Principal Chosen For NY Hebrew Language Charter School

The Forward earlier this week carried an interesting profile of Maureen Campbell, the principal of New York City's first Hebrew language charter school. Campbell attended Vassar, spent a semester at Oxford, and then graduated from Columbia University's Teachers College. Yeshiva Rambam School in southern Brooklyn continues to be the center of church-state questions as critics say it is an attempt to promote Jewish identity with public funding. Questions are intensified by the fact that the school is located in a building that also houses a synagogue. Campbell, who grew up in Manhattan’s Harlem area, the child of Jamaican immigrants, however is not Jewish and does not know Hebrew-- though she insists she is going to learn the language. A significant percentage of the school's entering students this year are children either of Israelis or of Russian Jews who live in Brooklyn's Sheepshead Bay and Brighton Beach areas.