(New York Jewish Week) — The first sign that things were changing at Schechter Queens came when the school began receiving requests from parents to let students hold an Orthodox prayer service.
As the first Jewish day school named for Solomon Schechter, an influential rabbi in Conservative Judaism, Schechter Queens only offered egalitarian prayer, where boys and girls prayed together. But families at the school pressed for students to have the option to choose a non-egalitarian option.
That was seven years ago. After the Orthodox prayer service launched, it became so popular that only two students continued going to the traditional one, recalled the school’s principal, Rafi Kalman. It ended entirely.
Now, Schechter Queens has voted to rename itself, completely dropping the appellation associated with what was once the largest Jewish denomination in the United States. It will now be known as Queens Hebrew Academy, families were told last month.
“We’ve changed so much of what we do in the building that it’s confusing to still be called Schechter,” said Karen Chazan, a member of the board of trustees. “Parents who are looking for Schechter come to us and they’re not finding Schechter, and parents who think Schechter is not religious enough or not traditional enough for them are turning away because they think it’s too liberal for them.”
The changes at Schechter Queens reflect both demographic shifts in the school’s neighborhood and the diminishing potency of the Schechter brand, once synonymous with a thriving network of day schools.
About 465 students are enrolled at the school, Kalman said. He estimates that 90% of the students or more identify as Orthodox — in keeping with the school’s location in Kew Gardens Hills, a heart of Orthodoxy in New York City. Many of them come from the local Bukharian Jewish community, centered in the nearby neighborhoods of Forest Hills, Rego Park and Little Neck.
Around 50,000 Bukharian Jews, many from the former Soviet Union, live in New York City. Unlike Ashkenazi Jews who faced religious persecution and forced secularization during the Soviet era, Bukharian Jews, whose ancestry comes from the Bukhara region of Uzbekistan and incorporates some Persian Jewish traditions, were able to somewhat maintain their Jewish practice during the Soviet era. Their institutions tend to reflect Orthodox practice today.
“We don’t identify with denominations. We have people who [are] less observant, more observant,” said Manashe Khaimov, an adjunct professor of Bukharian history at Queens College and CEO of the Sephardi American Mizrahi Initiative. “But yet we are all — if we ever decide to go to synagogue or decide to do any Jewish ceremonies, there’s going to be an Orthodox standard.”
He added that some of the religious practices that have animated Conservative Judaism do not resonate with most Bukharians in the United States.
“A typical Bukharian … on the street, you ask them, ‘How do you feel about egalitarianism?’ they don’t even know what you mean,” Khaimov said. “But if you ask them, without using that terminology, saying, ‘Would you be OK [with] men and women to be praying together in the synagogue and counting for the minyan?’ the answer would be — it would be a foreign concept for them.”
Yet many of the Orthodox yeshivas in the area have faced criticism for prioritizing Jewish learning at the expense of English and math. “We lack good schools,” Khaimov said about Queens. “And Schechter is known for having very robust, at least, secular studies, and I think that’s why some Bukharians were attracted to that school in the first place.”
The school, originally called the Solomon Schechter School of Queens, opened in 1956, near the peak of Conservative Judaism in America. It boasted two separate buildings, and eventually consolidated into one building in 1965, a brochure for the school’s annual dinner in 2014 said. It was the first school to take on the name of Schechter, the second president of the Jewish Theological Seminary and founder of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, but hardly the last.
By the 1970s, there were dozens of schools named for Schechter across the United States. Over time, some disaffiliated with the Conservative movement and became community day schools, serving students from across the denominational spectrum. Others retained their religious orientation but changed their names to reflect donors — and shed associations with a diminished brand. Last year, Schechter Manhattan shut down entirely after facing years of declining enrollment.
A decade ago, the attenuated Schechter organization folded into Prizmah, a network that supports Jewish day schools across North America. (Chazan boasted at the time that Schechter Queens was a proud outlier to the trend of disaffiliation.) Its CEO, Paul Bernstein, said the changes underway in Queens were notable.
“Schechter Queens is certainly among the oldest [of the Conservative schools], so this is indeed a significant move,” he wrote in an email.
But he said he was optimistic about the school’s future.
“Prizmah supports schools in their decisions as to how best to serve the local community — which does indeed include at times a shift in the religious composition of the community,” Bernstein said. “We hope that Schechter Queens continues to thrive and serve its community in the best possible way as the 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 in the 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.
US Jewry diversifying
“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.”