Yavneh Day School located in Cincinnati, Ohio is an independent private Pre-K-8 Jewish day school that caters to all Jewish denominations and to affiliated as well as unaffiliated Jewish families. The school was founded in 1952 at a time when Jewish Americans had started to become more receptive to full-time Jewish schooling for their children. The school is subdivided into a Preschool, Lower School, and Middle School. It emphasizes both Jewish studies and general secular studies. It was announced in January 2008, that the school would be changing its name in the future in honor of Dr. S. Sunner Rockwern who donated four million dollars to its endowment. The school is still officially Yavneh Day School and doing business asRockwern Academy.
Context and history
The roots of the school's origins are intertwined with the history of the Jews in Cincinnati. Many Jewish educational institutions were created and merged, and continue to do so, and Yavneh was part of that process: Cincinnati is the home city for Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College its central rabbinical school. Part of the main tenets of classical Reform Judaism as espoused by the Pittsburgh Platform was to reject the ways of Orthodoxy and part of that was to send the children of their affiliated synagogues to secular public schools and to receive Jewish education at temple "Sunday schools" instead. Therefore the introduction of all-day Jewish schooling should be seen as highly significant in the midst of a city that was the bastion of Reform Judaism. The school's history reflects the evolution and the struggles of Cincinnati's Jewish community. After its founding in 1952 it faced an uphill battle to recruit students and retain its strength as a school: Yavneh subsequently merged with Beth Am and Talmud Torah to form the Cincinnati Community Hebrew Schools a move that reflected that the Yavneh leadership had rejected the overtures of the strictly Orthodox line of Rabbi Eliezer Silver and was moving towards and an alignment with the non-Orthodox part of the Jewish community. During the 1970s there was a short-lived merger with the Cincinnati Hebrew Day school after which the school experienced greater enrollment.
Function and support
As a mark of its strategic importance to the Jews of Cincinnati it has been extremely successful in recent years in its fundraising. It has won significant support from the Jewish Federation of Cincinnati, the Jewish Foundation of Cincinnati, the AVI CHAI Foundation, and the Jewish Funders Network among many others.
