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RISING STAR RELIGIOUS MIDDLE SCHOOL

A Global Mission at Park East
International dynamic at East 68th Street school

With guns blazing and hate running rampant in the Middle East, it is comforting to know that on East 68th Street in Manhattan, one Jewish day school is not only teaching middle school students the meaning of world peace, but helping them to achieve it.

Rabbi Arthur Schneier Park East Day School is a small school with widereaching international connections. The school was founded by its dean, Rabbi Arthur Schneier, Senior Rabbi of Park East Synagogue and an internationally renowned advocate for religious freedom and human rights. Through the rabbi’s foundation, the Appeal of Conscience, students at Park East receive a truly global education.

“Rabbi Schneier is very well-known internationally,” said Andrew Butler, middle school coordinator and social studies teacher. “He has many colleagues who are ambassadors, religious leaders and U.N. representatives. The Appeal of Conscience Foundation is an organization that promotes religious freedom, peace and tolerance, and he shares that work with the students.”

The Chief Rabbis of Israel and Rome, the Grand Mufti of Bosnia, and the Mayor of Vienna all made appearances at Park East last year, as did a Buddhist monk, in a timely surprise visit during Butler’s unit on Buddhism.

“He’s an international rabbi,” explained Barbara Etra, principal of Park East. “On any given week you can have the director of Jewish Studies in Manging University in China, the Spanish Consul General, the Australian Consul General—you never know who’s walking through the door.”

Accommodating spur-of-the moment visits from international delegations in a dual curriculum of Jewish and general studies is no small task. But in helping the students find their place in the world as Jews, the international flair of the curriculum also allows them to find their place as world citizens.

“Jewish studies and general studies are not separated out; it’s all together so the child’s world is connected,” Etra explained. “Everything is woven together.”

The middle school students’ day is split as evenly as possible between Jewish studies and general studies, but students learn skills across the English/Hebrew divide as teachers work in teams to design an interdisciplinary curriculum. Each year brings a different school-wide theme that helps integrate the disciplines. Least year the theme was “Jews Around the World/All the Children of Israel.”

“This coming year, we’ll be working on ‘Building a Better World,’ reaching out to the world and making the world a better place, not just as a Jew but as a human being,” Etra said.

Such a theme ties in perfectly with Rabbi Schneier’s philosophy of tikkun olam, perfecting an imperfect world through deeds of compassion, justice and charity.

Although she has spent just one year at the school, Etra has already made her mark.

“She has come in and brought a level of professionalism and organization to our school,” Butler said.

Etra spent the last 15 years as a principal at a much larger school on Long Island (Park East has 250 students in nursery through eighth grade; last year’s graduating class had nine students), so the chance to work in a personalized environment was a welcome challenge.

“It’s a small school, so it’s a very customized education,” Etra said. “You can work on multiple levels in a room with children because the class is so small.”

“We really can cater to each individual family’s needs on both ends, enrichment and remediation,” Butler explained. “We have specialists who can pull kids out for remediation or enrichment, and teachers are very flexible about that.”

Although Park East Synagogue, which sponsors the Day School, is traditional, the population at Park East runs the gamut from non-observant to observant, and school families are not required to join the synagogue.

“We’re not labeling anybody here,” Etra said. “Everyone’s welcome, and the beauty is how respectful people are of each other.”

- Carolyn Braff