News of the imminent demise of Immanuel College made the national press last week with one reporting it to be one of the UK’s “only Jewish private schools”. That is not quite the case.
While Immanuel is unique as the only Jewish equivalent of an English public school and there are two Jewish prep schools, in fact most Jewish schools in the country are private, catering mostly for Charedi children.
Some of these are very small, with only a few dozen pupils. How some survive is a miracle as many parents cannot afford fees. But it would be unthinkable for any Charedi child to be left without a Jewish education. The sector is supported by generous benefactors, whose investment, in terms of Jewish continuity, has been repaid many times over as the Charedi population continues to grow.
Now the wider Jewish community is facing a test of its commitment to Jewish education with the crisis over Immanuel. To what extent is there a communal obligation to support up to 300 or so children from the college who do not have a Jewish school to go to?
Of course, Jewish education is a personal responsibility, as we recite daily in the Shema, “And you shall teach your children…” The home remains vital to the transmission of Jewish values and practice. But most of us outsource the acquisition of knowledge and skills - Hebrew reading or the study of Chumash - to community institutions, whether schools or chedarim.
Which is what our ancestors did long ago. The sages laid down that a teacher should be installed in every city. Originally, the rabbis said formal education should begin at 16 or 17. But Rabbi Yehoshua Ben Gamla, who might be said to be the father of Jewish schooling, said it should happen much earlier and children should begin at six or seven.
The collective responsibility to support education was forcefully emphasised in the Shulchan Aruch, the Code of Jewish Law, centuries later, which said that in any city which did not have a teacher, the people were to be excommunicated and if they still did not appoint one, the city should be destroyed.
In the 18th century, the first Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, wrote: “Our sages ordered that the teachers of young children should be paid by communal funds for all the children in the town alike, whether rich or poor.”
The practice in his time, he noted, was for individuals to pay for their own child if they could afford to but if they could not, “the community is required to pay”.
Rabbi Michael Pollak, of the recently formed Jewish Ethics Project, cites an anecdote about the Chatam Sofer, Rabbi Moses Schreiber, in the 19th century. A wealthy man complained that a school had moved in next door to his expensive apartment and the noise of the children at their lessons disturbed him.
The Chatam Sofer, invoking Yeshoshua ben Gamla’s principle, responded: "Education is a communal responsibility. Some contribute by teaching, some by learning, some by donating money and some by having to listen to children learning out loud!”
Last year, in the first report of his Schools Review, the Chief Rabbi, Sir Ephraim Mirvis wrote: “Our obligation to educate applies to us individually and also collectively as a community.” The community should take responsibility “by building and maintaining outstanding Jewish schools”.
If existing Jewish state schools could take all the Immanuel children who wanted to go, there would not be a problem. But most are oversubscribed and spare places seem likely to be few and far between.
But what if one of the schools were to respond: “We would be prepared to take a bulge class of Immanuel children, but we don’t have the space. We could house them in a Portakabin for a year, but we would need a more permanent extension”? Would there not be a case for an emergency appeal?
Alternatively, if groups of Immanuel children were to find a home in other, non-Jewish, public schools, might there not be a responsibility to support some Jewish tuition for them in that setting?
Consider the predicament of one Immanuel mother with a child in year 7. Last year their application to three Jewish state schools was unsuccessful and they would have been stranded had Immanuel not come to the rescue with the offer of a bursary.
All her children have been in Jewish education, from nursery onward. The family are active members of the United Synagogue.
Her situation exposes what might seem an anomaly in the current application system to Jewish state schools – in which to meet the religious eligibility criteria of some of them, a child simply needs to attend synagogue for a few times in the preceding year. So the child of a family committed to Jewish education could end up without a place, whereas another whose parents have opted for a Jewish school simply because they believe it to be academically a better bet than local alternatives – and are not fussed about Jewish studies – is able to obtain one.
Whatever prompted parents to send their children to Immanuel College, they chose a Jewish education for them – and now face being deprived of it.
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