The History of the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy in San Francisco

The Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy is unique. It is the only traditional Jewish day school high school in San Francisco - indeed, in all of California north of Los Angeles. Its mission is starkly simple: to ensure the very survival of the Jewish people in an area falling victim to a silent Holocaust. The Jewish Revolution in San Francisco tells the story of the remarkable rabbi who took on the San Francisco Jewish establishment to build a school that, after more than forty years, continues to turn out proud Jews who will continue the Jewish legacy in the Bay Area. It is a testament to the urgency of Rabbi Lipner’s work that Jewish luminaries worldwide, spanning the spectrum from Communists, socialists, and atheists to the most pious of the Orthodox community, have worked hand in hand to ensure the school’s survival.

In its own way, the San Francisco Jewish community is also unique. “Jews began with the city,” San Francisco Jewish leaders are fond of asserting. Jews numbered large among the city’s founding fathers, and have figured prominently among its power elite to the present day.

But the distinctiveness of the San Francisco Jewish community has a darker side: it is the most assimilated in the nation, and among the most resistant to tolerating an active Orthodox presence. By the mid-twentieth century, this community, still led by descendants of those founding fathers, had fallen prey to the silent holocaust of intermarriage and non-observance. In fact, some of the founding families had, as Jews, totally disappeared.

By the 1960s, the Jewish community in San Francisco numbered over 400,000, and was the third largest in the nation. But Judaism, as anything more than a warm cultural affinity for chicken soup and matzoh balls, might slowly have vanished entirely were it not for the efforts of a small group of dedicated families, aided by Torah Umesorah, the National Society for Hebrew Day Schools, which brought to San Francisco a young Romanian-born rabbi, Holocaust survivor, and celebrated yeshiva administrator, Rabbi Pinchas Lipner. Rabbi Lipner was charged with establishing an Orthodox day school; San Francisco was then the only city of its size without one.

In 1969 the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy of San Francisco opened its doors with 53 children from nursery through third grade. Today, over forty years later, the school continues to flourish and remain true to its original mission: to teach Torah Judaism, together with a rigorous college preparatory secular curriculum, in a setting that adheres strictly to Torah guidelines and to the Torah injunction, “Train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)

The Jewish Revolution in San Francisco relates the David-and-Goliath saga of the founding, growth, and survival of the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy and its extraordinary impact on the survival of Judaism in the San Francisco Bay Area. It documents the full weight of the resistance brought to bear on Rabbi Lipner by the established Jewish leadership, which attempted to thwart the success of the school by every means possible. The book recounts the perseverance and ingenuity with which Rabbi Lipner held his ground and fought for the survival of Torah Judaism, remaining unintimidated and steadfast to Torah principles and thereby winning important backing from Torah observant leaders worldwide, including six Israeli prime ministers.

He also marshaled tremendous support from an unlikely alliance of Jewish leaders worldwide, many of whom, under ordinary circumstances would not have spoken to each other, from leftwingers, socialists, atheists, and secular Zionists like Abba Eban, Moshe Dayan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Edward Teller, father of the H-bomb, to the most pious of the ultra-Orthodox like Rabbi Chaim Kreiswirth zt”l, Rabbi Noah Weinberg, zt”l, Rabbi Eli Dessler, and the Reichmann family (whose over $1 billion in charitable giving went almost exclusively to ultra-Orthodox causes.) Uniting this improbable coalition was a single goal: to guarantee the survival of one small school that was the key to the survival of a community of 400,000 Jews.

Even as these battles were being fought, Rabbi Lipner and the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy continued to educate Jewish children, training them up “…in the way [they] should go.” Although all students entering the school are Jewish according to Jewish law, most come from non-observant homes. Many are Russian-Jewish émigrés, whose exposure to Judaism was virtually nonexistent. Introducing its students to the study of Torah Judaism, the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy has developed proud, knowledgeable Jews.

Realizing the enormity of the San Francisco Jewish catastrophe, Rabbi Lipner also reached out into the broader adult community. He teaches a weekly Talmud class for men (ongoing for more than two decades), and has taught Torah-study classes for adults throughout the Bay Area. For many years he delivered lectures on Jewish law to Bay Area attorneys. At the same time he organized the Institute for Jewish Medical Ethics, one of the first such endeavors anywhere, which held frequent conferences that brought together luminaries in Jewish medical ethics, medical experts, and doctors from around the world.

San Francisco’s Jewish founding families may be disappearing, but their places as part of the Jewish community are being taken, one person at a time, by new generations of Jews - Russian and American - who have reconnected with their Jewish roots thanks to the Lisa Kampner Hebrew Academy, truly a Jewish revolution in San Francisco.

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