A note from Rabbi Chaim Elazar on scale.

When my grandfather opened the door in 1949, he opened it for twenty-four girls. The flat had three rooms. The first year of the home, my grandmother set the table for twenty-six people every Friday night.

We now serve more than eight hundred children across four programs, on two campuses in Jerusalem, with two satellite offices outside Israel. The question I am asked most often - by donors, by visiting rabbis, by my own brothers - is whether the home has lost something on the way from twenty-six chairs to eight hundred.

I want to answer that question directly. Yes. We have lost some things. We have lost the ability for one person to know every girl's name on the day she arrives. We have lost the version of the home where my grandmother did the cooking. We have lost the proximity that came with everyone living, eating, and learning in the same building.

What we have not lost - and what I have spent the last two years of my directorship working to protect - is the structure of the promise. Every girl who arrives at Bayit Lepleitot has, within seventy-two hours, a named house mother who knows her story, a designated bed, a designated seat at the table, and a five-year plan with her name on it. That is not the same as my grandmother knowing her. But it is the same promise, in a form that scales.

“Scale is not the enemy of the promise. Carelessness about scale is the enemy of the promise.”

The way we keep ourselves honest about whether the promise has been kept is this: every six months, we ask every girl to fill out a one-page form. The first question is "Do you feel at home here?" The threshold we have set for ourselves is 95%. We have not always hit it. In the spring of 2024, the answer at Nivcheret dropped to 89%. We did not announce that publicly at the time. We should have. I am announcing it now. The way we got back to 96% by the fall was by restructuring the house mother ratio - one house mother for every twelve girls, down from one for every eighteen.

Scale is not the enemy of the promise. Carelessness about scale is the enemy of the promise. The work of my generation of the home is to be careful.

- Rabbi Chaim Elazar Rosenfeld