Brighton Beach Yeshiva Feels Demographic Shift

BROOKLYN — The first day of class inside Young Israel of Brighton Beach’s yeshiva building looks like it would at any of the ultra-orthodox Jewish schools that dot South Brooklyn, where kosher muffins and milk await the preschoolers who dart screaming between classrooms.

Only here, on Neptune Avenue, in the heart of Brooklyn’s Little Russia, nearly all of them are screaming in Spanish.

“Years ago, our children were predominantly Russian,” said Pearl Benefeld, education director at Family Head Start of Brighton Beach, which operates inside the building.

“It seems the area has changed…and we’re not getting as many Russian children as we are getting Chinese, Mexican, Pakistani and Arab.”

Of the 150 local children already enrolled for fall, Benefeld said “hardly any” are familiar with English. Perhaps only a few speak Russian, and probably fewer are Jewish. The overwhelming majority of the three and four-year-olds starting the 2008-09 school year at Family Head Start this week are Mexican, and like most Mexican immigrants to New York, they come almost exclusively from the south central state of Puebla.

They are part of a demographic sea change taking place in Brighton Beach, a neighborhood still famous for its Russian furriers and Cyrillic signage, which has been an enclave of ex-Soviet émigrés since the 1970s.

Part of this change, at least at Family Head Start, can be attributed to economics. A family of five must earn less than $25,000 a year in order to qualify for the Head Start program. Many Russian families no longer fit that description, Benefeld said.

Tall with a carefully arranged honey-colored bob and bright pink lipstick, the Brooklyn grandmother moves easily through the Babel of crying children and the long lines of nervous mothers: a few in the colorful salwaar kameez worn by many Pakistani women, others with the straight black hair and almond eyes typical of Mexico’s indigenous people.

Things used to look very different. For more than 18 years, Benefeld taught here alongside the Young Israel school, until the yeshiva closed two or three years ago.

“We started in this building with just four classes. Now we have seventeen classes,” she said. “Give us two weeks, and we’ll be full.”

Rabbi Chaim Saltzman, an employee of Young Israel of Brighton Beach, said he could not comment on why the yeshiva had closed, but the Family Head Start faculty said changing demographics played a role.

“I think because of the population of the area, they couldn’t serve children,” said Stacy Rose-McFarland, also an education director at Family Head Start.

“I don’t think there was enough people interested in sending their children to yeshiva.”

Although the group still holds Saturday and morning prayer services at the school, their numbers have dwindled, she said.

“I think they just about make a minyan in the morning,” she said, using the Hebrew word for the minimum of 10 Jewish men needed to hold a prayer service.

That shift has had a visually interesting effect on the hallways of New Israel, where successive coats of red paint occasionally splatter the gold-colored mezuzahs affixed to every doorpost, and brass plaques commemorating yeshiva donors and rabbis hang outside most classrooms. Children’s art overhangs Star of David-stained glass windows and signs in Spanish, and increasingly Urdu and Chinese, are replacing older ones in Russian, Hebrew and English.

Irma Gonzalez, who waited to enroll her three-year-old son Denis on Wednesday morning, speaks no English. She said her son speaks only Spanish. They live on Brighton 10^th Street, just a few blocks away.

Gonzalez is from Oaxaca, a poor state in Mexico’s indigenous south. She sat outside the office with other mothers -- most of whom also do not speak English -- for more than an hour waiting for a Spanish-speaking parent coordinator.

Roughly half of these parents and others like them pass through the able hands of Mariana Rodriguez, one of only two Spanish-speaking parent coordinators left in the entire school. Until recently, there were four.

“Now it’s like everything is falling apart,” Rodriguez said. “It’s falling onto just us two, which makes our job a little more challenging, trying to accommodate everyone.”

Yet, not everything at the preschool has changed -- or will.

For one, starting school will always be nerve-wracking, and children like Ahasan still have hard days. The pre-kindergartner screamed and sobbed for the better part of an hour in his new classroom, while his mother watched anxiously from the doorway of what had once been a synagogue, unable to leave.

“Please, I don’t see him cry,” she pleaded.

But Rose-McFarland was firm.

“Mommy, he’s gonna cry,” she said.

It is in part for parents like her that Family Head Start maintains the yeshiva’s kosher kitchen, which serves hot breakfast, lunch and snacks every day.

“We have to serve kosher. The Pakistani parents, they only want kosher,” Benefeld said.

But Peter Salzman, who teaches English as a Second Language in the synagogue, said other things in Brighton Beach might be going for good.

“There had been a time when you had Russians,” he said. “When I came back here four or five years ago, the Russians were gone.”