(New York Jewish Week) — Rodeph Sholom School diversity drew our family in when we realized that our kids’ Jewish lives needed more than Shabbat and synagogue — they needed a Jewish day school where learning and community come together.

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As a family deeply committed to our Jewish and Korean American identities (ask anyone who has tasted my kalbi jjim on Rosh Hashana), we wanted our kids to have peers and teachers who reflected the broad diversity of New York City.

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Our son and daughter had been attending a nonsectarian independent school, and we thought that with enough weekly religious schooling, private tutoring, Jewish camps and practice at home we could build a robust Jewish foundation for our kids.

Yet when we thought about what we really wanted for our kids — to be able to follow the prayers in any synagogue, to be Jewishly literate and conversant with Hebrew texts — we saw that wasn’t happening.

At first glance, we weren’t sure whether Rodeph Sholom School — Manhattan’s only Reform Jewish day school, located on the Upper West Side — would be the right fit. For one, we’re not Reform Jews: I grew up attending Modern Orthodox day schools and Conservative summer camps. My wife, who found Judaism on her own as a teenager, studied with rabbis of many denominations on her path to conversion, but there wasn’t a Reform rabbi in the bunch. And the synagogues where we feel most comfortable — Romemu in New York, IKAR in LA — don’t fit neatly into any major Jewish denomination.

But what we have found at Rodeph is a vibrant, diverse Jewish community anchored by a remarkable school that not only offers our children an excellent secular education but also a grounding in Jewish values, a strong connection to Israel, and a commitment to Jewish scholarship. We made the switch four years ago, and we haven’t regretted it for a moment.

We’ve been particularly thrilled by the school’s relatively new Makor program — a unique Jewish studies track that allows students to engage deeply with the original sources that make up the Jewish canon.

Makor (Hebrew for “source”) puts students into direct conversation with texts from the Torah, Mishnah, and other rabbinic writings, and into conversation with each other, since the program uses traditional hevruta-style learning in pairs.

The program is open not just to advanced learners; anyone with sufficient Hebrew language skills can join. Rodeph Sholom School’s Hebrew faculty helped our kids get there, too. When they joined the school in the third and fourth grades, Rodeph set up each one with a year of intensive Hebrew. The kids did extra work during and after school days to catch up to their peers, some of whom are native Hebrew speakers from Israeli families.

Today, our son is starting eighth grade, and he can read Hebrew and pray fluently. Last year, he read his entire Torah portion for his bar mitzvah, and he regularly studies Torah with commentaries with his saba, his grandfather. My son’s skills are a testament both to his interests and to Rodeph Sholom School, which helped him with an on-ramp to Jewish study.

Our daughter, now 12, is working with me through Pirkei Avot (the Mishnaic text known as The Ethics of the Fathers) in the original Hebrew, as part of her preparation for her bat mitzvah. It’s our hope that, by equipping our kids with the language, background, and textual skills they need to engage with Jewish sources, Rodeph and Makor will empower them to chart their own Jewish journeys as adults.

We’ve also been pleasantly surprised to find that our kids’ friends at Rodeph reflect a far broader spectrum of Jewishness than we had initially expected. There are kids from families like ours who go to shul nearly every Shabbat and others who never set foot in a synagogue unless it’s for a friend’s bar or bat mitzvah. And our children get to spend each day in an inclusive community that dedicates time, thought, and energy to ensuring that Jews of all backgrounds — including Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Israeli, Chinese, Filipino, Black, South African — all feel a sense of belonging and feel that Rodeph is home.

This community of ours at the Rodeph Sholom School is an intimate, wonderful slice of the American Jewish community today. I don’t know if there’s another school like it, and we feel blessed and proud that it’s where our kids get to spend each day.

This article was sponsored by and produced in collaboration with Rodeph Sholom School, Manhattan’s only Reform Jewish day school. This article was produced by JTA’s native content team.