Hadassah Cohen, wearing a black graduation gown and mortar board, may have been the most applauded and adored high school graduate this year. 

The entire student body of Yeshivat Kadimah, the teachers, parents and supporters of the new Orthodox high school turned out for her graduation last week at Congregation Nusach Hari Ben Zion, 650 North Price Road.

More than 200 people filled the sanctuary and sat on chairs in the back and stood against the walls as Cohen, 18, of University City, the sole senior and first graduate of the high school, received her diploma.

“Tonight is a celebration of your future,” Rabbi Moshe Shulman, the head of school, said to Cohen. “She has raised the bar for all of us.”

Cohen plans to spend a year in Israel, studying at Sha’alvim for Women in Jerusalem. After that, she hopes to attend Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University in New York City and eventually become a fertility specialist.

If she does all of that, as Shulman said, she will have set a high standard for the students who follow in her footsteps. The first year of the school had 10 students enrolled: Cohen as a senior, one junior, four sophomores and four freshman, plus two students who were part time.

Jimmy Fendelman, chairman of the school’s board, told the audience that “the dedication for this entire project has been humbling.” Important administration details, such as registering as a nonprofit organization so gifts could be deducted from donors’ income taxes, finding classroom and administrative space in Epstein Hebrew Academy and negotiating a lease, then hiring the faculty – all had to be done before classes could begin last fall.

“We want to bring our children back out of the secular school system,” Fendelman said in his graduation remarks. “We were davening our brains out over this.”

Shulman, rabbi at Young Israel of St. Louis, said in an interview that next fall’s school has 13 students confirmed and that he expects 15 by the time parents have made their decisions. Tuition is $16,400. 

All but the senior year of Cohen’s formal education was in other Orthodox schools here, Epstein and Block Yeshiva High School.

However, the founders of Yeshivat Kadimah wanted to try a new form of Jewish secondary education that was more flexible while adhering to teaching Torah and Jewish studies. They came up with a model that used online curricula from Missouri University High School for general education courses and Skype links to teachers in Israel for some of the religious courses.

This approach, said Brad Heger, who oversees general education studies, raised several challenges to be overcome if the school were to be successful. 

“The biggest challenge was that we had such small classes,” said Heger, a Roman Catholic who has many years of administrative experience in area public and parochial schools. “We said that all of our teachers would be certified in their particular disciplines. Finding those teachers was a little hard.”

Sometimes, Heger said, the faculty realized it had to step in and do more teaching to complement the general studies content from MU High School. 

Asked what he liked about the year just past, Heger said: “The students were able to express themselves about their limitations. And we had family meetings. We asked ourselves, how are we all getting along? I liked the care and time the students showed to one another.”

Any surprises?

“How much extra the teachers were willing to come in and to give of themselves,” Heger said, noting that some of the teachers were not Jewish, yet they were committed to making the first year of the school a success.

Holding Cohen’s graduation ceremony at Nusach Hari, a new building for the shul, demonstrated the effort of some in the Orthodox community to appeal to a broader base.

“Nusach Hari wanted to get on the map,” Fendelman said in an interview. “And we want to be a school that appeals to the whole [Orthodox] community.”

He added that the Orthodox community in St. Louis is small, so creating a new school had to be handled in a tactful manner. 

“We are all married to each other,” said Fendelman, who has a son at Yeshivat Kadimah. “We live next to each other. There is a big impetus in not creating bad feelings.”

He also said that as Shulman and Heger changed the way the online courses were taught, the teachers got more involved and the students responded positively. 

“The more involved the teachers are, the better it is,” Fendelman said. “These teachers want to teach.”