One non-Jewish Mom’s experience of a Conservative Jewish Preschool.
I’m so lucky to live so close to Kindergym. As a mom of an infant, I knew about Kindergym as the play space for crawlers and toddlers. When my first son, Levi, was 8 months old, he still wasn’t crawling and I was getting so antsy about getting out and playing with him and other kids. I brought him to Kindergym and Dawn approached me to show me how to help him climb down from a slide. “That’s not gonna be a problem,” I thought, “he’s just gonna sit here a look.” Which he did. I loved the other parents and Dawn’s energy, so we kept going.
Since my husband is Jewish, raised in the Reform “brand”, and I was raised without religion and had committed to raising our kids as Jews, we started attending the Friday Shabbat Kindergym. It was a great way for me to learn and practice the shabbat ritual and feel integrated into this simple but profound practice. Levi and I became Shabbat Kingergym regulars (and he started crawling, walking, running, jumping, singing, dancing - generally becoming a super physically active kid in the meantime - by the way).
All the while, we assumed we would join the local reform temple and have our kids go to preschool there. It didn’t cross my mind that our family, with a reform-raised dad and a non-anything mom could fit in or be accepted at a conservative temple and preschool.
One morning, when I was schlepping around Kindergym with my newborn, Sam, tied to my chest and Levi nearly running over hundreds of toddler toes with his motorcycle, Dawn asked me if Levi was going to go to the Gan. “No, I’m not Jewish, Dawn,” I replied.
First of all, she didn’t believe me. She even went so far as to hypothesize that my family actually is Jewish but decided they needed to hide it a few generations back, and that if I did genetic testing, it would likely confirm that I’m Jewish. Well, that’s irrelevant to this discussion, but funny, since all my Jewish friends say I have a Jewish soul.
But, secondly, she said, “That’s okay!” And then my mind opened up to the possibility. I had developed friendships with other moms whose kids went to the Gan through our Friday Kindergym. And some of them aren’t Jewish. Oh! I didn’t know you could do that!
So I talked with my husband about it, and he was also excited. He’d been to a high holy days service at TBA once and loved the Rabbi, leaving feeling sad that we couldn’t be members of the congregation.
We asked more questions. We met with the Director and the Rabbi, and felt warmly accepted and given realistic expectations. Such as: It’s a conservative schule, the preschool is a Jewish preschool, they’re gonna do things that a preschool at a conservative schule are gonna do. The kids are gonna learn about the holidays, they’re gonna learn some prayers and rituals, they’re gonna learn what it means to be Jewish.
And there was the tension. They’re gonna learn what it means to be Jewish, in a temple that can’t officially recognize them as Jewish. I discussed this with the Rabbi, who openly let me know that my boys can attend the preschool without converting, but to attend religious school and be bar mitzvah’d in this congregation, they would have to convert.
So we decided to send Levi to Gan Avraham, and we joined the temple. Woah. The first few weeks, we all had to acclimate to the new climate. Levi came home singing, “Shalom Haverim,” which I promptly googled, finding that the first definition of haverim is “comrades,” which freaked me out. Then I checked with my Jewish friends, who assured me that it was simply a term for friends. Now I love that my son is teaching me Hebrew, and that he is proud to be Jewish, and he understands that not everyone practices the same things or celebrates the same holidays. He also knows what a bone is, that dinosaurs are extinct, and that 100 is a really big number - all things he’s learned at Gan Avraham.
In two years, we’ll need to decide whether he attends religious school at TBA, and right now, we think he will. It means he’ll go through a conversion ceremony, and then he’ll be officially a Jew. And our littlest guy, will attend the Gan in a year, and maybe be converted at the same time as his big brother.
Will I convert? Probably not. I wholly embrace the Jewish traditions and am often the only one in the family insisting on saying the prayers at the mexican restaurant on Friday nights. I raise my children as a Jewish mother would (for better or worse!), and that’s good enough for me. As long as my personal decisions don’t interfere with my boys’ ability to be fully recognized as Jews, I am going to keep that decision my own.
But for now, we are almost completely unambivalent about having our son at the Gan and being members of the community. But we are not striving for a complete lack of ambivalence - after all, we are a Jewish family.
Jessica Michaelson (Zapruder) is a psychologist practicing in Oakland.
