Third in a series on people and places fostering commitment to Judaism and the Jewish people.

It's not easy for a teacher to communicate in an entirely foreign language, especially to pre-schoolers. But that is what happens in an extraordinary experiment in Hebrew-language immersion launched seven years ago at the Jacob Pressman Academy, a Conservative day school in Los Angeles. Children entering the school between the ages of two and five have the option of spending half their day in classrooms where only Hebrew is spoken.

Using all their wits in a method known as total physical response—or, in this context, by its Hebrew definition guf velashon, body and tongue—teachers "act out what they are saying; they point, jump, spin, and play," remarks Jill Linder, the Judaic Studies principal. In one game, children are asked "What is missing?" and respond in kind; in another, they take turns as the "teacher's assistant"—all in the service of staying engaged and speaking the words.

The Pressman program is based on a body of educational research suggesting that languages are not taught but acquired. Rather than subjecting students to drills and rote memorization, let them absorb a second language the same way they learn their mother tongue—by hearing and speaking. A second body of research focuses on the ways that developing brains create neural pathways. For children under seven, it emerges, second languages are stored in the mind just as the mother tongue is. After that age, completely different pathways must be formed, and language study becomes commensurately more difficult.  At Pressman, notes Frieda Robins, who launched the experimental program there and at two dozen other places around the country, children coming out of immersion classes into the elementary school are able to talk in both English and Hebrew "about their school, family, friends, homes, holiday celebrations, everything."

What prompted the initial experiment, co-sponsored by the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Covenant Foundation, was a troubling and somewhat paradoxical fact of American Jewish life. Hebraic literacy, not to mention fluency, has declined significantly over the past 60 years, just as the Hebrew-speaking population of Israel has flourished and grown almost to the point of overtaking the American Jewish community in size. As a consequence of this decline, although Jewish education is thriving in this country, it is conducted almost entirely in translation. Indeed, when it comes to Hebrew, American Jews are far less fluent than Jews in most other Diaspora communities.

Why should this be so? The standard answer begins with the low priority Americans in general place on foreign-language study. In the Jewish community, several other factors are at work as well. Even at higher levels of Jewish learning, where once the goal and even the practice was to teach in Hebrew, students these days are provided, at best, with facing-page texts, ostensibly to enable the absorption of greater amounts of material in the same amount of time. Nor are many Jewish-studies teachers themselves qualified to conduct classes in Hebrew. In contrast with the situation only a few decades ago, most Israelis in the United States today are busy with their own studies or are pursuing careers in fields other than Jewish education.

Initially, the greatest impediment to the Pressman Academy program was the resistance of parents who feared the dual-language approach would hinder their children's progress. To persuade them otherwise, the school had recourse to the ultimate trump card: research demonstrating that alumni of such programs perform better than others on their SATs and display superior abstract reasoning skills and creativity. By now, with the program's proven track record of success, the school has gained renown in Los Angeles as the place for acquiring Hebrew at an early age. What is more, the school ensures that pupils continue with Hebrew immersion as they progress through the lower school, adding reading and writing comprehension to their repertoire even as they deepen their store of Judaic knowledge. 

Not all of the initial programs have done so well, and some schools have dropped out of the initiative entirely. The secret of Pressman's success can be summed up in two words: leadership and ideology. Guided by its principal, Rabbi Mitch Malkus, Pressman has committed substantial resources to training teachers in the techniques of language immersion, all the while insisting on nurturing Hebrew itself, if not as a sfat em, then as a sfat am. Hebrew may never be the mother tongue of American Jews, but it is and will remain the language of the Jewish people; as such, it must be both valued and acquired.

Watch Hebrew-immersion classes at the Pressman Academy.

Jack Wertheimer, professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, is the author of A People Divided, among other books, and the editor most recently of Learning and Community (Brandeis). Previous entries in Vital Signs:  "Torah and Service"  and "Putting the School into Hebrew School".