Non-Jews in ex-USSR seek Jewish schools
LEV KRICHEVSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
In the principal's office of a Jewish day school in Dnepropetrovsk, a mother is fighting to hold back tears.
"You cannot turn my son down," says the woman, who came to register her teenager for school in this Ukrainian city. "He will be a good student."
Grigoriy Skorokhod, principal at the Levi Yitzhak Schneerson School - which, with 630 students, is the largest Jewish day school in the former Soviet Union - later says he had a hard time explaining to the woman why her son couldn't be accepted.
"She didn't make a secret that her family had no Jewish connection whatsoever," says Skorokhod, sitting under two portraits: one of Leonid Kuchma, Ukraine's president at the time, and the other of the late Lubavitcher rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson.
"But she says ours was a very good school, and another foreign language wouldn't hurt her son anyway," Skorokhod says. "Jews are caring parents and their education cannot be bad. That's what she and other parents like her think."
Most of the Jewish day schools in the former Soviet Union register exclusively or predominantly those children who are Jewish according to Halacha, or Jewish law.
That's the official policy of all Chabad-run schools and schools that operate under the auspices of other Orthodox groups.
However, there is hardly a school in the area that doesn't have at least some non-Jewish students - not to mention children of mixed families who aren't halachically Jewish according to some because their mothers are not Jewish.
Not all schools are ready to face the issue openly, so some parents try hard to conceal the fact that they have no connection to Judaism - a huge irony in a country where generations of Jews tried to hide their Jewishness in order to get ahead.
Some schools have opened their doors to non-Jewish students because they can't enroll enough Jews to fill their classrooms.
"Many schools, especially in the smaller communities, have begun accepting non-Jews, primarily because of the lack of Jewish children," says Hana Rotman, a leading expert on Jewish education in the former Soviet Union and head of the St. Petersburg-based New Jewish School research center.
The number of Jewish schools in the former Soviet Union has grown exponentially in recent years - but, as in other countries, most Jewish children attend public schools. There are now nearly 100 Jewish schools with approximately 15,000 students in the former Soviet Union.
Jewish educators across the region have become accustomed to the fact that most Jewish and mixed families still prefer to send their children to non-Jewish public or private schools.
"Many Jews prefer to stay away from anything Jewish," says Dmitriy Tarnopolsky, Jewish community chairman in the Ukrainian city of Dneprodzerzhinsk, which has a Jewish day school operated by Chabad.
"They don't want to stick out, and there are plenty of mixed families with one non-Jewish parent against sending their child to a Jewish school," Tarnopolsky says.
"We have more new applications from non-Jews than from Jews, whom we usually have to persuade," he says.
The lack of Jewish kids is evident at Jewish Day School No. 41, a school for children in grades one to 11 in the western Ukrainian city of Chernovtsy - and the demographic situation, the result of a high rate of emigration and an aging community, isn't promising, principal Irina Savchuk says.
The 14-year-old school, one of the oldest in the former Soviet Union, receives municipal funding. As a result, it has to comply with government regulations that require a minimum number of children - often 25 - in each grade.
To meet that minimum and remain in operation, the school had to begin to accept non-Jewish students a few years ago.
Today at least one-third of the students are non-Jews, and the ratio is even higher in the primary school, Savchuk says.
Savchuk is not Jewish, although the principal she replaced a few years ago was.
In her school, all students are required to study Hebrew and Jewish history and tradition. Every boy is required to wear a yarmulke in classes on Jewish subjects.
"In our history lessons, non-Jewish students also say 'we' or 'our ancestors' when referring to the episodes from the Jewish past," says Savchuk, explaining that her goal is to maintain the Jewish character of the school despite the community's declining Jewish population.
It was natural for Savchuk to become the principal of a Jewish school, she said. She had many Jewish friends as she grew up and then went to work in this city, which until recently had a large Jewish community. Most of the local Jews immigrated to the United States and Israel between the late 1970s and today. The 1989 census registered 16,500 Jews, while the 2001 census counted slightly fewer than 1,500.
Because the issue is touchy in some schools, some parents try hard to conceal the fact that they have no connection to Judaism.
Some Jewish educators believe the influx of non-Jewish students in Jewish schools may not be a bad thing.
"This is the result of some positive stereotypes about Jews that many non-Jews share," such as the Jewish value on education, Skorokhod says.
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