By the time I entered the elementary school I attended, it had been around for nearly 50 years and was already in decline. Despite the challenges, there were two things which left a lasting impression. The Jewish studies, which occupied the first half of the day, were all conducted in Hebrew, Ivrit beIvrit; some of the teachers were dedicated, die-hard Hebraists who provided me with a very solid foundation. The Hebrew that I learned gave me access to Israeli songs popularized after the Six-Day War and to classic Jewish texts—the siddur, Humash, and even to Gemara (yes, Aramaic and Hebrew are closely connected). The language enabled me to act as a translator when my father’s cousin came to visit from Israel, and even enabled me, years later, to attend a regular Israeli yeshiva—in Hebrew.

In Jewish schools across the Diaspora, Hebrew instruction has long oscillated between two poles. On the one hand, Hebrew is a language of identity, emotion, and connection to the Jewish people and the State of Israel; on the other, it is a subject that struggles to justify its place alongside disciplines perceived as “core” and academically prestigious. As the head of the Hebrew department and a teacher in a Jewish–Zionist school, I have often found myself asking: Is my role to respond to the shifting expectations of students, parents, and political contexts, or to articulate and uphold a clear educational vision—even at the cost of friction, increased workload, and systemic challenge?

A few days after October 7, I received an email from the parent of one of my students. The message itself was simple: a link to a video of the prayer for the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces, set to music. But it was the words, written by the student, that stayed with me:

I’m sure you’ll like this video because you are Israeli. It’s a good song, very encouraging. I hope Hashem will watch over all our soldiers and bring them home safely so there will be peace.

Ivrit beIvrit has long been a central pillar of what we believe in. I know that there are fewer schools doing that today than there were twenty years ago, for sure, but it’s still something that’s very important to us. So the first thing is that if we want to do it properly, it’s probably good to have people who speak Ivrit as their native language. It’s not the only way to do it, but I believe that it is certainly the best way. Many years ago, I taught at the Yeshivah of Flatbush. I was not a native Hebrew speaker, but I think that I was pretty good. Nonetheless, it is much better for students to interact regularly with those for whom Hebrew is native. So, over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve brought in more and more shelihim.

Despite significant growth across nearly all curricular areas in recent decades, Hebrew language instruction remains a persistent challenge in many Jewish day schools. While schools throughout the diaspora have sought to address this issue by employing shelihim from Israel, this model has raised ongoing concerns, including a lack of continuity due to frequent staff turnover, uneven pedagogical training, differing cultural assumptions about teaching and learning, and questions of quality control. At the Moriah School (Englewood, NJ), these long-standing concerns converged with a broader question that many school communities face…

One of the major challenges in the diaspora today is dealing with the question, “Why Hebrew?” I think it is fairly clear to everyone why one needs to engage with Jewish content—in some schools they call it Judaic studies, in some schools they define it differently—but everyone understands clearly that a Jewish school must have a connection to Judaism. But regarding Hebrew, there are currently many very large question marks. My “I believe,” and it is mine alone, is that we teach Hebrew for two reasons. First, because Hebrew is part of the Jewish world. Hebrew cannot be separated from all of Jewish history. Hebrew is the most basic value of Judaism. That is to say, in my view, Hebrew is what unites Judaism in all its varieties, from the most secular Judaism to the most Orthodox Judaism…

The story of our model begins with the Israeli community in Silicon Valley. With the move of the Jewish Community Center (JCC) in Palo Alto to its new home, a first-of-its-kind department was established: the ICC – Israel Cultural Center. The goal was clear: to draw the local Israeli community to the campus and to make Hebrew classes a central anchor.

Last summer at Camp Yavneh, a group of Israeli staff members arrived late, delayed by the conflict with Iran. As they walked into the heder okhel, someone put on Od Yoter Tov by Uri Davidi. Soon after, campers spontaneously stood, singing and dancing in Hebrew to welcome Israelis they had never met. Most couldn’t tell you what every word meant. But something in that room transcended vocabulary.

That moment crystallized a question I had about the place of Hebrew in Jewish education: What if we’ve been focusing on the wrong thing in teaching Hebrew?

The events of October 7 and what followed were a rupture whose impact still echoes through everything. Not only were my senses of security trust, and faith shaken so much that it was difficult for me to stand in the classroom and teach “as usual,” my students in distant and safe Northern California also felt that something had broken. In the first days after the massacre, students told me that for the first time in their lives they were being exposed to manifestations of antisemitism and feared for their personal safety, or for their family’s highly visibly Jewish business. I was stunned by the fact that even in the small Jewish high school where I teach (180 students), students, faculty members, and their families personally knew hostages, survivors, soldiers, and fallen victims.

In recent years, we have found ourselves returning to a question that feels both old and new: If early Zionist thinkers believed that reviving Hebrew could reshape Jewish life, how might they have imagined teaching it in communities far from the land where it would be revived? We are not historians of Zionist pedagogy, and we do not pretend to reconstruct their educational blueprints. But reading figures such as Ze’ev Jabotinsky alongside other early-twentieth-century voices forces us to pause and plan intentionally. For them, Hebrew was never meant to function merely as a school subject. It was imagined as atmosphere, as music, as discipline, as shared inheritance. It was something that would seep into consciousness and form character.

For nearly eight decades, the King David Schools in Johannesburg have constituted a network of Jewish schools operating under the auspices of the South African Board of Jewish Education. The network includes four campuses and offers co-educational education from preschool through high school; today, approximately 2,700 students study there and approximately 385 teachers teach there. The schools operate in an Orthodox-traditional spirit, while remaining open to and welcoming students from diverse Jewish families. Alongside high-quality general education, significant emphasis is placed on Hebrew and Jewish studies, as part of an educational outlook that sees language, tradition, and the connection to the State of Israel as central components of students’ identity.

Shinshin is short for shenat sherut, a year of service. It is a year of volunteer work that some Israelis do before they start the army. Most people do their sherut in Israel, volunteering in lots of different places, but some of us choose to go overseas to work in schools or Jewish communities where we think that we can help build bridges between Jewish communities around the world and Israel. I got placed in Detroit, where I did most of my work at Frankel Jewish Academy, the high school. I also did some teaching in a Sunday school with younger kids and with a synagogue.

Ben Porat Yosef (BPY) is an Early Childhood-8th grade Modern Orthodox yeshiva day school (Paramus, NJ). The school was founded 25 years ago, initially as a Sephardic educational institution, and shortly thereafter shifting to our current model as a dual-curriculum Sephardic and Ashkenazic school, where students who hail from either heritage and tradition are welcomed and celebrated. Moreover, the educational program trains our students in the laws, customs, and culture of the varied Sephardic and Ashkenazic traditions.

In supplemental school settings, there is so much for our students to learn in so little time. With a focus on learning Jewish traditions and preparing for Benei Mitzvah services, students often interact with Hebrew as an ancient language used in prayer and the Torah. It can be challenging for educators to allocate additional preparation and class time for students to experience Hebrew as a modern, spoken language.

Over the past several years, I’ve found myself in the same conversation again and again with teachers, department chairs, and school leaders who care deeply about Hebrew but feel stuck. Not stuck because of a lack of passion, and not even because of a lack of resources, but because of something harder to name: a lack of shared clarity.

The transformations of the 21st century bring with them fundamental changes in the way we understand second language acquisition processes. Social, cultural, and economic shifts are creating a reality in which intercultural and multilingual interactions are becoming central to our daily lives. In this reality, researchers and educators who teach languages are called upon to be attentive and open to change, and to adapt instruction to evolving contexts, to prepare learners to navigate a complex and unpredictable world. 

When very young children interact with their favorite stories, they embark on an exciting journey of early literacy. They naturally love to pick up books, enthusiastically flip through the pages, point out characters by name, and label the actions happening on each page. Through joyful repetition, like mimicking the sounds of a word or rhythmically naming colors, children rapidly build their vocabulary and develop print awareness. They begin to recognize that the world around them is filled with words, and they master physical skills like directionality, quickly learning to turn an upside-down book so that it is right-side-up.

Imagine a Jewish day school that identifies Torah as a core value they seek to inculcate in their students as both a body of knowledge and a lens through which to see life. In such a school, it would be reasonable to expect to see the word “Torah” in the mission statements of the schools, represented in word and image in important locations around the building, and referenced at key gatherings of the community. One would never imagine that Torah would only be referenced in the Jewish studies courses or modeled solely by the Jewish studies faculty. For Torah to be a lived value, students would need to encounter it throughout the day and throughout the building, informing how they treat one another and how they help build a living Jewish community in school in ways that then spill over into their broader lives.

The events of October 7 and their aftermath marked a turning point in how the role of Hebrew language educators in the Diaspora is understood. Before then, their responsibilities were largely defined in linguistic terms: teaching Hebrew and fostering communicative competence within the cultural framework of its native speakers. Yet the events of that Simhat Torah reverberated far beyond Israel, affecting Jewish communities worldwide and significantly expanding the perceived scope of Hebrew teachers’ professional responsibilities.

When I first came to New Jersey from Israel, I was a young mother with experience teaching in a public school in Israel and, I confess, a little naive. I was born, raised, and educated in a traditional, non-religious community and came with a very simple vision for my professional path. I came to teach Hebrew in an American Jewish day school. I would speak only Hebrew, never English. I would create a curriculum that consists of classic Israeli poems and songs, a few short stories, and some clear and simple grammar charts. I really believed that if I did all of those things well enough, I’d excite my students and make them fall in love with my mother tongue, and… the fluency would follow.