Goldie Cohen, an elderly Jewish lady from the Bronx, goes to her travel agent.

“I vant to go to India.” 

The travel agent warns her about the long journey, but Goldie insists. After arriving in India, she joins the long line of people waiting for an audience with the guru. She’s told it will take at least six hours, and she can only say three\words to him.

Finally ushered into the inner sanctum where the wise guru sits in a lotus position, Goldie stands before him, crosses her arms, and says: “Sheldon! Come home!”

Like Goldie’s son, a substantial number of young Jews have left their religious roots in search of spiritual meaning elsewhere. A 2022 Pew survey found that 40% of Jews under 40 describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated.

How did this happen?

We’d be mistaken to dismiss Jewish alienation as mere ignorance. Many Jews genuinely open to finding meaning within their own faith did encounter Judaism at pivotal moments but found it rote, uninspiring or inaccessible.

My bar mitzvah experience as a 12-year-old boy was typical then and remains painfully common today. I prepared diligently,  by memorizing the haftarah from a tape recording. On the big day, I recited it flawlessly. Yet the Hebrew might as well have been Sanskrit; no one explained a single word. When my Uncle Milton proclaimed, “My boy, today you are a man,” I was bewildered, wondering how a 13-year-old could possibly be considered a man.

Afterward, the rabbi asked if I wanted to continue my Jewish education. The lure of after-school sports was far more appealing than a Judaism I had graduated from, not into.

I didn’t reject Judaism that day. I simply concluded there was nothing there for me. Like so many young Jews, I had been shown only the lobby of a magnificent mansion and assumed the entire building was just a waiting room.

And what’s inside that mansion, the one I was privileged to enter in my early 20s? Answers to the deepest questions I’d been carrying: Is there a God? Why religion? What qualities should I seek in a life partner?

I discovered that the Torah, given directly to the entire Jewish people at Sinai, is God’s blueprint for living the richest, most meaningful life possible. It didn’t offer pat answers, but enduring moral truths and timeless questions the greatest Jewish minds have debated for millennia — with intellectual rigor and spiritual depth I’d never imagined existed within Judaism.

But here’s the heartbreak: This wisdom, this spiritual wealth that transformed my life, remains locked away from most young Jews and many older ones as well. Not because they’re uninterested in spirituality; they’re desperately seeking it. The barrier is education — or rather, the lack of deep, immersive Jewish education that makes Torah a native language rather than a foreign text.

When Moses stood before Pharaoh, his demand was clear: “Let my people go.”
Today, we need a new rallying cry for our spiritually wandering youth: “Let my people know.”

The most powerful tool we have is Jewish day school education. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (z”l) said, To defend a country, you need an army. But to defend an identity, you need a school.”

The evidence bears this out. Day school alumni are more than twice as likely (81%) to say Jewish identity is very important to them compared with those who did not attend (35%).

Day schools don’t just transmit information; they create a relationship — with Judaism and with God. When children learn to decode a Torah text in Hebrew and Aramaic, engage in vigorous yet respectful debate about its meaning, and see Judaism not as a set of rules but as a framework for purposeful living, they come alive spiritually.

Yes, day schools require significant financial investment, and not every family can access them. But research shows they don’t compromise academic excellence, they enhance it. Students from day schools, especially those attracting non-Orthodox families, demonstrate stronger civic responsibility, commitment to social justice and resilience against negative influences on college campuses. They’re getting both worlds: deep Jewish literacy and preparation for top-notch universities.

That’s why communal investment in Jewish day school education must become the St. Louis Jewish community’s highest priority. Consider this sobering reality: St. Louis’s Jewish population was about 61,100 in 2014; the most recent  study in 2024 estimates 45,800, a shocking drop of 25%.

Robust K–12 Jewish day schools give our youth something essential — a compelling answer to the most basic question: “Why be Jewish?”

Today’s spiritual alienation is our desert. But our wandering youth need knowledge, deep, joyful knowledge of who they are and what they possess.

Let my people know – and like Sheldon hearing his mother’s voice, they will come home. Not to obligation, but to heritage. Not to restriction, but to richness. Not because they have to, but because once they truly know what’s there, they’ll want to.

The mansion is waiting, St. Louis Jewish parents and community leaders. Let’s give them the keys.