But during the last century in America, acculturation and assimilation changed the balance between family and formal education. For most Jews, the synagogue or community religious school, rather than the family and community, became the primary means of inculcating Jewish knowledge and identity.

Limitations of the synagogue school as a surrogate for the Jewish family/neighborhood:
The severe limitations of such a model became apparent over time. Children experienced Judaism outside the framework of a coherent pattern of life, secondary to their primary general educational program, learned at unwelcome times in the late afternoon or Sunday mornings, divorced from their personal experience, and often terminated promptly upon celebrating bar/bat mitzvah. The discontinuity between this limited Jewish academic experience and what was practiced in students’ family and communal environment significantly undermined this system’s effectiveness in inculcating a meaningful sense of Jewish identity.

The emergence and influence of Jewish family education:
In the 1980s and 1990s, Jewish educators and rabbis, recognizing the family’s crucial role in shaping Jewish identity, and observing that children rarely view Judaism as relevant unless it is modeled in their home and community, began developing educational strategies directed towards the Jewish family unit as a whole. A number of exciting initiatives have grown out of the movement for Jewish family education. Today, almost every Jewish institution – congregational and day schools, JCCs, summer camps, early childhood centers, etc. -- includes some family educational element in its programming. The Whizin Institute at the University of Judaism, and now the Consortium for the Future of the Jewish Family, has trained a hundreds of teams from congregations around the country in innovative approaches to Jewish family education.

The current range of Jewish family education programming embraces parent learning programs paralleling children’s education but on an adult level; joint parent-child workshops or learning units; educational materials for home-based use by families; family educational events in the community; family-based curricula; intensive programming such as family camps and shabbatonim; and outstanding web-based family learning resources.

The promise/limitations of Jewish family education:
The success (as well as the limitations) of Jewish family education have awakened Jewish educators to the need for deeper and more systemic innovation, and have highlighted the crucial link between the synagogue and the congregational school. In theory and practice, Jewish family education is founded upon several critical observations which underscore its importance and point to possible future directions:

1.  Jewish children's education inculcates Jewish identity far more effectively when it occurs within and is reinforced by a family and communal context.  Students find learning more meaningful and relevant when they witness their parent(s) and other adults similarly engaged in exploring their own Jewish identity through learning and practice, and when they observe what they are learning being practiced within a familial and communal context.

2.  Children's education is often a significant gateway for Jewish parents to develop a deeper sense of connection as adults with Jewish practice, tradition, and community.  The years of their child’s Jewish education represent the most promising “window of opportunity” to engage Jewish adults; this is when parents may be most open and have greatest access to Jewish resources and community. Too often, parents are not engaged in the process of Jewish growth, either for their children or for themselves, and they are involved only vicariously through their children’s learning. Once adults engage from a sense of parental responsibility, they often recognize their own personal motives for deepening their Jewish learning.

3.  Jewish learning has the power to build community by binding people together in deepened relationships.  Family-oriented Jewish education has the potential to significantly strengthen participants' sense of Jewish community and to revitalize and transform synagogues as institutions.  The active involvement of parents in Jewish learning through family education programming holds important implications for the transformation of congregations generally. Setting family learning in a communal context can dramatically infuse congregations with new energy and build a deeper and more meaningful sense of Jewish community for participants. It can also generate significantly deeper engagement in Jewish communal life generally.

The next frontier of Jewish family-based learning:  synagogue transformation.
The family-oriented approach to Jewish education calls for re-conceptualizing the structure of synagogue life so that it (1) better supports a more integrated vision of Jewish learning and living for parents and children, (2) promotes collaborative leadership between professional and lay leadership, and (3) utilizes the energy generated by a family approach as a lever to strengthen and deepen the congregation’s sense of community.