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Dr. Howard Rosenblatt, who has announced his retirement after four years as head of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Raritan Valley (SSDSRV) in East Brunswick and nearly four decades as an educator, has witnessed the dramatic transformations within Jewish education over the past half-century.

"It was a different kind of world," Rosenblatt said of his educational experiences growing up outside Boston in the 1950s.

That was time when it was not a contradiction to belong to an Orthodox synagogue and attend a public school, as Rosenblatt did. Public school was supplemented with Hebrew school, five days a week, where instruction in traditional Jewish texts dominated the curriculum, with little emphasis on Hebrew language, no discussion of the Shoah, nor any room for questioning, he recalled.

Nearly 50 years later, Rosenblatt says that all this has changed: Jewish day schools have embraced the Hebrew language, learning about the Holocaust has become an integral part of the curriculum, and questioning is the raison d'etre.

The education of an educator

Growing up, Rosenblatt was set on going to law school, yet a series of experiences compelled him to pursue his chosen field instead.

One of those experiences was his summers at Camp Yavneh in New Hampshire.

"It brought the whole community together," he said, recalling the many children of rabbis from across the denominational spectrum, including the son of a major Hassidic rebbe, who attended the camp.

Rosenblatt also pointed to his involvement with USY, the Conservative youth movement, in the early 1960s. Under the guidance of Rabbi Joseph Lukinsky, the teens were encouraged to merge their commitment to Jewish life with social action. Rosenblatt spent time volunteering in a Head Start program and as part of the civil rights movement, he participated in a voter registration drive in the Rockland County area in New York.

Another experience was his first trip to Israel, which took place the summer between his freshman and sophomore year of the Boston Hebrew Teachers College, where he pursued a joint undergraduate degree between there and Boston University.

In Israel, Rosenblatt divided his time between the Hayim Greenberg Institute and Hebrew University, where his Hebrew skills allowed him to take undergraduate and graduate courses in Jewish studies. Among his professors there was Yehuda Amichai, one of the most revered Israeli poets.

"He was young like we were, so we didn't really know how important he was," he said of Amichai.

His trip to Israel was also the first time that he encountered, in any meaningful way, the Shoah. On his return home, Rosenblatt decided to visit the Dachau concentration camp, which had a profound impact on him.

"That trip to Israel was very powerful for me, because while I had this knowledge, it really instilled this tremendous concern for me," he said.

Those series of experiences led him to abandon his plans for law school and instead enroll in a joint master's program, in educational psychology from Columbia University Teachers' College and in Bible and education from the Jewish Theological Seminary, in order to pursue a career in Jewish professional life.

Graduate school and the start of a career

While in graduate school, the civil rights, Soviet Jewry, and anti-war movements coalesced and for Rosenblatt highlighted the connections between Jewish life and social action.

Then '67 came, the year of Israel's swift military victory over its Arab neighbors, which he described as a "liberating" experience for the American Jewish community.

"What the Six-Day War gave people," he said, "was a sense of pride of being Jewish, of being committed to Israel, and they recognized that you didn't have to deal with 'are you a Jew or an American?'"

The event, Rosenblatt said, compelled the Orthodox and non-Orthodox alike to found Jewish day schools, and also provided an impetus for his own interest in going into day school education.

"Day schools gave people the opportunity, intellectually, to compound the two," he said.

Jewish day schools, Rosenblatt said, provided a model of education that was more exciting than what was available at public schools at the time.

"The fact that within a single school -- a Jewish day school -- you could make connections between Judaism and what's going on in the world and deal with the contradictions as well, was a chance that could not be beat," he said, adding that day schools, unlike many public schools, allowed teachers and administrators to experiment with the latest theories of education.

Developments in the field

Rosenblatt has spent much of his career in the Conservative movement's Schechter schools, though he has also taught in community and modern Orthodox schools in Cleveland and Montreal, respectively.

Over the past several decades, Rosenblatt has seen major changes at Jewish day schools, particularly developments in the curriculum as well as advances in classroom technology -- changes he admitted are not necessarily unique to Schechter schools.

"When I started in Jewish day schools... there was no Hebrew language arts program that you could say that was comparable in scope and breadth that you find developed in English language arts," he said.

Since then, Schechters and many other Jewish day schools have embraced the Tal-Am Hebrew program, which Rosenblatt proudly noted was developed by an educator who had worked for him at the Akivah School in Montreal. Other curricular developments at Schechter schools have included the MaTok Bible program and a newly established rabbinics program.

For Rosenblatt, his personal and professional experiences have taught him the importance of creating pluralistic Jewish communities. Even though Schechter schools are affiliated with Conservative Judaism, Rosenblatt said that day schools can transcend denominational boundaries.

"What I have found that is possible is that our approach to teaching Torah is one that would be meaningful to modern Orthodox and Conservative Jews and certainly to Reform Jews and Reconstructionist Jews," he said.

"I understand that there are certain questions that some people are prepared to ask and others not prepared to ask, but it's the intellectual approach of questioning, of using traditional sources and modern sources," he added. "I think we've been successful in making that part of our school."

For Rosenblatt, this emphasis on pluralism is not only possible, but actually enhances the educational experience for all students.

"My view of modern Orthodoxy and where I think it shares with Conservative and Reform Judaism is that when you study Torah, you can ask all questions and you look for evidence for questions," he said. "The fact that you may even use an archeological resource as well as a medieval commentator or modern commentator does not denigrate, because it enhances your understanding of Torah."

In terms of technological advancement, computer labs have become a given in schools across the country. In addition, classrooms at SSDSRV now include SMART Boards, an interactive whiteboards that allow touch control of computer applications and annotation over a word document.

The school has also recently a constructed a science lab, funded through a gift from the Center for Initiatives in Jewish Education, part of the Gruss Life Monument Funds.

Engaging students

Two experiences in the mid-1990s, Rosenblatt said, "affected everything I do in education."

One was the publication of "The Jew Within: Self, Family, and Community in America" by sociologist Steven M. Cohen and Arnold Eisen, a prominent historian of American Judaism who now serves as the chancellor of JTS. Based upon extensive interviews as well as quantitative data, the authors argue, in part, that an adult's strong Jewish identity derives from positive experiences he or she had as a child.

The second experience was an academic conference that Rosenblatt attended, during which the notion of "authentic assessment" was proposed. This theory of education asserts that the most effective way to assess a child's learning is not through tests that merely reflect memorization, but rather through allowing the student to apply the knowledge he has acquired in novel situations.

"Those affected my teaching in two ways," he said. "One is how do we assess what we do with kids intellectually in all of our subject areas and that is now reflected in all of learning and second, I want kids to have experiences."

In an effort to create such experiences, each year at Schechter the 8th grade enrolls in a theology class, where the students are encouraged to ask any "core questions" they have about religion.

"The premise is that every single human has the same questions," he said.

As part of this class, the school invites rabbis of different streams of Judaism, and even clergy of other religions, to come to the class.

"We have some similar answers, but we also have some different answers to these questions," Rosenblatt said. "Even within Judaism among the clergy, there may be some different answers -- and certainly across religions."

In addition to promoting a culture of questioning, the class also teaches students to respect people who may be different than them.

"Whether you go to a Jewish day school or a public school, you basically do not have a lot of contact with people who are different from you in any kind of significant way," he said.

The objective of this program, and by extension education as a whole, is to engage students, Rosenblatt said, rather than the kind of rote education that he received growing up.

"You engage them with things that are interesting, that they see have value, and that talks to them and I think that Judaism, and Jewish day schools, and our school has a lot to offer people to add meaning to their lives."

Though he has no plans after retirement, Rosenblatt, who has completed 13 full marathons since age 40, said that he "can't envision going from full force to nothing." Since he resides in the Philadelphia area, Rosenblatt says he is looking forward to relinquishing the 80-mile commute each way to work and spending more time enjoying the activities that he has neglected over the years such as his membership to the Philadelphia Art Museum and his subscription to the orchestra.