Chanuka Deans letter

Dear Parents,

There is nothing more exciting than to be able to watch your own students perform and show their love of Yiddishkeit and of the holiday of Chanukah. On Tuesday night, the first night of Chanukah, NEAT held its annual chagiga, directed by chagiga heads, Aviva Rotbard and Bracha Leibowitz. Together with their Student Council advisor, Mrs Tzippy Scheinerman, the girls prepared a beautiful program for the women and girls of the community. The many women and girls who attended enjoyed an amazing night of achdus, where every NEAT student either ran an activity, sang in the choir, or prepared delicious food and drinks related to the theme of “Lighten Up.” We give special thanks to all who helped to make the chagiga an
evening to remember.

On Wednesday morning, our Pre-K students enjoyed their annual Chanukah party, where they had the opportunity to participate in many different activity centers together with their parents. Special thanks to the Pre-K teachers, Morah Beth and Morah J., for their hard work. In the afternoon, the Kindergarten class performed their annual Chanukah play. Special thanks to Mrs. Jakubowicz for an amazing performance. On Wednesday evening, the parent body joined together for the PHDS Chanukah performance. The band, choir, video, and play performances were all second to none. It just gets better and better every year! Special thanks to Mr. Norman Rosenfield, band and choir director; Rabbi Jakubowicz and Mrs. Yudkowsky for assisting with the choir; Rabbi Yudkowsky for the video presentation, narrations, and choir costumes; and Mrs. Roz Segal for her work with the play.

There are a number of themes of Chanukah that strike a special chord in me that I believe are worthy of discussion. The first is based on a topic about which I have written before: “relevance.” There is a growing body of research pointing to the fact that in other time periods of our history, man relied on teaching religion as an emuna peshuta, simple belief based on a mesorah, tradition, that is passed down from generation to generation. However, as our world has become more complicated, the temptations of modern society have infiltrated our homes. While mesorah, tradition, is crucial to our young, today’s youth must actually understand the customs, and even more importantly, love their Yiddishkeit. A famous educator once said to me jokingly that a month in summer camp can be more important than an entire year in school. This seems like a radical statement, but perhaps we can explain the educator’s words as follows. We certainly don’t want to minimize the excellent day-to-day teaching that takes place in our school, but this educator was referring to the power of the extracurricular activities and their role in education. Of utmost priority in educating and parenting our children is to make our teaching as relevant as possible. The excitement generated from these special activities is very relevant and often remembered by children for much longer than the actual daily classroom learning. I hope you enjoyed their smiling faces as much as the teachers and administrators did.

The second theme is the notion that we read about in the Al Hanisim prayer. In describing the miracle of Chanukah, the tefillah uses the phrase “rabbim b’yad meatim- many in the hands of few.” While totally outnumbered, the Maccabim cried out, “Mi laHashem aylai—Whomever is for G-d come to me.” They assembled a fledgling army and fought an amazing surprise victory over the Greeks. The victory was much more than a physical victory of strength; it was, even more so, a victory of
religious freedom and yad Hashem. As we look to the history of the past year, we have witnessed strong and great leaders fall to the uprising of their constituents. In many of the cases, the replacement governments are even more hostile to Israel. A small country – a dot on the map surrounded by millions of enemies - still remains a force with which to be reconciled. These new developments and the battles that were fought by the Maccabim are not wars that can be fought with arms and munitions alone; they require the yad Hashem, the hand of Hashem. Chanukah is the reminder to us each year that even when nations like Iran threaten to annihilate us as a people, we turn to Hashem in our tefillos and ask Him to protect us from the verbal and physical threats that have faced us in each and every generation, just as those of the days of the Maccabim.

We wish our entire school family a happy Chanukah and an enjoyable winter break.