High School Welcome

When you inherit something great, it is a huge challenge to find a way to create something “new and improved”.  Magen David Yeshivah High School is great now, but we are at a crossroads, and the time has come to carefully examine what we have in the present to build for an extraordinary future.  Make no mistake, this is not a solitary task or vision, it belongs to all of us as a community.  We are building a new path to success and forging a fresh and wonderful new direction for our students, their families and our faculty.

In my forty-five years long career in education, my philosophy has always been that education is not just schooling.  Education is more than students sitting in a class and educators teaching for testing.  My perspective is a comprehensive education of the totality of each student as an individual academically and spiritually. 

It is said that “timing is everything”, and the time is now to move our school in a cutting edge direction to be in the forefront of academia while focusing on developing leadership, strength of character and of course maintaining the highest Jewish values.  I fully expect Magen David Yeshivah High School to become a premiere Jewish Day School in the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area and hopefully to be known as such on a national scale!  It is a challenging and very exciting time in our school’s history.
  
In 1953, the first images of eight Magen David graduates illustrate the fruition of first opening its doors in 1946.  Seventy years later, it is fitting then that the class of 2023 will be my first graduating class on the path to a new and cutting edge Yeshivah experience. It is my profound desire and intention to present graduates who are able to think, probe and analyze with the ability to integrate their Sephardic heritage with western culture.  While they are our students, I want to create a synthesis of a Torah-observant and practicing Jew, who is able to engage the modern world comfortably.  This is a concept whose time has come and one that will transform of our school into the new and improved version we are seeking to build.

Creating a school where great kids and their families bring other great kids and their families is the key to unlocking the door to reaching our full potential and even beyond what we now consider to be the best.  I want our kids to wake up and look forward to going to school, and when the bell rings they want to stay for sports, clubs and other enriching experiences.  This is the level of engagement we want for our students for them to have a full and satisfying high school career.

Magen David has a more than seventy-five year legacy of an idea that has grown into an amazing educational organization dedicated to the Sephardic community.  We are now privileged to be in the moment of this crossroads where our history will meld with the new to create a modern and state-of-the art yeshivah.  Together we will reinvent Magen David to move it forward from what is already excellent into something so sublime and exemplary that others will want to model their schools after us. 
 
I am honored and delighted to be at the forefront of this exciting new adventure and look forward to building this greatness alongside the members of our community.

Dr. Daniel J. Vitow, HEAD OF SCHOOL MDYHS