Ninth grader Joshua Appelbaum thought he’d do “pretty well” at his first national Hebrew Bible study competition, but he never expected to earn second place.
The Berman Hebrew Academy student, now a rising sophomore, said he’s always liked studying the Hebrew Bible. When Appelbaum spotted USA Chidon HaTanach at his school’s clubs fair last fall, it was beshert.
After months of reading, rereading and preparing, Appelbaum is a national champion.
“We’re all just so proud of Joshua on his win,” Malkie Hametz, the dean of students for Berman’s Upper School and lead teacher of Chidon at Berman, said. “It’s an incredible accomplishment. We’re impressed with his commitment to study Tanach.”
The May 4 competition consisted of a full day of written exams at SAR Academy in Riverdale, New York. Students in sixth through 12th grades took a 70-question multiple-choice quiz based on the text, then a 50-question multiple-choice quiz connecting different texts to one another.
“I thought that was a nice way to help [us] realize just how interconnected all of Tanach is,” Appelbaum said.
The top seven scorers from the high school division — ninth through 11th grades — were called up to the auditorium stage for an additional 10-question open-response test, he said. This year, there were eight competitors because of a tie.
“A lot of the questions were a lot of ‘Who said this?’ to ‘What book was this written in?’” Appelbaum said. “You have to distinguish between the prophecy of Nathan and the prophecy of Yirmeyahu. If they give you a pasuk from one of them, which one said it?”
Each competitor added their score to their previous total, and the top three were called back to the stage for an oral quiz. Scores were tallied with Akiva Shrier of YULA High School in first place and Appelbaum tying for second with Hadassah Esther Ritch of Bruriah High School for Girls in New Jersey.
When Chidon HaTanach coordinator Rabbi Dovi Nadel announced the winners, Appelbaum was ecstatic: “Maybe I shouldn’t have celebrated as loud as I did.”
“I thought I was going to do pretty well; I did a lot better than I thought,” Appelbaum reflected.
Appelbaum, Shrier and Ritch will go on to compete at the international level. The annual competition takes place in Jerusalem on Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, next year on April 22.
How did the first-time competitor manage to win nationally?
“I would like to say I came up with some clever idea,” Appelbaum said. “I just read [Tanach] enough times on the bus rides [to school] and back and on my own until I knew it very well.”
“Joshua was really dedicated from the start,” Ariella Parness, Berman Chidon’s team captain, said. “I would see him at lunch day after day learning the material and practicing it so that he would know it thoroughly.”
Appelbaum said he also created virtual flashcards for memorizing names and shared the flashcards with Parness so that the entire team at Berman would benefit.
“But other than that, it’s just every spare moment I have to just read the text over and over until you can start to recite it without looking,” he added.
Appelbaum isn’t solely studying to the test; studying Tanach is something the rising sophomore enjoys doing.
“I’m Jewish, and this is the text which we base our entire lives on,” Appelbaum said. “I figured that if I want to learn, which I do, it’s important for my Judaism that I should get a mastery of the basic text, which everything is based off of.”
The high school division finalists, which included Mali Osofsky of Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School, each received a book written by Dr. Moshe Avital, who coordinated USA Chidon for 12 years and died in 2021, according to The Jewish Link.
Sheara Arbit, Avital’s daughter, shared her father’s legacy and the importance of Chidon.
“Tanach kept my father alive through six concentration camps,” she told the audience. “One and a half million children perished in the Holocaust. He truly believed that every child born after the Shoah was a miracle.”
The international Chidon HaTanach was founded by David Ben-Gurion, the former prime minister of Israel, originally with the intent of encouraging adults to study the Hebrew Bible. Appelbaum said he looks forward to competing internationally, recognizing that the expectations are far higher.
“It’s a lot more specifics,” he said. “It’s on a larger scale, which means that instead of needing to distinguish between Yirmeyahu and Nathan, I have to distinguish between 15 different prophets. The big difference with the actual live competition is it’s not multiple choice there.”
“It’s a great way to, if not win anything, at least to motivate yourself to study Tanach,” Appelbaum said.
He added that studying Tanach is an “important piece of the puzzle” to understanding Gemara — a comprehensive commentary and analysis of Mishnah — in context.
“I think people should be spending more time on Tanach,” he said.
