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‘Reimagining’ Earns Educator Accolades

David Ellenson had made a mistake, and he knew Sara Lee could help. Months ago he had declined an invitation to apply for the position of president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). Now, at the 11th hour, he had changed his mind.
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February 24, 2005

 

David Ellenson had made a mistake, and he knew Sara Lee could help.

Months ago he had declined an invitation to apply for the position of president of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR). Now, at the 11th hour, he had changed his mind.

“That’s not a problem,” Lee told Ellenson, who in 2001 would become the eighth president of the Reform movement’s 125-year-old rabbinical school. “Just tell the committee you’ve reimagined yourself.”

Reimagining — and finding just the right words and approach to do it — is one of things that has made Lee, who has been the director of the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at HUC-JIR in Los Angeles for 25 years, one of the most well-respected educational leaders in the Jewish world. On Feb. 21 in Jerusalem, Lee was awarded Pras Hanasi, Israel’s President’s Prize, overseen by the Jewish Agency and awarded by President Moshe Katsav to four educators.

This award, along with her 1999 honorary doctorate from the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary and the prestigious Rothberg Prize from Hebrew University in 1997, puts Lee up there with a pantheon of 20th and 21st century educators and leaders who have impacted a wide swath of the Jewish community.

“People around the world recognize that Sara has elevated the standards of Jewish education to a new high,” Ellenson said. “She has such a combination of good sense and insight, as well as care and compassion for individuals and concern for the institution itself, that she’s just an unparalleled font of wisdom.”

With what students and colleagues call an iron fist and a velvet glove, Lee has been at the vanguard of the return to knowledge-based Judaism, refocusing attention on education as a lifelong family and congregational endeavor.

“She both anticipated many of the trends [toward traditionalism] in the Reform movement, and simultaneously through her work has really fostered many of them,” Ellenson said.

On a recent winter day, back home between tightly scheduled trips to New York, Florida and two visits to Israel, Lee was clearly at home walking through the halls of HUC-JIR at the USC campus, where, Diet Coke in hand, she headed toward a quiet basement classroom to reflect on a career that is still going strong. A grandmother of four, she carries her age like an elder politician whose vision continues to be about the future, not about past accomplishments.

“I’ve pushed the envelope on what Jewish education ought to be and what a Jewish educator ought to be, and I’ve pushed it pretty heavily,” she said. “You can’t change Jewish identity or Jewish community, but you can change the culture of an institution, and institution by institution get the community to think differently and feel differently about Jewish learning.”

One of her main lines of attack over the last few decades has been Hebrew schools and congregational education.

“The fact is that supplementary religious schools make no sense in an institutional culture that does not celebrate Jewish learning,” she said. “Why would any kid think it was worthwhile if Jewish learning is not something adults are doing?”

Lee helped formalize this integrated approach to Jewish learning in the Experiment in Congregational Education (ECE), which was founded more than 10 years ago and is now a national program.

She has been at the forefront of the trend toward day school education in the liberal community and founded and co-directs, along with Sister Mary C. Boys, the Catholic-Jewish Colloquium. The two recently traveled to Auschwitz and are writing a book about the experience.

Lee grew up in Boston and was educated in its rigorous Latin school system. She attended Radcliffe in the 1950s, where the women were assured that as the best and brightest nothing was beyond their reach. As a teenager she became involved in Young Judea, a Zionist youth group, and took a year off from Radcliffe to live in Israel.

“That was a very toughening experience,” she said of that year, which cemented her commitment to Israel. “You came to believe that nothing is impossible, that you shouldn’t accept the status quo because there is always something better.”

That determination would serve her well when her husband, a physician, died suddenly when Lee was in her early 40s, leaving her with two teenagers and a 7-year-old.

She enrolled in a master’s program at the Rhea Hirsch School of Education, where in her second year she was asked to intern and was hired there when she graduated.

In 1979, she was offered the school’s director position, despite the fact that she did not have ordination or a doctorate degree.

Lee keeps photos of all her graduating classes up on the wall above her desk, so that when alumni call, which they often do, she can immediately pinpoint the face. Students and colleagues alike speak of Lee’s penchant for asking probing questions and her ability to analyze a situation and focus on a solution.

“Sara sets incredibly high standards for herself. She lets you know what the ideal is, but you never feel like you are coming up short alone,” said Isa Aron, professor of education at the Rhea Hirsch School and senior consultant for the ECE.

Lee received a good dose of that kind of recognition when the Alumni Association of Rhea Hirsch School of Education honored her in December, where 120 alumni and colleagues attended in her honor. That, she said, was more meaningful than any other accolade she’s received.

“That is really what it is all about,” Lee said, “that people think that I have this impact on the field to help raise people’s vision and expectation of what a Jewish educator ought to be.”

 

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