Manchester United one. I heard [a teacher] say, ‘You know what isn’t here, is the Jewish football team’. I said I guess you’re talking about Spurs. I told him, ‘Jewish people support the teams where they live’.” 

While his remark was friendly, it was still perpetuating a stereotypical notion, she felt. “Spurs are no more Jewish than Arsenal or Chelsea these days.”