School teaches about spiritual and secular
New Tamim Academy of Greenwich offers an alternative
GREENWICH — Rinat Levy Cohen hadn’t planned to leave the city.
But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March, she, her husband and her 5-year-old son decided to decamp for less crowded surroundings.
“We evaded the city,” joked Levy Cohen, an educator and doctoral candidate at Fordham University.
Because of work and school, Levy Cohen and her family couldn’t go far. They settled in Greenwich in the spring. Over the summer, as the pandemic dragged on, they had to decide where their son would go for kindergarten. Through Camp Gan, a summer camp offered by Chabad
Lubavitch of Greenwich, she caught word of a new Jewish school that was just beginning to take shape and sought more information.
“There was a Zoom session for potential families,” Levy Cohen said. “I was very impressed with
what I was hearing. I’m an educator myself, and I liked the fact that their curriculum was integrated. There was a lot of interdisciplinary work. Not a lot of schools do that, and I think it’s very important. And it’s also a very warm community, which appealed to us very much coming from the city.”
The school, which would eventually become Chabad Lubavitch’s Tamim Academy, opened Sept. 10 on the former Carmel Academy campus. In part, it met the of demands from New Yorkers, such as Levy Cohen, who came to Connecticut as a result of the pandemic, though the school was more than a year in the making.
“We had had a request from parents a year ago to begin a kindergarten in September 2021,” said Maryashie Deren, principal and co-director of the school.
Those plans were disrupted, however, when the parents of children attending Camp Gan, which had gained a sizable following over more than two decades, said they were looking to push up the opening.
She and her husband, Rabbi Yossi Deren, who is co-director, decided it was a fortuitous time to open, especially after the closing
Greenwich’s Tamim Academy is one of four to open across the country this year. The others, in Florida, New York City and Vermont, share an interdisciplinary curriculum that bridges secular and spiritual education.
of Carmel Academy, the town’s only independent Jewish day school, earlier this year.
“We thought to ourselves, if people now are asking for a kindergarten, perhaps this is an opportunity to get it started,” Deren said.
Greenwich’s Tamim Academy is one of four to open across the country this year. The others, in Florida, New York City and Vermont, share an interdisciplinary curriculum that bridges secular and spiritual education. With two teachers and less than 10 students — Tamim Academy also shares a campus with Chabad Lubavitch’s preschool — the school also caters to the individual needs of its children, she said.
“Parents asked us to create a school where children can learn beautiful Jewish values, be spiritually inspired and have a secular academic program that’s par excellence,” Deren said. “That is what Tamim is. Our curriculum is a very high standard of academics.
And we are able to reach out to the individual child according to our standard.”
The curriculum was one of many draws for Vanessa Avery, whose daughter attends Tamim Academy.
Avery, a lecturer at Yale and leader of a local nonprofit, said she liked that the curriculum was rigorous, while also emphasizing the spiritual aspect, which she said was especially important during uncertain times.
“I think everyone feels unsafe these days to a certain degree and I think the spiritual grounding is super important for (my daughter), but also for all of our sustenance during these times,” Avery said. “We need something to ground ourselves and have hope.”
The school also provided an alternative to the town’s public schools, which Avery’s daughter attended last school year. Her daughter enjoyed the public school, Avery said, but she had serious concerns about the number of students in a building and the safety protocols that would be necessary as a result.
“I knew what the public school was going to do, with masks, the playground closed, desks with glass shields around each one,” Avery said. “We just thought it was kind of dehumanizing. I understand the health risks, but I couldn’t send my child into an environment where she has to ... be inside a bubble all day.”
At Tamim Academy, masks are worn by all students while inside the building and social distancing is practiced, Deren said. But because of the small class size and access to a campus, the children spend much of their day outside, she said.
“Our daughter is 5 and we just felt like physical health is one thing, but social-emotional health is one as well,” Avery said. “She really needed to be able to play with other kids for her development and her happiness.”
The school just opened, but Deren and her husband hope the word will get out to more people who are looking for innovative educational models. Ultimately, the Derens hope they’ll be able to expand to add more grades.
“We feel that when you offer a good quality program, combined with strong academics, nurturing, loving and emotionally healthy teachers, parents come to trust you because they see how happy their children are and they see how much they’re learning,” Deren said.