First-ever Solomon Schechter day school in North America goes Orthodox

Students at Schechter Queens/Queens Hebrew Academy participate in school activities. (Courtesy Schechter Queens/Queens Hebrew Academy)

Some in the Queens Bukharian community have taken the renaming of the school as a sort of triumph over non-Orthodox religious ideology. Inaccurately saying that the school had been associated with Reform Judaism, an anonymous Instagram account that posts about happenings in the community posted, “The school is once again on the right path and the only way.”

The post garnered dozens of likes. But some responded lamenting the change. “Especially in these times, it is honestly beyond upsetting to see so many members of the Jewish community excited that anyone who isn’t Orthodox no longer has somewhere to send their kids in Queens,” wrote Sarah Schraeter, a Queens artist who said she had been considering the school for her 3-year-old child amid concerns about antisemitism in public schools.

Chazan emphasized that the school would continue to call itself a “day school,” which is used beyond Orthodoxy, rather than a “yeshiva.” She also said the school’s pivot toward Orthodoxy and away from Conservative Judaism shouldn’t be cause for a “victory lap” for anyone.

“The only reason [we are here today] is because of the success of the school for the first 68 years of its life, and because of the Conservative Jewish lay leaders and rabbis that felt they saw the need to have this school that was not a strictly Orthodox yeshiva, that was a day school that was more accepting of different religious practices,” Chazan said.

“We want it to be a smooth transition and evolution, rather than, ‘Goodbye, and here we are as a new entity,’” she added. “It’s important to me that the future generations of this school know the history and know why there’s a school there.”

For some observers of American Judaism, Schechter Queens’ renaming was in some ways inevitable.

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“American Jewry is diversifying demographically. It’s no longer the overwhelmingly Democratic and Eastern European community of my youth. Just look how many Queens Jews voted Trump,” Gil Troy, a Schechter graduate and American presidential historian, wrote in an essay about the school’s renaming. (The Republican presidential candidate drew more than 75% of the vote in the districts immediately surrounding the school in November’s election.)

Troy recalled portraying Haym Salomon, the Sephardic Jewish merchant who financed the Continental Congress during the Revolutionary War, in a fourth-grade play. He described a feeling of both Jewish and American identity, and a commitment to Zionist ideals, that he suggested are harder to come by in liberal Jewish denominations today.

“Today, Conservative Judaism, which thrived in a middle-class-oriented, temperamentally-moderate America, faces severe ideological, demographic and institutional challenges,” wrote Troy, who now lives in Israel and recently published a book called “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream.”

Chazan said the changes at the school were more practical than ideological.

“We had a choice,” she said. “We could either close, or we could evolve to meet the needs of the changing Jewish community. And we decided that it’s more important to provide a solid Jewish education to families in the area than to just stand on our laurels and say, ‘But we are a Conservative school.’”

Chazan is herself the parent of two Schechter graduates, the younger of whom finished eighth grade in 2013, and has long prayed in egalitarian synagogues in the area.

“It was very difficult for us to accept the fact that our community is no longer providing the students for the school,” she said. “We just needed to make these changes so that the community that makes up the vast majority of our families feels that they’re getting an authentic minyan, something that is meaningful to them, and that they’re in a school that makes sense to them.”

In Hollis Hills, where Chazan lives, her Bukharian neighbors have raised children who have now established their own families in the neighborhood.

“I realized that for years, white Ashkenazi Jews like me have been the majority, and that other people have had to try to fit into our mold — and now I have to fit into another mold,” Chazan said. “That’s just the way it goes: Evolve or die. I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I think this is the community of Jews that is thriving right now in this location.”

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Publish date : 2025-01-06 13:55:00

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