After the attack, some teachers are reminding students that, as one educator put it, „the vast majority of people are good people who care about us.“<\/b>
\nBesie Katz runs an Orthodox Jewish day school in Northeast Philadelphia, and during Sunday classes this week her students were confused and saddened by the shooting that had taken place at a synagogue the previous day on the other side of the state of Pennsylvania. \u201cThe overriding question\u201d they had, she says, \u201cwas, in different iterations, how could somebody do something like this? How could this have happened? And of course, that’s the hardest question to answer.\u201d
She told her students at Politz Hebrew Academy that \u201chatred consumes people like a fire,\u201d and stressed that Saturday\u2019s killings were the awful result of someone who had given up on compassion, kindness, and empathy. \u201cThey seemed comforted by that,\u201d she told me, \u201cas much as you can be.\u201d
Over the weekend and into the week, Katz and other educators at Jewish schools around the country have been considering how best to help their students make sense of the actions of a gunman who reportedly yelled \u201call Jews must die\u201d upon entering the synagogue. In speeches, smaller group discussions, and all-school gatherings, they attempted to explain the Pittsburgh shooting, even as they sought answers themselves.
Read: A Prayer for Squirrel Hill\u2014And for American Jewry
Jonathan Kroll, a rabbi and the head of school at Katz Yeshiva High School of South Florida, convened his roughly 350 students before classes started on Monday. Saturday\u2019s shooting was particularly resonant on the Katz Yeshiva campus because it\u2019s only a 15-minute drive from the city of Parkland, where earlier this year 17 students and staff died in a shootin g at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. „Unfortunately we had a little bit of practice last [school] year talking about this and addressing it in the wake of the Parkland shooting, not from an anti-Semitic perspective but from a school-safety perspective,\u201d Kroll says.
After he and his students prayed together, he delivered remarks about the synagogue shooting: \u201cI said, ‚We have to be vigilant and careful and realize that anti-Semitism is not a relic of the past. It’s not something that lived in Europe 70 years ago.\u2026 But I tried to reassure our students that we really have a very safe environment here and they should be vigilant but feel confident and not scared.“ Additionally, he reminded them that \u201cthe vast majority of people are good people who care about us, who wish us well.“
Kroll\u2019s audience was made up of high-schoolers, and educators elsewhere also calibrated their messages about the shooting based on students\u2019 ages. Ari Leubitz, a rabbi and the head of the Atlanta Jewish Academy, a modern Orthodox school, sketched for me a rough timeline of students\u2019 readiness. Since the academy \u201cruns from newborns to high school,\u201d Leubitz had thought a lot about what was age-appropriate. \u201cInfants through fourth grade\u2026 we don\u2019t bring it up,\u201d he said. This was in line, give or take a year, with what other school leaders told me.
Around fifth or sixth grade, Leubitz says, students start to have questions, and to reflect on their emotions, so they\u2019re readier to discuss tough subjects. By seventh and eighth grade, \u201cThey want to be able to talk it through and come to a solution,\u201d Leubitz said. \u201cWhen you get to high school, then it shifts from the \u2018what happened\u2019 to the \u2018why it happened.\u2019\u2026 At that age, I want to fix it. What am I going to do to fix it?\u201d
That was a question that students had at Golda Och Academy, in West Orange, New Jersey. „Our 12th graders, they’re angry,\u201d Adam Shapiro, the head of school, told me after meeting with them. \u201cThey’re angry about the environment of the world they\u2019re living in right now, where hate is becoming so prevalent. They were looking at me and saying, \u2018We want to act\u2014we don\u2019t want to be passive.\u2019\u201d He noted that many of them will be voting for the first time next week.
All of the Jewish school leaders I spoke to said that their minds went to campus security\u2014something that is in their control\u2014after the Pittsburgh shooting. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to get much more secure than we [already] are,\u201d Kroll said. \u201cWe definitely had something of a wake-up call after the Parkland massacre last year.\u201d Katz, in Philadelphia, said that on Monday she added a second guard to watch over her campus\u2019s entrances. \u201cI want to upgrade our cameras, we’re going to get more fencing on the perimeter of the school\u2014which are things we were looking at anyway,\u201d she told me. \u201cBut [Saturday’s shooting] gives credence to the fact that we’d better do it fast.\u201d
Leubitz, of the Atlanta Jewish Academy, says that another issue on his mind was how he was going to give his staff (and himself) the time and space to process and mourn, so that they would be able to do the same for their students. \u201cI think it\u2019s very hard for [teachers and parents] to not have the answers,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to say, \u2018There\u2019s an answer to this,\u2019 and it really hurts because we can\u2019t say \u2018It\u2019s going to be okay,\u2019 because many of us don\u2019t believe that.\u201d<\/p>\n

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