Beit Rabban Day School: Cultivating Open-Minded and Socially Conscious Jewish Children
With a corporate law and nonprofit background, Stephanie Ives found her calling at Upper West Side Jewish school Beit Rabban, which offers preschool through 8th-grade education. As Head of School, Stephanie invests heavily in relationships between students, teachers, parents, and families, generally to foster a feeling of a small-town community in a bustling city.
Beit Rabban Day School is intentionally a home to diverse Jewish families—the spectrum of Jewish affiliations, practices, and beliefs, including both intra and inter-faith families. What connects them is a commitment to meaningful Jewish life. Home to deep, joyful learning, Beit Rabban employs a progressive educational approach across secular and religious studies, focusing on interdisciplinary studies that follow students’ interests.
According to Stephanie, the school uniquely blends Jewish, progressive, and rigorous education. “Our education rests on four core pillars: active learning, empowered Judaism, boundless campus, and kind community. Our goal is to cultivate kids who are curious and motivated learners, who are equipped with the skills and fluency to follow their dreams, who engage others with kindness, and who internalize a sense of obligation, a Jewish obligation, to care for themselves, their families, their communities, and their world.” This teaching method has helped students grapple with the big realities of today, including racism, antisemitism, and environmental changes—always in the context of optimism and the ability to change the world for the better.
The school has grown its offerings, branching out first into preschool and then opening a middle school in the fall of 2019. And
now, they are planning a move to a new building in the same neighborhood. The space will have bright, sunny classrooms with loft areas, a chapel for prayer, a science and exploration room, and an art workshop. It will also have a library, or something much more, where students will come to study. “It will be called the Beit Midrash, which means ‘house of study’ in Hebrew. We intend to reimagine what a library looks like for kids, and we have a few ideas on the table! While we may organize books by genre, we are also considering dividing them by big questions. As part of their weekly service-learning period, our middle schoolers may be the ones to organize the library as they see fit. All of this will not be limited to a designated room; rather, it will wrap around the building to convey our value that learning belongs everywhere. These are just a few ideas, but the overarching intention is to create an inspired ‘house of study’ that is as magnetic for our modern Manhattan children as the traditional ‘Beit Midrash’ has been for Jewish scholars around the world for millennia.”
This is what Beit Rabban does. It combines the magic of things that are often at odds—the old and the new, optimism and obligation to repair, diversity and Jewish affiliation, the big city and the small town. Because, as Stephanie explains, “we think this is our best bet for the Jewish future.”
