Pioneering educator Beverly Gribetz on the elements of an ideal school
A school where every student wants to be there—that, more or less, was what Dr. Beverly Gribetz, founder of Jerusalem’s pioneering high school for religious girls, Tehilla, and guest at the Shalem English Immersion Program’s Dinner Conversation series, had in mind. For previous generations of female students in Israel’s capital, the best possible education was also an unequal one: Whereas boys’ schools emphasized the hard sciences and, in religious studies, Gemara, girls’ schools generally sufficed with “safer,” “softer” subjects, that often left their students feeling intellectually and spiritually dissatisfied. Even when more progressive, academically outstanding options became available, she explained to students, such as Pelech High School and Hartman’s Midrashiya, they tended to become elite enclaves, whose student bodies lacked the diversity of backgrounds, practices, and opinions that characterizes religious society in Israel as a whole.
Enter Tehilla, the high-school Gribetz founded in 2007, which quickly became known as much for its outstanding academics as for its groundbreaking approach to enrollment. In just four years, its student body grew to more than 160 young women. Then, in 2011, the city of Jerusalem asked Gribetz to merge Tehilla with the struggling Evelina de Rothschild Secondary School; this September, Tehilla-Evelina will welcome nearly 300 students in grades 7-12.
Unlike most other religious high schools for girls, Tehilla-Evelina does not require an entrance exam. Despite this, more than more than 90 percent of its students graduate with a full matriculation (bagrut) certificate. Moreover, its reliance on private sources of funding means that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds receive the scholarships necessary to study there. The resulting heterogeneity, Gribetz insisted, is the school’s biggest advantage. She encouraged the student participants—several of whom have expressed interest in founding their own schools, or generally working in the field of education—to view diversity as something integral to educational goals, and not merely complementary.
Over a wide-ranging discussion, which covered topics from the differences between religious education in the United States and Israel (Gribetz, before moving to Israel, was headmistress at New York’s Ramaz School, and earned her doctorate in Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary), the advantages and disadvantages of co-ed and single-sex education, and the future of the religious school system in Israel, Gribetz remarked frequently on several parallels between Tehilla and Shalem College. For example, she appreciated Shalem’s intention to provide scholarships and living stipends to all accepted students, so that even those young persons who wouldn’t normally be able to afford an elite education – or, moreover, to study the liberal arts – can do so. She also applauded Shalem’s determination to make the college into a community of scholars—with emphasis on “community.”
Dr. Daniel Polisar, Shalem College Provost and attendee at the dinner, agreed with Gribetz’s insistence on making the interactions between students and their peers, and students and faculty, a key part of the educational experience. “The give-and-take of intellectual debate is one of the key characteristics of a liberal-arts education, in particular at small liberal arts colleges, of which we are one. But as with institutions such Tehilla-Evelina, Shalem seeks to model a certain type of discourse, one marked by mutual respect and openness to difference. In the final equation,” concludes Polisar, “that’s what the Jewish state needs from its leading citizens.”
