Yavneh marks 25 years with ‘Tzsilver Tzadakah’

After 25 years of growth in a relatively small Silicon Valley Jewish community, Yavneh Day School deserves to celebrate its silver anniversary. But celebrating without thinking of ways to help others wouldn't be Yavneh's style.

Yavneh is the only Solomon Schechter-affliated K-6 school in the Bay Area. Now at its permanent location in Los Gatos at the Gloria and Ken Levy JCC campus, Yavneh offers a familiar home to Conservative families and an inclusive environment for all Jewish families. Multilevel approaches are used in reading, math and Hebrew language. A special Israeli curriculum addresses the needs of native Hebrew speakers while introductory Hebrew is available at every grade level. 

The school's passion for helping the community infiltrates its quarter-century celebration, with its "Tzsilver Tzadakah" quarter drive.

Students are being asked to donate a quarter each week from their allowance . At the end of the school year the funds raised will be sent to a yet-to-be determined school in northern Israel.

"It is important to be thinking about people in need in our time of celebration," said Shelley Leveson, Yavneh's director of admissions.

"I think that the Yavneh community brings this overriding sense of social responsibility," said Yavneh's head of school, Lori Abramson. "These are the people that are the first to drop everything and help a family that has fallen on hard times."

The fundraiser, said Leveson, "helps the kids understand the concept that although they're just giving one quarter every week it will be a couple thousand dollars by the end of the year."

Yavneh started as one class of about 30 students and has grown into a seven-grade school with two more upper-level grades, seven and eight, to be added in the near future.

Susie and Adam Green, parents of a fourth-grade Yavneh student, have been associated with the school for 23 years, when they first researched the school as an option for their eldest child. Looking back on Yavneh's early days, Susan Green recalls that the school grew considerably in its first five years.

"Yavneh had an incredible warmth and haimish feeling that we haven't felt anywhere else, in any other educational environment," she said. "The children experienced an incredible bond, as did the parents and staff."

Alumnus Jeremy Segall, now an attorney in Chicago, attended Yavneh in the 1980s. He says that his Jewish identity that was nurtured at the school played a large part in his desire to study law. "The most important thing I learned at the school is how important Judaism is in my daily life and how it permeates everything that I do and all of the decisions that I make, the holy and the secular, and that no matter what I do, I am always a representative of Jews everywhere and my family."

Yavneh endured some difficult times when the JCC closed the campus during construction and had to temporarily relocate to the former Blackford High School in San Jose. "I think the school has had its up and downs," said Abramson. We were on an oversized high school campus, and my kids were two feet off the ground. The campus swallowed them up."

Said Green: "Relocating proved very difficult for enrollment, especially since the campus was large, old, run-down and did not have any of the same feel of Yavneh's prior home. The ability to positively market the school became quite challenging, yet the mission and direction of the school remained strong."

Yavneh moved back to their permanent location last August. "We're home," Abramson said.