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March 12, 2004/Adar 19 5764, Vol. 56, No. 25
Preschool priorityEditorialIn recent years, the local Jewish community has devoted marketing and money to promote day school education. And the results have been positive.What about our Jewish children too young to attend day schools? As Beth Olson's Page 10 feature this week reveals, nearly twice as many children are enrolled in a dozen local Jewish early childhood centers than in our five Jewish day schools, which serve children in grades kindergarten through 12. Talk about critical mass. We need to make certain it is a community value, a priority and affordable for every family. Through Jewish preschool education, our children learn to be proud and positive, confident and comfortable about being Jews. They make Jewish friends and learn to define themselves by who they are, rather than by who they are not. Jewish preschools also provide an avenue for becoming part of the Jewish community. The time that parents enroll a child in a Jewish preschool often represents their first involvement with the organized Jewish community since they themselves were children. And once they connect, they frequently choose to become part of the community - establishing friendships with other parents as their children build connections with one another. Jewish early education also forces parents to become better educated themselves. They learn Jewish lessons from their children, and they are compelled to seek answers to their children's "Jewish" questions. In the process, they reinforce at home the lessons their children learn in school. What a beautiful unintended benefit of early childhood education: parents and children strengthening one another's Jewish identities. Get it?When did you get the Purim joke?Did the multi-colored "Jewish News" masthead and "Just for Purim" headline on last week's front page give it away? Or was it the altered photo of President George Bush as an ultra-Orthodox Jew - with black hat and full beard - praying at the Kotel? Or was it Mel Gibson's father denying the existence of gravity and a round earth? (OK, that one could be true.) Was it Mormons declaring the Salt Lake to be a giant mikvah and converting en masse to Judaism? Or was it the fantasy that officials at a local community agency, upon discovering a "bookkeeping error," decided to cancel their annual campaign - and instead devote their fund-raising energies to saving the whales? We chose to take a break from the weekly gloom and doom of the real world, to have some Purim fun. We'll be doing it again next Purim. Be prepared! |
