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Soon after, Oorah dispatched a group of yeshiva boys to build a Sukkah on the Knopf’s patio. Shelly was eager to learn the laws of how and when to eat in her Sukkah, and when the Yom Tov came, she and her daughter were able to and share their experience with neighbors and friends they invited to their table.

Now Shelly is following her daughter’s footsteps, moving slowly but surely toward a Torah life. She has requested a tutor for her daughter to help her catch up on her Hebrew and religious studies, and another tutor for herself, so that she, too, can begin to learn. Most recently, Shelly has begun, step-by-step, taking on Shabbos observance. As the mother and daughter grow together, Oorah will be there to keep the sparks of inspiration aglow.

Her Brother’s Keeper
Ilana Kotlyarevsky faced adult-sized problems when she was only a small child. Her father passed away, and her mother remarried a man whose volatile, angry temper created a home that was always in turmoil. Soon, a new baby boy was born to the family. Ilana treasured her baby brother and tried to keep him safe from their father’s tirades. Compounding the tragic situation, Ilana’s mother also died, leaving her and her brother defenseless under their father’s reign of terror.

Ilana found a way out. After several moves, she finally settled in with an elderly aunt, a Russian immigrant who, although in poor health and possessing meager means, welcomed the unfortunate girl. Now, at 17, Ilana lives in these dark circumstances. The only light is her life in school – a Jewish school paid for by Oorah – where she finds the warmth, friendship and guidance she so desperately needs.

This summer, Oorah urged Ilana to attend its GirlZone summer camp where she could shed her worries for a few weeks and enjoy just “being a kid.” But Ilana, after all she has endured, does not see herself as a “kid.” Her sensitive heart would not allow her to cast off her responsibilities, even for a few weeks. She insisted on staying home and earning some money to help her aunt with expenses.

But Ilana’s real focus is on her brother’s plight. She eagerly awaits her 18th birthday when she hopes to be able to become his legal guardian and remove him from his father’s home. Meanwhile, Oorah, along with her teachers and friends, help her to build an optimistic vision for the future, when she will take her place as a proud, respected and beloved Jewish wife and mother.

Would you be willing to have kiruv children in your children’s yeshiva?
In the late 1980s when the Iron Curtain parted, thousands of Soviet Jews followed their long-held dream to emigrate to America. The fate of these Jews was of intense concern to the American Orthodox community. Was there any hope of breaking through the atheistic beliefs of these Jews and touching the pintele yid inside? Or would they, like so many Jewish immigrants before them, fully assimilate into American culture?

At the time, two schools of thought emerged on the question of how to bring these Jews back to Judaism. There were those who felt that they would have to be segregated into their own special yeshivos. Their culture, language and lack of religious background would make it too difficult to integrate them into existing yeshivos, said the proponents of this view.

Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky zt’l and Rav Moshe Feinstein, zt’l, held otherwise. They believed that Russian children willing to attend yeshiva could be absorbed in small numbers throughout the existing system, and that this would give them the greatest opportunity to be successfully integrated into the religious Jewish world. If they were segregated, the two leading Torah giants warned, they would be surrounded by other children just like themselves. Their environment would not spur their growth, and the effort to draw them into religious life would not succeed with more than a small minority of the children.

Unfortunately, the efforts of these leaders met with resistance from many parents, and many Russian immigrant children never received the benefit of a mainstream yeshiva education. As an alternative strategy, Rav Yaakov worked diligently to establish Be’er Hagolah, which catered specifically to the needs of the Russian population. Nevertheless, many children were lost.

Since those days, the community’s approach to Russian Jewish immigrants has been retooled considerably, and much of that revision has come about because the original model of separate “Russian schools” did not yield the hoped for results. And yet, as more children from outside the religious community – whether Russia, secular Israeli, American or another nationality – respond to kiruv efforts and seek a Jewish education, the dilemma still remains. Should our existing schools bend to accommodate them or should they be tended to in special “kiruv” schools?

Beyond the Limits?
From the schools’ point of view, the idea of taking in a child from a non-religious family, especially in the upper grades, appears challenging, if not impossible from many angles. First is the child’s lack of background and skills. Will the teacher have to devote too much time to the child? Will the child’s parents be willing to provide the tutoring and other support the child may need to be brought “up to speed?” Most schools, already inundated with the individual needs of the mainstream students, are unwilling to even contemplate enrolling such a potentially labor-intensive student.

Furthermore, Jewish schools consider themselves to be bastions of morality and wholesomeness in an otherwise wild-and-free secular culture. Many would not want to expose their student body to the influences a child from a non-religious home might carry along with him or her into school. Inappropriate language, songs, movies, ideas, clothing styles and many other sometimes indefinable details could “enter the bloodstream” of the school and cause damage to other students.

However, neither of these problems is insurmountable, and this has been proven hundreds of times by children Oorah has placed in a wide range of yeshivas and girls’ schools across the country.

“Children catch on very quickly,” said one Oorah volunteer. “If we invest in some intensive tutoring at first, they are usually caught up by the next school year. We’ve often had a child who starts out in yeshiva in fourth grade, and is at the head of his class by sixth grade.”

As far as the influence of secularly oriented children, the Oorah volunteer offers this perspective: “It depends on the direction a child is heading in. When people come from outside the religious world and they begin to keep the mitzvos and try to fit in, they don’t want to drag anyone down, and they won’t. We have to give them time to grow. We can’t expect everything to change in a month or a year. But the kids from those kinds of families are not likely to be a negative influence.

“It is important, though, that the schools educate their students. It can be a disaster if the religious kids make fun of the new student or look down on him. They have to learn a little tolerance and acceptance.”

Soul Search
While both of the objections examined above have a certain altruistic root – the benefit of the school and its students – there are sometimes other, less justifiable forces afoot when a yeshiva refuses to accept kiruv children. Sometimes, the overriding motivation is concern for the school’s status in the community. The more exclusive the school, the tougher its standards and longer its waiting list, the greater its “name” tends to be. Many parents believe that by virtue of the school’s status, their children will have a better chance at a good high school/seminary/yeshiva or perhaps even a better range of marriage prospects. While these are real and legitimate concerns for a parent, they are concerns that sometimes pit the perceived best interests of individual schools and families against the best interests of Klal Yisrael as a whole.

Nonetheless, there are also good reasons to educate kiruv children in an environment tailored to their needs. First of all, they will not feel out of place. Secondly, learning can progress at a rate geared to their progress. Thirdly, the school and staff are trained to work with such children, to become involved in their families and guide them through the many personal hurdles they encounter as they grow.

Thus, the bottom line when deciding where a kiruv child should be educated is – what would be best for the individual child. This must then be balanced against the question of how much Klal Yisrael can be expected to invest for the benefit of its entire population of children, including those who don’t yet fit the profile of a full-fledged yeshiva student.

Give us your opinion: Would you be willing to have kiruv children in your children's yeshiva?