City Could Get Charter School That Teaches Hebrew

A former congressman who started a public school in Florida where students will learn Hebrew said opening a similar school in New York will be a natural next step.

The Ben Gamla Charter School, which will open August 20 in Hollywood, Fla., has yet to install sprinklers, finalize a car pool list, and deal with critics concerned that Jewish themes in the school's curriculum violate the constitutional separation of religion and state. But its founder, Peter Deutsch, is already focusing on a plan to export his model to New York City within the next two years.

National scope had always been the plan for Mr. Deutsch, 50, a Bronx-born graduate of Horace Mann and Yale Law School who served in Congress as a Democrat between 1993 and 2005 before running unsuccessfully for Senate. But he says he did not initially realize how much interest his concept — public schools that teach in both English and Hebrew, blending Jewish history and culture into language lessons — would generate.

"Had we enrolled 50 kids, we really would have been happy," he said. Instead, in one week the group received 800 applications. "It was a phenomenon. Parents waited two or three hours in lines to enroll their kids. It was like the return of the Beetle," he said.

Now, he says he may have landed on a revolutionary new way to educate pupils. "This is a model which conceivably could be a huge paradigm shift in education in America," he said. "I can see a point in time where there would be 100 schools like this."

The school has met with some skepticism from the Jewish community in Florida. Leaders of the Anti-Defamation League's Florida chapter and the Jewish Federation of Broward County have testified about the concerns before the local school board, and the board has pledged to monitor the school closely for any constitutional violations.

"Every Jewish professional that I've spoken to in the Broward community is concerned," the Anti-Defamation League's Florida regional director, Andrew Rosenkranz, said.

The school's director, Adam Siegel, said the school will be just like any other Florida public school, except that each of the 430 students will spend a period each day learning Hebrew, and at least one subject — math or physical education — will be taught simultaneously in English and Hebrew. Jewish themes, he said, will be limited to what is necessary to learn the Hebrew language. "If you're going to Israel, you have to know what a falafel is, you have to know what matzah is," he said.

Skeptics say the school has been promoted as a free alternative to Jewish day school. "Our concern is that when you say you are going to teach Hebrew in the context of both Israeli and Jewish culture, you have to be very careful to ensure that the line separating church and state is not blurred," Mr. Rosenkranz said.

Mr. Siegel said about 20% of the school's population is transferring from a Jewish day school. The rest, according to Mr. Deutsch, are coming from other public schools.

Mr. Deutsch said the pattern is easy to explain. He said the population of Jewish children between kindergarten and twelfth grade in Broward County is 50,000. But last year, only 1,600 enrolled in Jewish day school.

New York has the largest Jewish community in the country. That, said Mr. Deutsch, is why moving here would be a natural next step.
A New York-based philanthropist Mr. Deutsch met with earlier this month to discuss the school, Michael Steinhardt, praised the idea. "One of the great failings of the American Jewish community is that we have notably failed to educate our next generation," said Mr. Steinhardt, a former hedge-fund operator who is an investor in The New York Sun. He said public charter schools like Ben Gamla might address that problem.

A Hebrew-English charter school would likely face criticism from others in the city.

The executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, Michael Meyers, vowed to oppose any school that catered only to one population. "The whole purpose of a public school is to bring all children to the same schoolhouse, under a roof where people can learn about each other and with each other," he said.

Mr. Deutsch said his Florida team placed advertisements in Creole, Spanish-language, and Israeli newspapers. He also said more than 20% of his parents identified as Hispanic on a survey. Most of the rest were white, and 37% of parents said Hebrew is their native language.

An Arabic-language school set to open in Brooklyn this September has raised similar concerns about the church-state line, but Sara Springer, a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, which opposes the Arabic school, said she would support a Hebrew-language school.

"It's just so much different with Arabic," she said, "because there's so many instances of the language being wrapped up with the religion, whereas Hebrew it's not."

Correction from August 1, 2007: If a public school in New York City taught only one culture and one language it would be opposed by a member of the Stop the Madrassa Coalition, Sara Springer. Her stance was misstated in an article on page 1 of yesterday's New York Sun.