Our Story
Opening the Doors to Jewish Education
For many families, the desire to give their children a Jewish education has never changed. What has changed is how difficult that choice has become.
Around the kitchen table, families weigh up what they want for their children against what they can realistically afford. For some, the numbers simply don’t add up. Not because Jewish education matters any less, but because the financial commitment can place it beyond reach.
At Masada, we believe a family’s financial circumstances should not stand in the way of their child receiving an outstanding Jewish education — one that builds knowledge and confidence, strengthens Jewish identity and creates a lifelong sense of belonging.
For years, the challenge of affordability has been widely recognised across Jewish education. The Masada community was determined to do more than acknowledge it.
One woman brought a thousand dollars.
In 1980, Masada launched a capital appeal that was written up in the Jewish press, and a woman named Dr Susan Sedgwick read about it and sent $1,000.
She was invited in to look around. While she was there, the President of the day mentioned a program that quietly helped families with fees so their children could stay at the school. That stayed with her. She went home and set up a charitable foundation to support those students, and asked that it carry the name of her late brother, Major Hyman Abramovich MC, who had been decorated for his service in the Second World War.
In the four decades since, Dr Sedgwick gave this school more than four million dollars through the foundation that bears his name.
She had arrived with a thousand, and nobody had asked her for anything more. She simply gave what she could, and then kept giving it for the rest of her life.
What Masada and HAF did next
Plenty of Jewish schools talk about how expensive a Jewish education has become. Masada and HAF together decided to do something about it.
Working together with Masada College, the Foundation sold land it owned beside the school to the Sir Moses Montefiore Jewish Home. It used the proceeds to create the HAF Jewish Bursary, which takes forty per cent off tuition for every Jewish child at Masada from Kindergarten through Year 12, with no means test attached.
That last part matters more than it might sound. Because there is no means test, no family has to open its bank statements to anyone, and no child is ever quietly known as the one who’s here on charity. The family that is comfortable and the family that is barely holding on get exactly the same forty per cent, and neither has to say a word about their circumstances to receive it. The dignity of that was the whole point.
It is the first arrangement of its kind in Sydney, and it did what it set out to do. Families who had privately decided a Jewish education was beyond them found that it wasn’t anymore.
The sacrifice, and where you come in
Still, it was a genuine sacrifice, and it was made so that a Jewish education could stay within reach of ordinary families. Land was given up so that the fees would not be.
This is where everyone else in the community has a part to play. A handful of people carried the cost of making a Jewish education affordable. The rest of us can help carry what comes after, so that the children arriving now get everything they should. You don’t have to do what the founders did. You just bring what you can, the way they did, towards the same thing.
What we are becoming
What is taking shape on this one piece of ground is unusual, and rather wonderful. A place that holds a whole Jewish life at once: the little ones at the early learning centre, thirteen years of school, a synagogue, and our elders living a short walk from all of it. Four generations, close enough to see one another every day.
Your gift is what keeps that community strong, and keeps a Jewish education here within reach of any family that wants it.