By Donna Gordon Blankinship, Editor, JTNews
The Seattle woman who has helped make Jewish education so popular that people bid on learning opportunities with her at fund-raising auctions has been named the recipient of a prestigious national award.
Rivy Poupko Kletenik will be one of three Jewish educators to receive this year’s Covenant Awards for outstanding Jewish educators in North America. Each award carries a $25,000 prize to the recipient and an additional $5,000 to his or her institution. “The three winners embody leadership and excellence within the field of Jewish education,” said a press release from the New York–based Covenant Foundation, which has been presenting these awards for 12 years.
Kletenik is director of Jewish Education Services for the Jewish Education Council of the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which is a long way of saying she is in charge of the JEC program for teaching and honoring Jewish teachers. She and the other two winners — Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, founder and president of the Washington Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values, in Rockville, Md.; and Rabbi Peretz Wolf-Prusan, rabbi and educator at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, Calif. — will be honored at a luncheon to be held at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities in November in Philadelphia.
“We are thrilled for Rivy,” said Carol Starin, director of the JEC. “By honoring Rivy, the Covenant Foundation honors our entire community and all its Jewish educators.”
Starin, who worked with lay leader Michele Rosen on Rosen’s nomination of Kletenik, said the choice of her colleague was obvious to her and every other educator who has ever worked or learned with Kletenik. “I am her supervisor, but she is my teacher. Rivy is a valued colleague, a gifted teacher, a voracious student, a citizen of the world,” Starin said in a letter to the Covenant Foundation.
“Rivy learns from everyone and from every experience. She is a passionate student. Always trying to understand a text, every book, article, play, movie and lecture helps her enlighten a text, and in turn the text enlightens her life. Then she moves from student to teacher as she incorporates her learning and thinking into teaching — in the classroom, at the board meeting and through her writing,” Starin added.
Rosen wrote in her nomination letter about her shared history with Kletenik. She became president of the Jewish Federation at the same time Kletenik came on board at the JEC. “Our mutual goals were to inspire, to educate and to connect Seattle Jews to our traditions and our community. Jewish learning proved an effective tool. Rivy became our most effective educator. I was in the unique position to witness this quiet revolution which occurred under her supervision,” Rosen said.
In addition to instructing Jewish educators, Kletenik teaches in a variety of settings all over the community — from her living room where women of all ages from Bikur Cholim Machzikay Hadath congegation gather to soak up some wisdom to more formal settings at the Florence Melton Adult Mini-School, the Community High School of Jewish Studies and her women’s Talmud group that has met at the Jewish Federation every Thursday morning for many years.
Her husband and father are both Orthodox rabbis and Kletenik was raised in a traditional home where Jewish learning was important for both boys and girls. She has studied at the Jersusalem College for Women, Touro College, Yeshiva University/Bernard Revel Graduate School in Judaic Studies, the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Religious Studies and Hebrew University Melton Senior Educator program.
Kletenik is known for inclusiveness in the classroom and for the way she makes learners at every level feel at ease. “She’s quite wonderful. Rivy has brought a high level of Jewish learning to the mainstream,” Rosen said this week when asked to comment on Kletenik and the award.
Rosen said she could go on and on singing the virtues of her favorite teacher: an ardent Zionist who understands the complexity of life in the Middle East, a great mom, a woman who actualizes her values, and much more that few even know about.
Kletenik herself seemed both shocked and awed by the award, although she was aware she had been nominated. When asked what she planned to do with the monetary prize, she replied, “I think we’ll go with college tuition.” She and her husband, Rabbi Moshe Kletenik, have two children in college and two more in high school.
She said she was very excited about the grant to the Jewish Education Council and for the opportunity to join in national gatherings of Covenant Award winners to discuss the state of Jewish education. Past winners have included Danny Siegel of Rockville, Md., Peninnah Schram of Yorktown Heights, N.Y., Joel Lurie Grishaver of Los Angeles, Calif., and Debbie Friedman of New York, N.Y. — all household names in Jewish communal life and certainly among Jewish educators.