HACD is a true community, with teachers who get to know our students well in small classroom settings.
When I first served as Board President of HACD it was 1996. Why have I re-assumed the mantle again some 30 years later?
Some may think that a Jewish Day School is not needed in our community, or that it is an expense one cannot bear. … I faced this issue with my two daughters. Weren’t the public schools, synagogue Hebrew Schools, or even Sunday Schools good enough? After all, do kids really need all that Hebrew study? Will Judaics get in the way of studying the history, math, and English they needed to be able to achieve and be successful in this world?
Trepidatiously, we enrolled our children in kindergarten to “try it out”.
And what we found was downright spectacular.
The faculty, administration and staff were an incredibly dedicated, supportive group. Concerns about the amount of Hebrew versus secular studies were completely unfounded ….Our children, Arielle and Sarah, turned out to be sponges, absorbing whatever they were dipped into. Quickly, their knowledge of Judaism and Hebrew outstripped my own afternoon Hebrew School experience …. And they became, to an extent, my teacher – which was a wonderful experience. Their secular studies were as comprehensive as any I received in public schools.
But of greater significance than our children’s education, I learned the unique importance of a Jewish Day School education in general. Our children didn’t just learn State mandated curricula of a series of isolated courses… a bunch of facts and formulae to be regurgitated on the SATs or the ACTs.
No…if there is one thing that a Day School can do — that a public school cannot do — it is to take everything that students need to know and wrap it in a moral, ethical covering of our Jewish Heritage. Students learn simultaneously about Abraham and Albert Einstein …. about Jeremiah and Thomas Jefferson ….. about Bar Kochba and Daniel Boone. They come to see themselves as part of a chain stretching from Abraham to Sinai to today. They understand that Judaism is not just a religion of holidays or Holocaust remembrances, but a living, breathing covenant that demands responsibility, integrity and devotion.
And now I am seeing my grandchildren experience that same learning at HACD.
Why serve a second time as Board President? Because a Jewish community cannot survive without a means to educate others on to how to create community. Jewish education, in this sense, is not just about knowledge. It is about spiritual survival. It is a defense against a world that often tells our children that being Jewish is inconvenient, that Jewish values are wrong or outdated, or that Israel has no moral right to exist.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, put it, “…To defend a country you need an army. But to defend a civilization you need schools. …”
HACD is not here merely to survive— HACD is here to transmit the essence of a 3,000-year-old civilization to the next generation.
Welcome to the Hebrew Academy of the Capital District.