Bureau of Jewish Education

The Bureau of Jewish Education was an attempt to standardize and improve the religious education of Jewish youth throughout Western Pennsylvania. It was first established in February 1922 at a meeting at the Hebrew Institute featuring representatives from Jewish educational organizations throughout Pittsburgh. Judge Josiah Cohen served as the first president. The effort was part of a larger initiative to create a national Bureau of Jewish Education. Hebrew Institute Director Israel Abrams was associated with both efforts.

In its first year, the Bureau of Jewish Education hosted large communitywide Passover and Shavuot celebrations for Jewish children throughout Pittsburgh but struggled to make substantive changes in the curriculum or methods of local religious schools. The initial iteration of the Bureau of Jewish Education appears to have become dormant in 1923. It was revived under the same name in 1924 and persisted into the late 1920s but again appears to have struggled to unite its member schools around new educational standards.

A Jewish Education Society of Pittsburgh was formed during a symposium on local Jewish education in December 1934 but never developed into a permanent body. Israel Abrams again proposed a centralized Bureau of Jewish Education in 1940, this time looking specifically at neighborhood schools and at the many small-town Jewish communities throughout the region, but once again failed to get widespread support.

Efforts to centralize religious education for Jewish youth were revived again in 1950 with the Self Study on Jewish Education and the Pittsburgh Council on Jewish Education.