07/17/2026

Building Jewish Identity Through Education, Family Engagement

Tags: Federation

Article reprinted with permission from Cleveland Jewish News

by Casey Couch

When Jonathon Nisenboum grew up attending the Joseph and Florence Mandel Jewish Day School, his identity and connection to the Cleveland Jewish community existed within the walls of a classroom.

It wasn’t until the Highland Heights resident became a father to two young children – a four-year-old daughter and almost two-year-old son – that he started to understand the full scope of programming that Jewish Cleveland offered for young families. Once he did, he described it as “incredible.”

“We’re very blessed to live in Cleveland for a number of different reasons,” Nisenboum told the Cleveland Jewish News. “The ability for us to do things at least once a month with the Federation, where (my kids) are with other Jewish kids and doing events around the holidays is just hard to beat, and when you throw the schools on top of that, it’s just incredible.”

This sense of belonging wasn’t an accident. The Jewish Federation of Cleveland’s 2022 Population Study found that Jewish identity among the area’s children has remained strong since the last study took place in 2011 – the result of meticulous planning and investment in the future of Jewish Cleveland.

According to the most recent study, 88% of children in Jewish households are being raised Jewish – a rate nearly unchanged since 2011, even as intermarriage has risen. Of this group, 77% are being raised Jewish only and 11% are being raised Jewish in addition to another religion.

About two-thirds of Jewish children in Cleveland – 69% – are raised by two Jewish parents, while about one-quarter – 28% – are raised by interfaith parents.

Regina Krieger, director of Limmud Learning at Congregation Mishkan Or in Beachwood, has seen these changes head-on through her time at the former The Temple-Tifereth Israel since 1999, and working with families in the same capacity since the temple’s merger in 2024.

“We do serve a lot of interfaith families,” Krieger told the CJN. “It’s hard to tell which kids in our programs are interfaith, and it’s not something that we identify unless it’s been identified to us. Congregation Mishkan Or is open to all family types, and we are creating programs to welcome families that have non-Jewish parents.”

According to Krieger, the programs offered to young children are all about inclusivity, social justice and helping people in need, setting up future generations to see those needs in others.

“We try to take into account, for those parents who might not have the same background, those differences and we try to be inclusive,” Krieger said. “We find that families of interfaith children are very excited to learn and we want to make it as positive as we can for them.”

The majority of families, Krieger said, are public school students, so learning at the temple is the main source of Jewish religious or cultural learning for many of the enrolled children.

“Knowing that we don’t have the same amount of faith time hours, we try to make every moment that we have with our students a moment of learning, connection, growth and giving them what they will need to be thriving Jewish children,” Krieger said.

Even during the COVID-19 pandemic – school year 2021-2022 and summer 2022 when the population study was taking place – the majority of school-age children were engaged in Jewish education: 47% attend public school; 29% Jewish day school; 13% non-Jewish private school; and 11% other education arrangements such as homeschool.

Additionally, 15% attended congregational or Sunday school, though part-time Jewish education enrollment has been rising since study data was collected; 27% participate in informal programs like youth groups, teen programs or Hebrew tutoring; 42% attended Jewish day or overnight camps in 2022; and 95% of households with children discuss Jewish topics at home, and 80% read Jewish books.

For Marlyn Bloch Jaffe, the Irving and Frieda J. Hand Chief Executive Officer at the Jewish Education Center of Cleveland, she noted that she is “endlessly inspired” by the myriad ways in which children connect to their Judaism.

“Strategically, it is important to offer multiple paths to engagement, because people connect differently,” Bloch Jaffe told the CJN. “At the JEC, we talk about fostering a ‘multi-pronged’ approach, because it’s important to reach different learners in ways that speak to their individual needs and interests.”

Through this “multi-pronged approach,” the JEC has invested in @akiva for teens, Chayim Tovim for adults 55+, including grandparents, jHUB for interfaith couples and families, as well as working on the Jewish Day School Transformation Initiative.

“We continue to innovate new onramps to Jewish engagement, wherever people are in life,” Bloch Jaffe said. “That’s the idea behind The Prototype Initiative, which will launch six new part-time Jewish educational programs in our community this year.”

According to Bloch Jaffe, the JEC is deeply involved across the denominational spectrum with students who are already connected to Judaism, as well as those not yet engaged, in a variety of formal and informal settings. This allows them to elevate the learning and sense of community present in each of these portals, setting up the future generation for continued success.

“At so many key junctures in Jewish history, Jews developed innovative strategies to ensure the continuity of the Jewish people,” Bloch Jaffe said. “Here in Cleveland, it’s vital that we remain open to the changing needs of families and respond with creative solutions. The children of today become the leaders of tomorrow, and the more ways we can engage, educate and inspire them, the more vibrant our Jewish future will be.”

Hoping to engage Jewish children who reside outside of Cleveland’s most populated Jewish suburbs, Devorah Jacobs, co-director of Chabad of the West Side, told the CJN when she moved to the area in 2017, Jewish neighbors in the West Side didn’t even know that one another existed.

“I started to meet families one-on-one in the park or at the library and just see what was available, what they were interested in, and hear them out,” Jacobs said. “That’s pretty much how everything that we do now started – because of the young families and what they were looking for.”

According to the population study, Beachwood and the Heights area are home to over 40% of Jewish Cleveland households, and 28% of the Jewish children in Cleveland are residents of the Heights region.

In contrast, the West Side and Central region is home to about 16% of Jewish Cleveland and 12% of Jewish children. On this, Jacobs said that the geographic separation was certainly felt amongst families.

“A lot of families were struggling with being away from the Jewish community and feeling like everything was far,” Jacobs said. “They felt like they didn’t necessarily want to be in a traditional synagogue; they just wanted more cultural Judaism and they wanted their child to have a Jewish identity.”

For some families, Jacobs said that their child was the only Jewish kid in their school. But in the past 10 years, since Jacobs had arrived in Cleveland, she has seen Chabad of the West Side grow into a community that was simply not there before.

“It grew into this beautiful community of people that come together,” she said. “It wasn’t that they were looking for a synagogue; it was that they met people that they liked and the synagogue just happened around it, which I think was really nice and special, and I feel so honored to be a facilitator of that.”

Now, Jacobs said that not only do the families in the West Side feel more connected to one another than they did at the time of the 2011 population study – they also feel more connected to the larger Jewish community in Beachwood and the Heights area through many community partnerships.

Going forward, Jacobs said that some families on the West Side would appreciate a more formal Jewish education, such as a Jewish day school, but don’t have a way to get their students there.

“That’s definitely a need,” she said. “I’ve been trying to put together a Jewish day school curriculum that I can incorporate into the programming that I have, but I would definitely love to figure out a way to do that better.”

Additionally, Jacobs said she would love to see a more mobile, pop-up version of events and programming for families who are further out and may not have the capacity to come to Lakewood each week, but still want their children to be involved.

“My real goal is for every kid to feel proud of their Jewish identity, to not feel like they have to hide it, to know who they are and to feel proud of who they are,” Jacobs said.

For Nisenboum, that means researching which day school is a good fit for his children and co-chairing the Federation’s Super Sunday kickoff with his wife, Alix. This year, the couple is weaving a family aspect into the event so that their children – as well as the children of other young families – can get involved.

“I’ve lived here my whole life, but I do have friends who live in both Cincinnati and Chicago who are Jewish, and I think we have more events and programming than those cities combined,” Nisenboum said. “Truthfully, with the strength of the community, we will never leave. There’s no desire to leave because we have things in Cleveland that, when I speak to other people, they are so jealous of.”

To view the 2022 Cleveland Jewish Population Study, and to read other articles in this series, visit cjn.org.

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