Welcome to the Upper School
Barbara Shea
Rabbi Scott Slarskey
Upper School Principal

Brukhim ha-ba'im (welcome) to the Upper School section of our website!  

The hallways of the Upper School are alive.  The spirited sounds of vibrant conversations and laughter mingle with music drifting  in from any one of our multiple, practicing, student choirs or grade level bands.  Throughout the school hang silk paintings, paper cuts, etchings, and bronze mezuzot created by our students.  In the classrooms and in regular tefillah (prayer) students passionately ask profound questions to hone their understandings of the world and their insights into both the human spirit and the nature of avodat Hashem(divine service).  Out on the field and in the gym students run, jump, kick, pass, and shoot—bringing out the competitive and collaborative spirit in each other and in students from other schools who visit to play games such as basketball, softball, baseball, and lacrosse.  As is true at the Lower School, our faculty support and provoke the social, emotional, spiritual, physical, and of course academic growth of our students.  From grades four through eight, students experiment, explore, and often begin to galvanize the habits of mind, heart, and spirit that make them who they will be as adults. 

By the time students leave the school they will have had opportunities to sing in Boston at the state capital building, to participate in a variety of national academic competitions, and to chantTorah.  They will have designed and conducted experiments, carefully recorded observations, analyzed data, and drawn conclusions about both the nature of the laws of physics and chemistry and about the spiritual / communal effects of Jewish ritual observances.   They will have had opportunity to support a literacy program at a public school in Boston that serves an under-privilegedurban community, attend a school Shabbaton, visit a mikveh, participate in an immersive residential science and spirituality program, walk Boston's Freedom Trail, read, analyze, and draw personal meaning from Biblical and Rabbinic texts in these texts' languages of origin, raise hundreds of dollars for student-identified tzedakah causes, visit both Washington DC and Israel on study tours, and sing or dance in a musical theater performance conducted exclusively in Hebrew.  In fact, most of our students who have attended grades 4-8 will have done all of the above.

It is impossible to fully capture the vitality of our students, the warmth of our community, or the passionate commitment of our faculty, so I hope to see you here—to meet you and to work with you in lending your voice and spirit to nurturing the creativity and sparking the inspiration of the next generation of confident, compassionate, practicing Jews and committed citizens who are prepared for the academic and social challenges of the modern world and connected to both the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

 

Rabbi Scott Slarskey

Upper School Principal