When Beyachad opened in 2022, it was the first time in seventy-three years that Bayit Lepleitot had built a program for boys. The decision was not an easy one - the founders' promise had always been a promise to girls. But Rabbi Chaim Elazar had heard the same sentence too many times in too many intake meetings: "and what about my brother?"
Beyachad - "together" - is a day program for boys ages eight to fourteen from divorced families. It is not residential. The boys live at home with their mothers (and, where it is healthy, with their fathers). They come to Beyachad after school for homework help, dinner, a Beis Medrash hour, and what the staff calls "the table" - a long, slow meal with one adult per six boys.
The first cohort started in May 2025. Forty-two boys. The retention number - the percentage who came back every week for the full twelve months - is 91%. The four boys who left did so because their families moved out of Jerusalem. We are still in touch with three of the four.
“The most common answer to "what changed this year?" was four words: "He started doing homework."”
Next year's cohort will be ninety-four boys, across two campuses. The waitlist is at one hundred and sixty.
The metric we keep coming back to is not retention. It is what the boys' mothers wrote on the end-of-year survey. The most common answer to "what changed this year?" was four words: "He started doing homework."