June 1, 2026
Dear Mirowitz Community,
Nine years. For some of you — most of you — nine years in this building. That is not a school career. That is a childhood. And tonight, that childhood officially has a last chapter. Not closing paragraphs, per se, but writing this part of your narrative and putting it into memory.
I’ve been thinking about what to say to you all — Aidan, Noah, Aaron, Olivia — and I keep coming back to the same place. Not to the accomplishments, though they are real. Not the places you’ve been together, and this year there have been many. Not to the thank-yous, though they are deserved. Not even to the people whom you love and those who love you, especially those in this room tonight. What I keep coming back to is what actually happened here. At Mirowitz. What you actually did.
You built a life together.
Not beside each other. With each other. That distinction matters more than it sounds.
Most people — most adults, even — spend their whole lives looking for the thing you four already have. A community where people knew you before you knew yourself. Where someone remembers the version of you that existed before you got careful, before you got guarded, before you figured out how you wanted the world to see you.
That is not a small thing to carry out of here.
I read your speeches this week. Aidan talked about standing alone in a room full of principals in fourth grade — representing this school — and carrying himself like he belonged there. Aaron grappled with consequences, with the particular moral weight of owning what you’ve done. Noah talked about what happens when you strip away the cell phones and the familiar and put people on a bus together headed somewhere real — how that’s when you find out who your people actually are. And Olivia talked about trust. About what it means to walk into a community mid-journey and be genuinely received.
Four different stories. One through line.
This place taught you how to be in relationship with other human beings. To know “you are all responsible for one another” — and as Aidan says, “you cannot love your neighbor as yourself until you actually know your neighbor.”
That is, quietly, the most important thing a school can do. And most of them don’t.
So now you leave. And I’m not going to tell you to hold onto this place the way I might tell a younger student. You’re too old for that, and frankly, you’d see right through it. What I will tell you is this:
You are walking out of here with something in you that most of your new classmates – at the other schools you will attend in the fall – won’t have and can’t yet name. A fluency. A way of being in community that came from years of praying together, singing together, disagreeing and forgiving and showing up again on Monday. Davening. You know what Kabbalat Shabbat actually feels like in your chest when it slows the week down. You know what it is to chant Torah in front of people who love you.
Don’t be casual with that.
The world will try to be casual with it for you. Don’t let it.
Come back for Kabbalat Shabbat — not as nostalgia, but as practice. As a reminder of what you’re made of. Bring whoever you’re becoming with you and let them see where you came from.
And four years from now, when you graduate high school and the world is wide open and terrifying and magnificent all at once — I want you to come back here together. One more time. Walk through these doors, run the gauntlet through these hallways, let this community that watched you become yourselves cheer for who you actually became.
ALONE AND TOGETHER. This is YOUR story. This is YOUR home. THIS is what you wrote. That moment is yours. We’re already saving it for you.
And to our 7th graders who are also stepping away this year — I see you, too. This is a different kind of leaving, and it deserves to be named honestly. Go find your community. I genuinely hope you find it. But if you don’t — or if you find it and there’s still something missing — you know where we are. The door does not close. It never closes.
Now. To these four.
You came in small. Younger. You leave ready. That is the whole job of a school, and Mirowitz did its job — because you did your job. You showed up. Year after year, in the hard stretches and the joyful ones, you showed up and you became.
Go do extraordinary things. Close this chapter. Begin a new one.
And come home when you need to remember who you are.
Mazal tov!
Brian Thomas