Editor’s note: Paul Solyn, religious school director and synagogue administrator at Mishkon Tephilo, a Conservative congregation in Venice, CA, poses a question at the end of his article that we hope will provoke you to write to us with a response.

My grandparents belonged to three synagogues: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. My grandfather was a charter member of one; the second was the synagogue they chose together as a young married couple; their children went to Hebrew school at the third.

Their religious lives were a combination of "Reconservadox" elements: they equally admired Reform social principles, Orthodox adherence to tradition, and Conservative education. They were shomer kashrut but not shomer Shabbat. They attended services on the second day of Rosh Hashanah but not necessarily on the second day of Shavuot.

Parents whose children are now entering schools find boundaries even more permeable. When asked about their religious orientation, many answer, "We’re just Jews."

For these parents and other young adults, the choice of a synagogue is rarely motivated by its denominational affiliation. They’re more likely to be influenced by the school (and by its milieu more than by its curriculum), the rabbi or cantor, location, or friends who are already members.

First, it widens the potential distance between what the school teaches and the Jewish life that students experience at home. We are all familiar with the cognitive dissonance that students suffer when we teach a standard of observance to which their families do not adhere, but when parents identify even less strongly with the synagogue’s philosophy, the gap is greater.

Second, we must recognize differences in practice that arise from the ethnic diversification of congregations. While the congregation whose school I direct has a Hungarian heritage, its members now represent all kinds of backgrounds. Ethnic differences in my synagogue once meant Galitzianer versus Litvak; now the congregation includes families from Israel, North Africa, and Iran, all with different customs.

Third, it means that we need to ask parents what they want from their children’s religious education. It helps us to know, for example, whether identification with Israel is stronger than identification with ritual practices; if so, we may have more success with modern Hebrew than with prayer fluency and procedures.

Finally, we should redevelop our curricula around a core of elements that are common to all forms of religious Judaism. This will not mean glossing over our differences, but it will mean that the elements we share—think of God, Torah, and Israel—will be the starting points.

Some resources for this kind of teaching are available. The Z’man L’Tefilah series (A.R.E.) includes both Ashkenazi and Sefardi versions of some prayer texts, as well as both traditional and modern (usually Reform) versions of some. Hineni also offers liturgical variations for the prayers, with explanations.

Rediscovering the Jewish Holidays includes the traditions and customs of many different ethnic Jewish communities, as well as new practices that are entering the mainstream of American Jewish life from Jewish renewal and Jewish feminism. If a teacher wants to include the Iranian custom of symbolically whipping one’s neighbor at the seder table with a green onion during the singing of "Dayenu," or have the students make a kos Miryam (Miriam’s Cup) as a Passover art project, the class will find background about both. Even more valuable is that it draws its discussion of the practices of each holiday out of the Jewish values that the holiday embodies, so that students learn the practices as expressions of core values rather than as a set of disconnected, particular customs.