Jewish Day Schools: L’dor VaDor
I am deeply grateful to those who build and sustain Jewish day schools, because Jewish day schools built me. My father attended a Jewish day school as a traditional Jew in a shtetl called Horodok between Minsk and Pinsk in the early 1920s. My mother attended a Jewish day school as a secular Jew in Czestochowa, Poland, in the early 1930s.
My parents survived the Holocaust and fell in love after the war in a displaced persons camp in Austria. Broken and starved, Jews there nevertheless started a school, as our tradition mandates. My 18-year-old mother, the only living member of her immediate family, became a teacher.
As poor immigrants to New York City, my parents scraped together enough tuition money to send my sister, Bella, and me to the world’s first-ever Solomon Schechter Day School. Solomon Schechter School of Queens was founded in the mid-1950s as an alternative to Orthodox yeshivot or synagogue schools.
A decade later, visionary leaders in Pittsburgh launched both a community day school, in the city, and a suburban Solomon Schechter School. In the mid-1980s, those schools merged to become Community Day School―a Solomon Schechter Day School that later became pluralistic and independent.
When my husband, Paul, and I moved to Pittsburgh for his work, we enrolled our children at that merged school. That is how I grew to know and love Community Day School. It is no small testament to CDS educators that after 37 cumulative years partnering with the school in raising our four children, Paul and I are immensely proud to forever share credit with CDS in celebrating the adults―and the Jews―they have become.
Stepping Up
In 2004, when three of our children had graduated and the fourth was entering middle school, I was first invited to join the search committee for the next head of school. I was then asked to apply for the position. Over the years, I had assumed several academic roles at the school, but I had no interest in leading. My mindset changed when I read the ambitious educational vision crafted by the committee. It aligned so perfectly with my own hopes and dreams for CDS that I felt inspired and empowered. If helping to create this future meant leading, I realized that is what I wanted to learn to do.
As I was wavering, a dear colleague said to me that he challenged himself every day to do something that scared him. I was definitely scared.
Then came the moment I remember like it was yesterday. I was driving, thinking about this unexpected and outrageous possibility, when I felt a jolt of electricity go through me. I felt lifted up, and my heart and mind spoke in harmony and told me that I could do this big thing. That I should do this big thing. It was a flash of epiphany that felt like a calling.
So here is my advice to anyone interested in leading a Jewish day school. Make sure it aligns with your life and your passions―and then go for it. It is not an easy path, but it will be sublimely gratifying.
I loved CDS from the outside looking in as a parent. From the inside, I grew to love it even more. Most of all, I have treasured all of the people who have devoted themselves to ensure that our students are rooted in community and prepared to soar. I treasure those who are no longer at CDS and those with me now, seeing me off into my next adventure. I have tried to see each person as I see myself―perfectly imperfect in mutually complementary ways.
As a head of school, one is often called upon to step out and lead when every fiber of one’s being wants to curl up inside a blanket and cry. For me, stepping out to lead was never something I needed to do alone. I stood shoulder to shoulder with my team and could always count on their wisdom and heart during exigent times.
Together, we led our community through contentious elections, the Pittsburgh synagogue attack and its enduring trauma, a global pandemic, my personal journey through cancer during Covid (now in full remission, thank God), skyrocketing antisemitism, the atrocities of October 7 in Israel, and the horrors of its aftermath. I am forever thankful that every response to a crisis was a collaboration.
Leading with Joy
I repeat my invitation to leadership. If you are like me and wonder every day what you can do to help fix this broken world, Jewish day school leadership is next-level tikkun olam. Spending each day with hopeful, excited, impassioned, funny, curious, justice-seeking children is vitalizing. Watching teachers bring their best selves to children even when their own hearts are breaking will lift you up to do the same.
The mission is so big, and it is so biblical, that it is hard to not feel it, every day, as sacred work. Jews for millennia have been in an existential struggle to survive and thrive and be a light unto the nations while in every generation enemies rise up to destroy us.
It is nothing short of miraculous that Jewish day schools manage to hold this mission in the hearts and minds of educators, families, and children, while pursuing world-class education with limited resources and with few people outside of the day school world understanding what we are doing and why we need their support.
As I reflect on my career, I am most proud that we have established a place where children are loved and joyful learning is treasured. Both visitors who come for an hour, and those of us embedded in the day to day, attest to feeling that sense of joy―even on the hardest days.
That is true only because we have worked to recruit, retain, and celebrate the educators who create that culture of joy. Without first-rate teachers and staff members to support them, we are not the partner that Pittsburgh’s Jewish families and the Jewish future deserve.
The culture of joy is non-negotiable, because what we learn in love is what sticks with us. Jewish day schools are more than just schools with exceptional academic outcomes. We are powerful transmitters of Jewish heritage, culture, belonging, and menschiness. We offer an immersive experience that has staying power to inspire families for a lifetime.
It is no surprise then, that as I fully embrace my new role as Bubby, that our community has chosen a CDS alum as my successor. Dr. Casey Weiss (also featured in this issue) knows and loves our school because it was her foundational Jewish and educational home.
Very few things could draw me away from this work that I obviously love, but my grandchildren are now the most compelling calling on my horizon.
How grateful I am to have been able to immerse myself in three great passionate pursuits: the creation of my family (thank you, Paul Munro), the care and stewardship of Community Day School, and now, the blessing of our family’s next generation.