Is Seward Park Experiencing an Orthodox Exodus?
The community has lost dozens of families over the past few years. Does that mean it’s doomed?
Does Seward Park Have a Future?
The close-knit community has been hemorrhaging members. Yet many think its limitations are what makes it special.
By Rachel Roman
Sasha Mail never thought she’d leave Seward Park. She’d lived in the Greater Seattle area since 1992, and in 2004, she moved to the South End neighborhood and immersed herself in the Orthodox community. She refers to herself as a “Northwest girl.”
But the longtime resident, who was active at the Orthodox Ashkenazi synagogue Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath and worked at Torah Day School, moved her husband and twin sons to Dallas in 2020 due to the lack of affordability following a job loss. Reflecting on Seward Park, “I thought my kids would have their bar mitzvah there, but it wasn’t Hashem’s plan,” she says.
Mail counts more than 30 religious families from the heavily Jewish neighborhood who have left over the last two years. Many have gone to larger centers of Jewish life, like Baltimore, others to southern states like Texas and Florida, and still others to Israel. This spring and summer, the community waved goodbye to around 10 more families. “It’s a huge exodus, and very few families are moving in,” Mail says. “I feel like it’s dying. It’s so sad.”
Affordability is one of the main drivers of attrition in Seattle within and outside the Jewish community. In August of this year, Seattle home prices were up 5 percent from last year, with a median price of $840,000, according to Redfin. Zillow calculates the typical home value in Seattle as $944,260.
“Seattle is just not affordable anymore,” says Ari Hoffman, a BCMH vice president and local radio host. “And Covid made it so now you can work anywhere. A lot of Seattle families that previously weren’t considering leaving said, ‘Why would we want to be somewhere where it costs so much to live?’”
Sefira Ross also left Seattle in 2020, relocating with her family to Israel. Although the move was the fulfillment of a years-long dream, high housing prices were a contributing factor. “Housing was a huge issue while we were living [in Seattle],” she says. “You could rent a house for maybe $3,500 a month, which was a lot of money for us at the time. We were renting a little cabin that was $900 because someone in the community had owned it and kept it at a low price for Jewish community members. We stayed there for much of our entire time living in Seattle, and we felt really trapped.”
But the cost of living isn’t the only thing driving families from the Emerald City. Small schools and limited Jewish infrastructure leaves traditional families wanting more for themselves and their kids.
That was a factor for Mail with her sons, who attended Torah Day School. “We were always told to try to get them into separate classes, if possible, to develop their individuality,” she says. “That was never possible in Seattle. Their class, in and of itself, was five kids, and they were two out of the five. And they also didn’t have many friends because of that.”
The losses uniquely affect Torah Day School. In May 2021, two TDS board members (both of whom have since moved out of the Seattle area) initiated an email to families with a dire message: “We believe it is our responsibility to inform our community now that there is a very realistic possibility that the 2021-2022 school year might be TDS’s last year of operation.” (TDS’s former head of school, Rabbi Yona Margolese, who left the position at the end of the last school year, declined to comment.)
News of TDS’s possible closure caused a panic, says Miri Tilson, a fourth-generation Seattleite and board member at Sephardic Bikur Holim, who moved her two children out of TDS last year. “That news was a little bit premature, and the messaging came across to people that the school was closing,” she said. “People decided they weren’t going to stick around another year.”
Current TDS board president Sue Condiotty confirmed that the email was the impetus for many parents to pull their children from the school. The email “came from a good place because they wanted to give people the opportunity to do what was best for their family,” she says. “Unfortunately, it caused a bunch of people to leave when we weren’t really closing; it put us in a bad position. We’re still fighting that email,” she said.
It wasn’t just parents who reacted to the email, according to Condiotty. Only two teachers stayed after last year. The school has 12 teachers this year. On December 9, TDS sent out another email that they would open for the 2022-2023 school year and would be partnering with Derech Emunah, an all-girls high school with just 11 students enrolled last year. The two schools will now be sharing a space in TDS’s Beacon Hill building. An all-boys high school, the Torah Academy of the Pacific Northwest, has 11 enrolled students and operates out of the Seattle Kollel.
“Looking down the line, the schooling was a huge factor,” Ross says. “TDS and SHA” — Seattle Hebrew Academy, a co-ed modern Orthodox school on Capitol Hill — “are great schools, but they don't necessarily have all the needs for all different children. And they don’t have anywhere else to go aside from those two schools if you’re Orthodox.” Yonit Diaz, who moved from Seward Park to Silver Spring, Maryland, last year to provide more opportunities for her two children, echoes this sentiment. “I saw that my kids weren’t thriving,” she said. “They needed something that Seattle couldn’t provide.” Silver Spring has more kosher restaurants, a large kosher grocery store, and bigger class sizes with more extracurriculars. “It’s the little things that add up, and we’re now living an immersive Jewish life. Seattle just couldn’t provide that.”
The doom and gloom prophecy is rebuffed by other Seattlelites who appreciate the unique qualities of Seward Park.
A sense of intimacy and accessibility is appealing, especially young adults who are coming back to Seward Park to start their own families. Jack Gottesman, who moved here in 2020, believes bigger communities are not nearly as personable as a smaller one, like Seward Park’s. Gottesman was born and raised in Chicago and moved to Seattle in July 2020 for his wife’s residency at Seattle Children’s Hospital — as well as to be closer to his Sephardic extended family.
“This community is remarkable in terms of friendships and cooperation between different cultures and levels of observance. It’s like that song from Cheers. ‘You want to go where everybody knows your name.’ You definitely get that here,” says Gottesman, who is a member of Sephardic Bikur Holim, along with his wife and five children. “Bigger communities have a lot to learn from Seattle, and especially Seward Park.”
Despite feeling more connected to her Jewish roots in Israel, Ross said she is finding it difficult to fit into the community there, unlike her experience in Seward Park.
“I heard that there was a wonderful community here, and I’m still looking for that wonderful community,” she says. “[Seward Park] was a very warm, welcoming, loving, and supportive community. Since it’s a smaller community, it has more availability to reach out to newcomers and to support them in that way. Each person brings their own element to the community, and we all kind of rely on each other.”
In an effort to keep Jewish communities thriving throughout the Seattle area, various organizations are enacting programs to lower the high costs that create barriers to entry.
The Samis Foundation, which distributes funding to Washington state Jewish education, launched a Day School Affordability Initiative this past spring that will make private Jewish day schools more affordable for many families. Plus, there are long-standing resources offering aid, like the Hebrew Free Loan Association of Washington State and the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle’s One Happy Camper grant for first-timers to Jewish camps. The latter was established in 2012 during the height of the housing crisis. On a broader scale, the City of Seattle recently received the Governor’s Smart Housing Strategies Award to “support affordable housing on property owned by religious organizations.” The motivation behind this policy is to enable faith communities to create more homes for low-income people. However, it is unknown whether this will impact the Seattle area Jewish community.
In Seward Park, some members and rabbis have banded together to combine resources and facilities to aid and grow the community. TDS board members and staff have teamed up with the Seattle Kollel to brainstorm how to bring in new families. One possible solution, according to Condiotty, is busing in people from other areas of town, including North Seattle, where a Jewish community is thriving.
“The Seward Park area is very expensive to live in,” she says. “It’s pretty difficult to buy or rent a house here because there really aren’t that many available. We’re trying to think of different ideas so people know about us and can afford to go to the school.”
Sephardic Bikur Holim has formed a committee that is working on a strategic plan for congregational growth. Rabbi Ben Hassan believes that finding more affordable housing is key: “If you solve that then you have more young families, more vibrancy, more programming and more students.”
And individual community members, like Tilson, are trying to bring people together to build an even stronger community. “I make it my mission to try to bring people together; I call myself an ‘Ambassador of Unity,’” Tilson says. “I think that once people spend time together and don’t talk about the hot topics, like the synagogues or the schools, and just enjoy each other’s company, then the rest will follow.”
Meanwhile, changes are afoot in the wider Orthodox community. Northwest Yeshiva High School on Mercer Island will have a new head of school next year, and Seattle Hebrew Academy and TDS have new heads of school this year, and Seward Park’s other Sephardic synagogue, Ezra Bessaroth, has a new rabbi.
“The mood in the community is optimistic and hopeful,” Hassan said.
Hoffman believes the community will bounce back. “Communities in the diaspora go through peaks and valleys, and Seattle is no stranger to it,” he says. “In the 1970s, a lot of people left town when the economy was reliant on Boeing, and the company canceled several projects and laid off a lot of workers. We bounced back from that, and I have no doubt we will again.”
Correction: The original version of this story stated that TDS was the only school to provide separate-sex education. MMSC also provides separate-sex education.
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