We were all shocked and pained by the events that occurred in Eretz Yisrael on October 7.

Since the majority of our school’s Judaic studies team are Israeli educators who came to teach at a Jewish school in the US out of a sense of duty and a desire to unite, support and deepen the connection between American Jewry and the State of Israel, we were seriously discussing how to move forward. While we are going through a tough period, we believe that we can make a positive impact and reinforce the bonds of belonging between the State of Israel and its citizens, as well as between the students, parents and greater community.

Embracing Our Jewish Mission for Israel

We regard our objective as a worthwhile and crucial mission that will mold and shape our people’s future generations as well as Jewish history. The relationship between the State of Israel and the Jewish communities around the globe, in the United States and in our neighborhood is currently very important, and to support our Israeli brethren at this trying time, we must be strong and unified. We communicate to our community that our power lies in our unity and oneness as Am Yisrael.

Last Tuesday, we began the school day by educating our students about the current war in Israel in an age-appropriate level, informing them that our soldiers serve as the State of Israel’s guardians and protectors. We included a special prayer for the State of Israel and its soldiers with our daily prayers. We also made cards to send to the Israeli soldiers, hoping to provide them support during this trying time. 
We also sent encouraging letters to kids in Israel. We distributed Shabbat candles to our community on Friday. Our students composed messages for Israel’s peace on a miniature replica of the Western Wall that we had constructed. Our longer-term plans include our students recording a special song in our podcast room, which we hope to share to help lift the spirits of the Israeli people. We are also going to begin gathering donations for the State of Israel, which we will then forward to the Israeli soldiers and civilians.
As a result of the love and encouragement we receive from our community, families, parents, students, teachers, and staff, we feel even stronger than ever.

School Ties to the Jewish Community

There are close relations between the local Jewish community and Hillel School. Among the initiatives we run are the following:

• Our older students go to a nearby Jewish preschool to read Hebrew stories to the children, celebrate festivals with them, and do many other activities.
• One of our programs involves the school’s pupils visiting a nearby senior Jewish home. We gave the locals a happy new year and Jewish holiday season with a parade in the run-up to Rosh Hashanah.
• The children helped create our enormous Sukkah, which we welcomed the community for supper on Sukkot. 
• We went on an annual Sukkah Hop, which involved visiting the Sukkahs of several local synagogues in our neighborhood.

The educators that make up our Judaic team are driven to impart knowledge of Hebrew, Torah, daily prayer, Parshat Hashavuah, Judaism, Israel, and Jewish history to the children. The future generation’s devotion to the Jewish faith, the Torah, its values, and its commandments, as well as Israel’s legacy, are significantly influenced by our department of Judaic studies.

The faculty of Hillel School prays for the restoration of peace to the State of Israel and its population, for the troops of the State of Israel, and for all our Jewish brethren around the world. May all the soldiers and captured civilians return speedily and in peace.

.ה’ עוז לעמו ייתן, ה’ יברך את עמו לשלום
May the Lord grant strength to His people, May the Lord bless His people with peace. (Psalms 29:1)

Am Yisrael Chai!

"What we want in our Jewish day schools is for people to see that people are far less concerned with what I’m doing wrong Jewishly than with what I’m doing right and with what is compelling and meaningful to me as a human being in the world. Marketing and branding are ways for us to get past some of those hurdles. People can realize that day schools provide a way for you to share something profound with your children that doesn’t have to be about feeling not part of something because you felt like there was a right way to do Jewish and you weren’t part of that.” - Dr. Dan Glass, Head of School, The Brandeis School of San Francisco. 

Our twelve day schools in Northern California are used to working together. The heads of school have met regularly for decades, exponentially more so in the pandemic. We have created joint professional development days, shared sports programs for students, and more. When The Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund (of the Bay Area) issued a call for pandemic recovery grants rooted in collaboration, we saw the marketing and branding of our schools—after a pandemic-related enrollment surge—as a valuable area for experimentation.

This initiative was buoyed by a research project supported by the Jim Joseph Foundation and conducted by Third Plateau, which found that for their particular target families, some of our schools are too Jewish; for others, not rigorous enough; and according to a different segment, not Jewish enough. We know, of course, that there are places in our schools for those not otherwise Jewishly engaged, for interfaith and dual-faith couples and families, for those looking for advanced science and math or Talmud. We know that we seek out innovative curricula, environments of curiosity and growth for our teachers, and audaciously hospitable communities that support and welcome all families. How could we tell those stories?

Working together, nine of our schools—mostly K-8 or K-6, with a few preschools or pre-kindergarten programs and one stand-alone high school —built an RFP, employed a full-service branding and marketing firm (MediaCause), and put together a project to tell a new day school story in Northern California. With the firm, we:

• Conducted research with families who chose our schools despite deep uncertainty and reservations, or who, more generally, represented the audience we were targeting for growth. 
• Built a full branding campaign rooted int he idea that “There’s More Here”; There’s more community, there’s more curriculum, there’s more learning, there’s more growth (a few of the 20 taglines the firm developed and shared below).
• Built a shared website, a landing page, with data on our schools and links to admissions pages.
• Ran a social media and internet ad campaign during October-November, targeting a list identified with their search choices and zip code, and then flipped that campaign to a school-related campaign, sharing open houses with those who saw the first ads. 
• Sent a series of emails to those who saw the first ads, sharing school-specific information.

In the end, we reached 12 million people with impressions and other e-connections. And we learned important lessons about messaging, marketing, and working together. 

Generating new interest is not the same thing as rebranding our schools. 

Techniques that generate leads are, simply, not exactly the same as rebranding techniques. At the end of the campaign, we were surprised to see that we could track very few direct enrollment leads to this campaign (even while we could track some inquiries). We realized quickly that we had been so focused on telling a new story—and on the story we were telling—that we sacrificed some obvious lead activities for that larger message. If we do this again, we’ll use the branding materials in specific lead generation activities, sharing our reframed story with a very specific audience.

Similarly, it will take professional time to identify our common story. 

For most (but not all) of our schools, social media and Google marketing are not allocated significant professional resources. Identifying data and stories and communicating with the larger collective takes not insignificant time. Working across even the nine schools engaged in this project—let alone the full twelve—involves enormous give-and-take. We need to identify the best way to manage the work that each school needs to produce.

The unique work of the collaborative is that of enrollment growth.

Most of our students come to us through relationships, through word of mouth. What we can do as a group is reach families who have never heard of our particular schools or Jewish day schools or who may be intimidated or disinterested in Jewish schools. Our collateral—soon to be in-real-life and web-based—needs to reach new families, and then send them to a website that walks them through the thinking involved in school choice. Other work—new media stories, telling the schools’ best stories—is also necessary, but can be done school by school, targeting friends of our friends.

We know we have something good here, but we also know that it will take time and attention to get it right. We are building new capacities for our schools, in our collaboration and also in the precise use of these tools. We look forward to the hard work and to building these resources together.

Phoenix: Playing Together 

Lauren Kreisberger, Director of Admissions and Enrollment Management, Pardes Jewish Day School 

Pardes Jewish Day School and PJ Library Phoenix received a very generous gift from Prizmah’s Engage program, allowing us to create authentic relationships and partnerships to enhance community engagement. The aim was to foster greater involvement and interaction within the community. This involved not only the students, faculty and staff but also broader relationships and collaborations. 

We had the opportunity to partner with a diverse range of organizations, such as the Center for Jewish Philanthropy, Arizona Science Center, Bureau of Jewish Education, Jewish Free Loan, and community clergy, among others. These collaborations allowed us to pool resources and expertise and maximize our collective impact. Why spread the community thin with four separate events, by four different organizations with the same goal, when we can have one larger, well-planned one? 

The collaborative efforts had a positive impact on recruitment and retention efforts and contributed to the growth and, hopefully, the sustainability of our organizations. Our emphasis on community building, Jewish traditions and values, from preschool through young teen programming, demonstrated a dedication to inclusivity and ensuring that our community members of all ages felt welcome and engaged. “Havdalah Under the Stars” and “The Rabbi Slurps Spaghetti” events are great examples of innovative and fun ways to bring people together. 

This attracted new families to campus that may not have otherwise come. These events provided an opportunity for newcomers to see our beautiful campus, meet our amazing teachers, interact with our outstanding student ambassadors and learn about our educational philosophy, all while experiencing the warmth of our community. 

We really feel we have started something that is contagious in our community and we look forward to seeing where it takes us next. “Those that play together, stay together!”

Atlanta: Kehillah 

Amy Helman- Darley, Outreach and Engagement Manager, The Davis Academy 

In my work for Nurture, our school’s program that engages, connects, and supports families with young children throughout the greater Atlanta community, one of the first words that comes to mind when thinking about partnerships is kehillah. Kehillah, a term rooted in the Hebrew word for community, beautifully encapsulates the essence of unity, mutual support, and collective responsibility. Its wisdom can breathe life into our partnerships with other organizations, infusing them with deeper meaning and purpose. 

For the last year, Pam Cohen, PJ Library Atlanta Manager, and I have been working together to strengthen the Atlanta Jewish community through monthly programs showcasing the value of kehillah. The support of Prizmah through Engage allowed us to strengthen our partnership and develop more community-focused programming.  

PJ Library and Nurture are two initiatives that share similar values and missions that support and engage families with young children in the Atlanta Jewish community. We understand that families are looking for opportunities to connect with others in a similar age and stage, and together, we are offering programs to support them through fun, meaningful, and Jewish-themed experiences. 

Our Li’l Shabbat: Hanukkah Around the World is a signature program that highlights the diversity of the Jewish community in a welcoming environment. During this program, families participate in a preschool-aged Shabbat service, and then they “tour the world” by visiting different tables hosted by Davis Academy and PJ Library families who immigrated to the United States from different countries. Each host family shares special Hanukkah traditions that are unique to their homeland. Building on the success of this program last year, we are excited to expand and engage even more families this upcoming Hanukkah.

By working together, we can build on the strengths of each organization and combine them to bring high quality programming to the community.  In the spirit of kehillah, we truly are stronger when working together.

New Orleans: Community-wide Programming 

Jessie Dowsakul, Director of Admissions, Jewish Community Day School of Greater New Orleans 

A community is strengthened by its differences and brought together by a common goal. To that end, our school and PJ Library have partnered in creating inclusive, dynamic programming. Coming out of the grips of the pandemic, our population has been eager to rejoice together. Our school’s partnership with Prizmah has awarded us with opportunities to reach out to synagogues, Jewish Federation, PJ Library, JNola (Federation’s young adult group), Jewish Community Centers, and much more. By creating and fostering friendships with these organizations, we have been able to collaborate in creating dynamic programming aimed at the inclusion of all.

Our annual Family Fun Fest puts these relationships on full display. This is our biggest event of the year, and its success is contingent upon collaboration with community partners. When we chose to expand our collaboration and invite the wider Jewish population, some challenges surfaced.

One of these challenges was adhering to a level of kashrut that would be more inclusive; while the school lunches come from a Chabad-supervised kitchen, food brought in for events has typically been held to the standard of Orthodox supervision, which would exclude the many Chabad families in our community. This entailed staff learning more about what that heightened level of kashrut would look like as we sought to host events that truly included everybody.

New Orleans’s PJ Library’s local representative, Bonnie Lustig, meets with us monthly. In our meetings, we strategize the planning of our upcoming community events as we work creatively and innovatively to create fun, engaging programs. Moving forward, Bonnie and the school have created a friendship of collaboration that will hold well beyond our current work. We have every expectation that Jewish Community Day School will continue to create community-driven collaborations. We hope you can join us at our next event: a Shabbat challah making party.