‘We will always prioritize Jewish children at Hillel.’

By Marshall Weiss, The Dayton Jewish Observer

With parents urging Hillel Academy to reintroduce middle school grades for its current students amid an overall decline in enrollment, the Jewish day school will admit qualified non-Jewish students to all grades and will expand to seventh grade with the 2025-26 school year. Hillel also plans to add eighth grade with the 2026-27 school year.

Anna Smith, Hillel Academy’s principal, hopes these moves will strengthen not only the school, but the Jewish and general communities.

“We’re opening our doors to admission for people of different faiths and backgrounds who are interested in a Jewish faith-based values education,” she says.

“The Dayton Jewish community is a finite number, and we want to make sure that Hillel is available to anybody in the Jewish community who wants to be here. We’re able to offer an incredible education to a slightly broader audience as well as generating a greater trust and understanding among non-Jewish people about what Judaism is.”

Smith says Hillel has 30 students enrolled this school year from kindergarten through sixth grade. Without the new changes, she estimates enrollment would comprise 24 students for 2025-26.

With the addition of seventh grade and expanding enrollment beyond the Jewish community, she anticipates another five to 10 students will attend Hillel for 2025-26.

Hillel’s student population peaked in the early 1990s with 190 students — nearly 50 in its high school. But because of a shrinking Jewish community, declining enrollment, and budgetary constraints, Hillel discontinued its high school grades in 1999 and 2000.

By 2011, Hillel’s enrollment had dropped to 22 students in kindergarten through fourth grade.

Hillel came closest to its goal of increasing enrollment to 50 students — the maximum capacity for its site on the third floor of Beth Abraham Synagogue at Sugar Camp in Oakwood — in 2022-23, with 47 students in kindergarten through sixth grade.

“Covid boosted the enrollment because we were able to stay open,” Smith adds.

Ohio’s 2023 expansion of EdChoice Scholarship student vouchers hasn’t led to new student enrollment, she says, but has reduced Hillel’s financial aid load with each family that takes advantage of the program.

“We’re able to make it more affordable for more.”

When non-Jewish students attend Hillel, Smith says, they will experience the same Jewish and secular education as Jewish students.

“They will take Hebrew, they will take Judaics, they will participate in prayer and have no different expectations than any other student.”

Hillel President Andy Schwartz says non-Jewish parents have requested to enroll their children at Hillel for years.

“They might not be Jewish, but they would like to have that experience for their kids: people who have appreciated their Jewish education at the JCC Preschool and would want to continue that at Hillel.”

Smith and Schwartz emphasize that Hillel will have guardrails in place to ensure the Jewish character of the school.

“Jewish students, Jewish families are the priority for Hillel students at all times,” Schwartz says. “We will always prioritize Jewish children for a Jewish education at Hillel.”

Smith says she’s consulted with several Jewish day schools that accept non-Jewish students, and with Prizmah, the network for Jewish day schools and yeshivas in North America, to establish new policies, which will include zero tolerance for proselytizing on the part of students or their families at the school.

As a Jewish day school, Smith says, Hillel maintains its ability to admit or not admit students on the basis of religion.

“There will be limited spaces in each class available for non-Jewish students,” Schwartz says. “That’s to make sure each class is not out of balance. It would never be the case that Jewish students would be turned away because there are current spots taken by someone who is not.

“And then you wouldn’t want to have one Jewish student in a classroom with four, five, or six non-Jewish kids.”

Prizmah’s senior director of school services, Amy Wasser, tells The Observer she’s aware of at least 30 Jewish day schools in the United States that have enrollment open to non-Jewish students.

Some have made the change recently; others, such as Tampa’s, go back more than 30 years. The main reason, Wasser says, is to grow enrollment, “which does not usually pan out in big numbers.”

Sometimes, Wasser explains, it’s to meet the needs of non-Jewish students within a day school framework. Other times it’s to allow children of non-Jewish faculty and staff to attend, “to make tuition benefits more equitable.”

Wasser says U.S. Jewish day schools with non-Jewish enrollment are all non-Orthodox.

In Ohio, Jewish day schools open to non-Jews are The Lippman School in Akron, Mandel Jewish Day School in Cleveland, Columbus Jewish Day School, and Akiva Academy in Youngstown.

Of these, Youngstown has a Jewish population smaller than Dayton’s, estimated at 1,500 people, according to the Cleveland Jewish News.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Dayton estimates the Jewish population of the Dayton area at about 4,000, 2,700 of which have been identified.

For more information about admissions to Hillel Academy, contact Meryl Hattenbach, mhattenbach@daytonhillel.org.

To read the complete April 2025 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.