The Sholem Community, a secular and progressive Jewish educational, cultural, and social institution, has a new home at Short Avenue Elementary School and will host an Open House Sunday, Sept. 8 from 10:30 a.m. to noon, the first day of the 2019-2020 school year.
Visitors will learn about the Community’s non-religious Jewish programs, meet current members, visit the classrooms and meet the organization’s Sunday school principal Ross Helford, a Culver City resident.
Sholem offers what a synagogue does such as observances of Jewish holidays as well as Sunday school but does so from a non-religious point of view.
Regan Kibbee, Sholem’s community outreach co-chair enrolled her daughter Mira in the school, at the age of six. Kibbee considers herself a Jewish atheist because she is Jewish culturally but not religious. She and her husband, who is not Jewish and also not religious, were seeking some way for Mira to have a sense of the Jewish part of her identity.
“How is our daughter going to have any idea that she is Jewish at all?” Kibbee said. “So my husband and I were delighted to learn about secular Jewish education.”
Most of the Sholem’s activities revolve around their Sunday school, which engages children aged 4-17 in an exploration of Jewish history, culture, and traditions of social justice. Additionally, Sholem offers a monthly parent-toddler group, a unique Bar/Bat Mitzvah program, adult activities, and humanistic observances of Jewish holidays.
Helford said that the history of secular Jewish education, which goes back more than 100 years, is a vital component in helping the more than 50 students in Sholem understand how they fit into the modern world.
“We try to link history to modern times,” Helford said. “We try to teach that the history of Jewish people is not separate from the history of humanity. We try to teach that Jewish history is the history of humanity.”
According to Helford, Sholem’s approach to the topics that it teaches is from a social justice perspective meaning that there is an emphasis on the differences between peoples in regard to the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society.
“Social class is an important concept,” Helford said. “So rather than focus exclusively on the lives of the richest one percent, we want to see what life was like for the peasants.”
Focusing on social justice allows Sholem students to address and acknowledge the struggles that many ethnically diverse groups, including Jews, had to face in the past and continue to face today.
For example, during a bar or bat mitzvah, instead of making the Jewish child learn Hebrew and recite from the Torah as they would be expected to do in a synagogue, at Sholem, they are expected to research and present a social justice topic of their choice as well as a year-long project on a topic related to their Jewish heritage. Recent topics have included DACA and the rights of immigrants as well as homelessness.
Mila Marvizon, who lives in Culver City and is Sholem’s co-chair and holiday committee member, felt as if she had found her place when she discovered Sholem.
“I felt so alone and isolated in a synagogue,” Marvizon said. “When I found Sholem, I knew I was home because they cared about social justice issues, which is very important to me and they focused on teaching critical thinking skills.”
Karen Reynolds, principal of Short Avenue Elementary School (SAES), said the school, which is a Title I public school and is in the process of becoming an International Baccalaureate program, was a hidden gem in the neighborhood.
Reynolds said Sholem’s progressive, inquiry-driven educational approach and their goal of creating caring, community-minded students was a perfect match for SAES’ educational vision and philosophy.
Sholem was founded in Los Angeles in the early 1950s as a refuge for entertainment industry professionals and their families from discrimination during the days of the Hollywood Blacklist. For more than sixty years, the non-profit cooperative has been a friendly, meeting place for secular Jews and multicultural families.
Short Avenue Elementary School is located at 12814 Maxella Avenue, Los Angeles.
For more info about the Sholem Community and a full calendar of upcoming events, visit www.sholem.org or call 310-984-6935.