A brand new Jewish custom has taken maintain at a personal, non-Jewish faculty in Manhattan.
On a latest Friday, about 240 college students, mother and father and educators from the City Faculty, situated on the Higher East Facet, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.
It was the third time in as a few years that the varsity had held a Shabbat celebration, and greater than half of the scholars and fogeys in attendance weren’t Jewish.
“I believe there’s a actual enthusiasm and pleasure for households who aren’t Jewish to come back into their first Shabbat or study extra about it once more,” mentioned Pierangelo Rossi, the City Faculty’s director of fairness and neighborhood motion.
Initially from Peru, Rossi shouldn’t be Jewish. His first Shabbat expertise ever was on the City Faculty in 2024, after Jewish mother and father organized a gathering within the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel.
For years, the varsity had particular “affinity teams” and areas for college kids and fogeys of coloration, for “white anti-racist” college students, and for queer college students and their allies. The assault, and the surge of antisemitism that adopted, spurred Jewish college students and fogeys to work with the varsity to create their very own.
Whereas the City Faculty doesn’t gather details about college students’ faith, officers estimate that at the very least 1 / 4 of the coed physique is Jewish.
“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it turned clear to all of us — that our Jewish neighborhood was on the lookout for that sense of affirmation in a manner they hadn’t earlier than,” mentioned Head of Faculty Doug Brophy.
Brophy, who has led the City Faculty since 2018, understood how they felt. He’s additionally vice chairman of the Stephen Smart Free Synagogue on the Higher West Facet.
Affinity teams have emerged as a hot-button concern within the debate over DEI, or variety, fairness and inclusion. Whereas their proponents say the teams give minority and marginalized populations desperately wanted areas of their very own, critics of DEI say the teams can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into colleges and different establishments.
Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have significantly criticized the affinity group framework for too usually forcing Jewish college students right into a binary framework about race and privilege that doesn’t acknowledge the complexity of Jewish id.
On the similar time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York Metropolis non-public colleges. The top of 1 elite non-public faculty stepped down final summer season after members of the varsity neighborhood clashed over id, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza battle.
On the City Faculty, officers and fogeys say, these tensions have been absent. As an alternative, your entire faculty neighborhood has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the opposite particular occasions held to honor college students’ traditions, similar to a lion parade on the varsity’s block to mark Lunar New Yr and a Persian New Yr observance led by mother and father.
“Whether or not it’s coming from a vulnerability or a distinction, it’s [about] desirous to be a part of one thing greater than your self, and never simply our Jewish households and colleagues feeling a way of id, however everybody else creating a larger sense of empathy,” Brophy mentioned.
The City Faculty shouldn’t be the one non-Jewish non-public faculty within the metropolis to carry Shabbat celebrations in recent times: Riverdale Nation Day Faculty within the Bronx says 700 folks attended its November 2024 gathering. But it surely has dedicated to annual gatherings, that are rising in attendance.
That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Smart; and this yr, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Higher West Facet’s Rodeph Sholom Faculty and the Pelham Jewish Heart.
“For me, it was actually a really totally different context the place you might have non-Jews which are inquisitive about studying about what’s it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz mentioned. “And it was lovely.”
To create an academic plan that was nonetheless partaking for kids of all ages, she narrowed the main focus of the occasion to 2 phrases: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” which means “Sabbath” and “peace.”
“I want to make use of vocabulary, and I must work with the room solely, with these with ideas which are common,” Turkienicz added. “And there’s a lot. There’s loads in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ which are common.”
She taught the friends the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic phrase for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the youthful youngsters adorned placemats, whereas the older youngsters frolicked with their classmates.
14-year-old Daniel Rybak caught round close to the varsity after his final class of the day obtained out so he may attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.
Rybak, whose mom is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the City Faculty for 9 years.
“Simply speaking in regards to the larger world at this level, with all of the troubles within the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, in addition to simply the overall sense, I suppose, that issues are getting just a little extra violent around the globe — it’s only a good factor that brings folks again to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re right here, we’re household, we’re OK, we’re getting via this,’” Rybak mentioned. “It simply reveals that even all through all that that’s occurred all over the place, there’s nonetheless pockets of neighborhood and of actual hope.”
This yr, the Shabbat gathering took on added which means for some attendees as a few of New York’s Jews really feel more and more alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s workplace.
“The entire time I used to be pondering: 20 blocks north from right here, there’s a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish neighborhood in New York,” Turkienicz mentioned. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we now have a personal, non-Jewish faculty doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”
Katy Williamson, a Jewish guardian who helped set up the final two City Faculty Shabbats and attended this yr’s, mentioned she was “actually blown away by the sense of neighborhood” and stunned by how many individuals attended.
“I learn the information. Clearly, we stay in New York Metropolis. I’m very conscious of what’s happening outdoors of this, simply on this planet proper now,” she mentioned. “There was simply this actually heat feeling. … So many individuals from the varsity neighborhood joined and wished to be part of it.”
