From 7 Kids to 11,000: The Story Behind Fifteen Years of ShalomLearning
One morning in Bethesda, Maryland, a little girl wrapped her arms around the legs of a dining room table and refused to let go.
She was not being dramatic. She genuinely, deeply did not want to go to Hebrew school.
Her father happened to be the co-founder of Blackboard — one of the most widely used educational software platforms in the world. And even he didn’t have an answer. Until, together with a friend who’d been a Hebrew school dropout himself, he decided to build one.
That moment — two fathers, two sets of frustrated kids, one synagogue — is where ShalomLearning began. The pilot launched in 2011 with seven students. Not seven hundred. Seven.
Fifteen years later, ShalomLearning serves 11,000 students alongside 200 synagogues and religious schools, reaches military families stationed overseas, and has expanded to 10 countries outside the United States. The little girl at the table is grown. The idea she helped spark is very much alive.