By Denise Smith Amos
The Cincinnati Enquirer

Hazel Bolnick

KENWOOD - Hazel Bolnick knows how to grow a school.

In 1982, when Bolnick started a Jewish day school from scratch in her native South Africa, she had only 17 students. When she left the school in 2000 to emigrate to the United States, the Johannesburg school was teaching 670 students.

Her marketing strategy was old-fashioned.

"I literally knocked on everyone's door and encouraged them to come to school," she said.

Now Bolnick, 56, is about to take over Yavneh Day School, a private pre-K-8 school that concentrates on Judaism and general education. The school of 340 students is finding it harder to compete for Jewish students than in the past, school leaders say.

IF YOU GO

What: A reception for community members and parents to meet Hazel Bolnick, Head of School at Yavneh Day School. When: 4-6 p.m. Sunday. Where: 8401 Montgomery Road, Kenwood. Reservations: recommended. Call 766-3163 or e-mail lafrenkiel@yavneh.org.

Jewish families were once clustered in a few Greater Cincinnati neighborhoods. In the past decade, however, the number of families has not only declined but has spread out to other suburbs with high-quality public schools, said Dr. Gary Kirsh, Yavneh's president and a urological surgeon.

"The Jewish community is everywhere from Loveland to West Chester and all moving north, west and east. They're not concentrating in the Amberley Village area, like in the last generation," he said.

"We have to sell them on our value, and we have to provide an excellent product."

Yavneh, which charges $8,175 annually in tuition, must make its case to attract Jewish parents. That will be Bolnick's charge, Kirsh said.

Bolnick will meet with parents, students and staff for the first time Sunday at the school. She is replacing Mitchell Flatow, who returned to teaching in June.

Bolnick has been an educator for more than 30 years, teaching grade school before founding and running the Sandton King David School in Johannesburg.

Since 2000, she has been a lower school principal at a private school in Atlanta.

Bolnick said her strategy has been to pick from the best things competing schools did and then improve on them.

Yavneh, she said, already has advantages, with its small class sizes - averaging 15 students - and its individually tailored lesson plans geared to help every child.

Yavneh, she said, offers what other schools can't - its Judaic studies and traditions.

"It's a school with such a heritage to it,'' Bolnick said. "It's steeped in Jewish traditions. It will be wonderful to build on the lessons established there. It's really in its golden days."

She and her husband will move to the Cincinnati area in May. She starts work on July 1.

E-mail damos@enquirer.com