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Jewish Community News

News: June 2006

Building a Jewish high school from the ground up

By Cecily Ruttenberg

Four years ago, 33 brave freshmen made local history when they walked into rented facilities at the Blackford School campus in Campbell as the first-ever class at Kehillah Jewish High School. This month, these same students will walk out the door of Kehillah’s new Palo Alto facilities as the first graduating class and will be moving onto colleges that include Dartmouth, Yale, NYU and all the U.Cs. The school’s founders feel they finally have some hard data to support their triumph.

“We knew we were doing a great job. The families knew we were doing a great job. And now seeing that independent confirmation from so many colleges is very encouraging,” said founder Len Lehman.

Adds founder Jackie Bocian, “I think now people will begin to see us as more of a proven entity. I think we’re going to grow, grow, grow!”

Kehillah was born in a brainstorming meeting six years ago, led by Jackie Bocian. Bocian had helped found Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School, later working to expand the Gideon Hausner into the middle school years. High school, she said, seemed like the next logical step. Lucky for Bocian, Len Lehman and Bobby Lent both accepted the invite to her planning meeting.

“They are our two largest donors and financial backers,” said Bocian. “They got the dream right away, that night! It was a revelatory evening.”

Bocian originally conceived of the idea for a Jewish community high school after reading data on these types of schools nationwide.

“I saw that students could emerge as successful high school students despite the dual curriculum,” Bocian said. “They could foster a love for Israel, the Hebrew language and a love of Torah. It would establish a life-long habit of study and Torah.”

Adds Lehman, “I like to invest in teens. I think these are the critical years to provide Jewish teens with a social group, with formal Jewish education and with connections to Israel. I think they’ll carry those with them for the rest of their lives.”

Building a high school has been no easy task. Lehman likens the challenge of building a high school as more akin to building a college than an elementary school. Kehillah founders were steadfast in their commitment to providing the highest level general education, sports, extracurricular activities, AP and honor courses and foreign languages in addition to Hebrew and Jewish studies.

“We had heard that it was going to be difficult, but we didn’t imagine how different a high school is than a K-8,” said Lehman. “Education at the high school level is expensive. It’s absolutely necessary to meet the best that’s out there in the general studies program.”

Since its inception Kehillah has grown from 33 students in 2002 to 96 students today. The four local day schools in the greater South Bay—Yavneh Day School, South Peninsula Hebrew Day School, Gideon Hausner Jewish Day School and Ronald C. Wornick Jewish Day School in Foster City—feed into the school.

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