Going into the pandemic, Jewish Day Schools across the country were having trouble with growth.

Paul Bernstein, the CEO of Prizmah, an organization that acts as a network for Jewish day schools and yeshivas across North America, in part by creating initiatives that invest in Jewish education, said that this trend was a concerning one.

“Pre-2020, outside of the Haredi world where the number of students in schools has been growing rapidly for many years, enrollment was declining year over year,” he said. “There were a lot of challenges, and the perception often was that the Jewish day schools were not excellent.”

Bernstein said that the turning point wasn’t necessarily because of anything that the schools started to do differently, but because of the perception of their value for Jewish families.

“Post-2020 was really sustained and accelerated enrollment. Enrollment has been growing each year, and the perception of quality in schools has changed quite significantly,” he said. “That’s not because our schools suddenly woke up in March 2020 and became good, it’s because they did a great job during COVID, and afterwards, people actually perceived what they were doing in a different way.”

With that in mind, Prizmah ventured into its first North American marketing and enrollment campaign for Jewish day schools, designed to better understand the climate around Jewish education. They are zeroed in on five cities in the United States, one of which is Pikesville.

Krieger Schechter Day School Director of Admissions Nissa Weinberg said that the work that the school is doing with Prizmah doesn’t take much from the school’s end and will hopefully help them understand their market even better than they do now.

“I met with their marketing [staff], and they asked me just for information about our school, our location and all kinds of things so that they can target families in our area. It’s actually not much on our end at all. We have to give them some information that would help get our word out into the community,” she said.

The campaign is also targeting Scottsdale, Arizona; Seattle, Nashville and Denver. The idea is to target families with a high potential to be swayed to joining the Jewish day school community, those who are adjacent to current day school families — what Prizmah calls “the moveable middle.”

It worked to refine the assets and tactics that they use to reach Jewish communities, according to Prizmah, with the first phase of the project that ran in 2025 reaching more than 190,000 total households. That phase also saw Prizmah help 113 schools use its “school toolkit.”

Bernstein said that the assistance they provide to the schools and the information they obtain using their data helps create a roadmap for Jewish educational institutions.

“Now we get into a whole sort of narrative about, how do you seize the moment for Jewish day schools? How do you layer into that surge that many people have spoken about? What does it mean for the future of the Jewish community?” he said.

One of the specific aims of the program is to get more children who are currently in Jewish early childhood education into Jewish day schools. Krieger Schechter and the Goldsmith Early Childhood Center are part of the Chizuk Amuno Congregation, and despite the fact they share a campus, Bernstein said there was room to improve that pipeline, as there is with many congregations and schools in a similar situation.

“They didn’t have a tradition that was a natural flow,” he said. “I think one of the things that we’re very supportive of is that we as a community can do a better job at helping Jewish families make the next Jewish choice, rather than having them in a Jewish experience and then losing them,” he said.

Ultimately, Weinberg said, the appeal of Krieger Schecter is made clear to families once they join the community. Like other Jewish day schools, KSDS provides a chance for kids to grow as people and as Jews. Prizmah just wants to help strengthen that understanding.

“Our families come to Krieger Schecter because we have really strong academics. We’re teaching Jewish values every single day. We have a great community. And this is a place where families feel that their kids are supported and are getting the best education they possibly could get,” Weinberg said.

aguckes@midatlanticmedia.com