A group of parents has purchased a Jewish school in Rio de Janeiro to keep it open amid declining enrollment, determined to preserve Jewish education in their region.
The unusual move has led to a sudden increase in enrollment amid competition from international schools in the city.
The new Chai School in Rio de Janeiro’s Barra da Tijuca neighborhood, which runs from nursery through ninth grade, has seen enrollment increase from 163 to 210 pupils in the six months since the buyout, reversing years of decline.
The unusual story began in 2023 when management decided to close the local branch of the largest Jewish school in Rio, Collegio A. Liessin, which had been open for eight decades.
“We were in love with this school and couldn’t understand why this place was going to shut down,” Richard Zeiger, a prominent Brazilian venture capitalist whose oldest son was enrolled in the school, told JNS Friday.
The school is one of five Jewish schools in the city and the only one in the area.
He gathered a group of parents who negotiated with the school to keep it running the next year by getting donors.
With an eye on future enrollment, the Brazilian venture capitalist even checked in with the local mohel, or specially trained person who performs Jewish ritual circumcisions, to see how many circumcisions he performed annually in the area.
Seeing the numbers were highly promising, the parents realized last year that to make real change and keep the school open long term, it would be necessary to own it, he said.
They raised millions of dollars and acquired the institution at the end of last year.
“Our main motivation was to preserve Jewish identity and education in the region,” said Zeiger. “If we lost the Jewish school, within 10 years the community would be assimilated.”
The tri-lingual school, which operates in Portuguese, English and Hebrew, welcomes Jews of all denominations. It offers 60% of its students some scholarship.
The non-profit hired new educational directors for the school, while keeping its old staff, with the founding parents contributing their time voluntarily, focusing on long-term strategy, fundraising and development, including a future high school. The school aims to reach 500 students within five years.
Dalia Tamler, one of the school’s founders and an architect, said that one of the factors behind its early success has been the renovation of its learning and recreational spaces.
“Seeing the children playing and thriving in these new spaces makes us very proud of what we are building together,” she said.
“This is a unique initiative by parents who are not educators who had a very strong and impressive will to ensure that they had a high-quality Jewish school in their area,” said Chaya Yosovich, CEO of the Jerusalem-based Yael Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports Jewish education worldwide, which awarded the new school a grant to subsidize staff.
About 120,000 Jews live in Brazil.