Chris Aguero.
As a seventh-grader, Chris Aguero had acquired enough Hebrew to use a personally coded script to express his 12-year-old angst — aka kvetching — in his daily diary.
Aguero, now 42, has grown up to become neither spy nor cryptologist but rather the new Head of School of Ezra Academy, the New Haven area’s anchoring progressive Jewish day school.
Aguero was made regular, no longer interim, director of Ezra Academy in January. While interim, he had been commuting from the Upper West Side in Manhattan, where he has been living with his partner. In the coming weeks, Aguero said he will be moving to permanent digs in Westville.
The world he hails from doesn’t necessarily fit the expected for a Jewish day school leader.
Aguero grew up on Long Island, in South Carolina, and other places being towed about by peripatetic, entrepreneur parents. They did send him to a two-day-a-week afternoon Hebrew school connected to the temple in Great Neck. But the parents don’t fit the stereotype of future progenitors of a Jewish day school principal — a non-Jewish Latino dad and a mom who is of Turkish-Jewish extraction.
Ezra Academy, a pre‑K Montessori to eighth-grade dual language school, was founded as a Solomon Schechter school affiliated with the Conservative Movement in 1966 at the Beth El Keser Israel (BEKI) synagogue on Harrison Street in Westville. It relocated to the Bnai Jacob synagogue in Woodbridge three years later in 1969.
Today the school has 106 students from 64 families, Aguero said. That’s about the same number of kids in the school in 2012, when Ezra contemplated a move, which never happened, from the Bnai Jacob synagogue to the Jewish Community Center in Woodbridge.
“Today,” Aguero said, “we have Israeli families who fit right in, they are not observant but feel very comfortable here. We have families who grew up in egalitarian environments. And we have a number of families who grew up observant, and while they want to turn the volume down a bit on that, still want their kids Jewish. So we are serving as a hub for a whole diverse range of Jewish people.”
In 2011, when Aguero was a young teacher at Ezra, there was a plurality of families from Woodbridge. Now the plurality is from New Haven, largely Westville, but also East Rock, and some families from Woodbridge. Gone are the days when Ezra used to have school buses shuttling from the academy to Bridgeport or Fairfield, Aguero said.
Today, Aguero said, Ezra Academy is facing a world of smaller Jewish families, new demographic and geographic challenges and also a world where in New Haven proper there’s a thriving Orthodox and Chabad Jewish presence, with synagogues and schools of their own.
“It’s getting tough to recruit for a [progressive] Jewish day school,” he said. “But Ezra is very much still a destination for non-Orthodox Jews, who are still the majority at this time.”
That challenge is precisely what Aguero is trying to address with Ezra’s dual language (that is, English-Hebrew) educational experience, and its progressive experiential, project-based learning model.
While “progressive” is a very broad term in educationese, Aguero said, perhaps its chief hallmark is that “in a progressive classroom teachers de-center themselves,” leaving space for students to have more agency, to find on their own solutions to problems, to move toward a Socratic approach in which the students, as well as the teacher, are both holders of knowledge. And that of course leads to more experiential learning and project-based learning that Aguero particularly champions.
That year 2012 was the last of Aguero’s four-year stint at Ezra. At the time, he was still a new young teacher without much classroom teaching background. Perhaps somebody there at the time sensed that this was a future leader-of-school because Ezra subsidized Aguero earning, while teaching at Ezra, a master’s degree in education from St. Joseph’s College near Hartford.
For “the four years here I fell in love with the school and community, more so than I realized,” said Aguero. For a range of personal reasons, he left Ezra and New Haven in 2012 and returned to New York, where his family was.
He eventually took a job as a teacher at the Austin Jewish Academy. When that school was in transition and looking for a new director, the faculty made the case not to search outward but inward, and that Aguero should be selected, and he became head of school there.
Aguero said that when he reflects on the arc of his life and work thus far he is not a bit surprised that he has ended up in Jewish education. After all, he said, here he was a kid who used to hang out with books, history, foreign languages, and diaries of secret, private, coded Hebrew journals. He described the feeling it produced as one of coziness, warmth, and safety as comfortable as being in a warm bathtub.
What is a bit of a surprise, he added, is that he is regularly recruited as a teacher/leader.
After college in Austin he enrolled in a master’s degree program in Jewish women’s studies, taking courses at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Union Theological Seminary, and Columbia. Even though he’d received a full scholarship, he looked out on the horizon of courses — three years worth of them to finish — and he decided, despite a full scholarship, other paths called.
They included working briefly in Jewish publishing and, in the move before he came to Ezra Academy, as the interim director of a Solomon Schechter school in Manhattan. There he presided as a transitional director at the merging of the school, but also in helping to handle for the students and families the immediate aftermath of the October 7 Hamas attacks.
“The return to Ezra felt b’shert,” Aguero said, using the Yiddish word meaning pre-destined. “I was thrilled.”
He was offered the job as Ezra’s interim director in June 2024, coinciding with a difficult personal time, the death of his father. Aguero said he accepted the position as “interim” for a year, and then before journeying to the Elm City to start at Ezra in July, he went off to Israel to re-center and to re-charge.
“My father had passed away in June. I felt a bit lost emotionally. I felt Israel was the place to mourn. And it was the most meaningful trip [among many to Israel] that I have ever taken. I went to Hostage Square, it was incredibly moving. We all just wanted to feel safe.”
These days at Ezra, Aguero said, they have been marking October 7 not with ceremony, the way other important Jewish historical moments are marked, but with, primarily for the older kids, a study session. “It’s different because it’s not part of the past. The war isn’t over. It’s different because it’s not part of the past.”
“Our students engage with the history of Zionism … I remember teaching that [at Ezra] in my 20s,” he recalled. “And it requires us to revisit the narrative that we’ve been handed down. The history is nuanced and the unsavory parts are part of it.”
Because of the ongoing conflict, Augero said that he’s made the decision, as was taken last year, not to have the Ezra kids spend two weeks in Israel, which is part of the curriculum. Instead they will be taking a trip, with an environmental focus, to Costa Rica. “We’ll send them back when the conflict is over, God willing.”
Long before October 7, he added, “I’ve been, as the leader of small Jewish schools, in the security-awareness space. I’ve thought about security for Jewish community [schools] for three different cities: Austin, New York, and New Haven. Anything can happen. That’s how I got here, and I do feel like New Haven is home.”
I asked Aguero how he feels not only about leading a Jewish school but about being himself Jewish in today’s newly conflicted and perhaps threatening post-October 7 climate, and he answered very personally:
“I don’t usually discuss this, but I’ve been out [as a gay person] since I was 13 years old. One of the pitfalls of being an out gay guy is that my existence threatens some form of masculinity. After October 7th, I felt some of that [vulnerability] about being Jewish as I felt about being gay. At the same time you can’t live your life in fear. It’s just so sad.”
And how does Chris Aguero’s identity play as a leader in today’s progressive Jewish world and at Ezra Academy in particular?
“I certainly believe that my identity has helped play a role in my experience as a day school leader,” he told the Independent. “There was curiosity about my background at first. In fact, it was the first question that board members asked in the way that folks have over my entire life: How does a nice Jewish boy get a name like Chris?
“A number of times, I have had the sense that my presence in Jewish spaces has made the other non-White-identifying Jews feel that they belong just a little bit more. Now more than ever, the Jewish world needs a galvanized Jewish community. If I can be part of what draws new families into our community and keeps current families engaged, then sign me up! For Ezra Academy, selecting a leader with a less conventional Jewish identity was just a happy accident.”
He continued: “Across North America, Jewish day schools are working hard to appeal to families for whom Jewish day school wasn’t an option they had considered. Families that are already engaged Jewishly will likely seek us out. We want those who don’t realize what an immersive Jewish experience is like for our students.
“Life in a Jewish day school is always evolving. It is exciting to be part of what directs the daily formative experiences of Jewish students, who will inherit the world that we face today.”