The Heschel School

Opening Minds, Bridging Differences, Living Jewish Values.

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About
About Heschel

When the Abraham Joshua Heschel School was founded in 1983, a new model of Jewish day school was created. Named after one of the great Jewish leaders, teachers, and activists of the twentieth century, The Heschel School opened with a commitment to creating a pluralistic Jewish community dedicated to the values that characterized Rabbi Heschel’s life: intellectual exploration, respect, integrity, love of the Jewish people and tradition, and a commitment to social justice.

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The Heschel Experience
The Heschel Experience

The Heschel experience embraces both what it means to be a pluralistic community and the values that characterized Rabbi Heschel’s life: intellectual exploration, respect, integrity, love of the Jewish people and tradition, and a commitment to social justice. Learn more.
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Academics
Academics at Heschel
The Abraham Joshua Heschel School fosters critical thinking and a love of learning in an environment of intellectual challenge and academic excellence. By weaving together Jewish and general studies we nurture each student’s intellectual, emotional, social, and spiritual growth.
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Admissions
Admissions
Welcome to The Abraham Joshua Heschel School. We are a unique pluralistic Jewish day school, emphasizing academic excellence as well as awareness of social and communal responsibility through an offering of a superb integrated curriculum of general and Judaic studies.

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Parents
Parents' Association
The PA is comprised of all parents in the school, including Early Childhood, Lower School, Middle School, and High School. We foster communication between the parent body and the administration, faculty, and staff. Throughout the year, we engage families by creating and producing community-building and educational programs.
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Alumni
Alumni

Heschel's alumni, now over 1,400 strong, span the continent and the world. We are proud of their accomplishments and celebrate their successes as artists, educators, scholars, journalists, business and financial leaders, and rabbis, with the foundation of a Heschel education.
Support Heschel
When you give to the Annual Fund, our number one fundraising priority, you support all of the ways in which we strive to achieve Heschel’s mission, including supporting our exceptional faculty and staff and our talented student body. Your gift enables us to provide our students with a unique and exceptional education and to nurture our distinct and special pluralistic and socio-economically diverse community.

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Dr Ruth Westheimer

Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer

Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer was born Karola Ruth Siegel in Wiesenfeld, Germany, on June 4, 1928 to Irma Hanauer and Julius Siegel. She enjoyed a happy childhood in Frankfurt where her parents raised her according to modern Orthodox Jewish tradition. Shortly after Kristallnacht, when she was 10 years old, her father was taken to a labor camp by the Nazis, and her mother and paternal grandmother sent her on a Kindertransport to Switzerland. She spent the next six years there in an orphanage with 99 other Jewish refugee children, some of whom became lifelong friends.

After the war, with no surviving family members, Karola decided to emigrate to Palestine, where she began going by the name Ruth. There, she lived on several kibbutzim, joined the Haganah, the underground military of pre-state Israel, and taught kindergarten, before moving to Paris, where she studied at the Sorbonne's Institute of Psychology. She subsequently went to the United States, where she enrolled at the New School for Social Research in New York and had her ﬁrst child, Miriam. She married Manfred Westheimer in December of 1961 and they had a son, Joel.

Ruth received her Ed.D. from Columbia University and held a number of positions working in sex education and family planning before hosting her own radio show and several television shows. She has also authored more than 30 books and is an adjunct professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. Ruth and Manfred were together until his death in 1997. She has said that looking at her four grandchildren--Benjamin and Michal Leckie Westheimer and Ari and Leora (HS ‘14) Einleger -- reminds her that “Hitler lost and I won.”