By Joel Magalnick , Editor, JTNews
Rabbi Morton and his wife Leya Moskowitz knew about the gala in their honor. They knew they’d be called onstage during the event to speak. The longtime educators even knew about the trip to Hawaii a Seattle Hebrew Academy family had donated in honor of their 50th anniversary, which they had celebrated the day before the event. What they didn’t know was they would walk out with two etched glass plaques, and checks for $10,000 each, bestowed upon them as the Samis Foundation’s first Rabbi Doctor William Greenberg Award, recognizing them for their individual contributions to educating generations of children in Seattle’s Jewish community.
“How can you receive so much appreciation for doing something you love so much?” Leya Moskowitz told JTNews after leaving the stage. “It’s so much recognition for simply doing the things we love the best in the world.”
For Rob Toren, the grants administrator for Samis, bestowing the award on the Moskowitzes “just felt right.”
Rivy Poupko Kletenik, SHA’s head of school, noted that for a teacher like Leya Moskowitz who has spent decades in the classroom, it would be easy to resist change, in particular when that change is as dramatic as SHA’s adoption of the Tal Am Hebrew immersion program at the start of the 2010–11 school year.
“It really is a huge change, a philosophical change — it’s also on how you lead the classroom,” Kletenik said. “It was really amazing that Mrs. Moskowitz was able to do that.”
But she wasn’t surprised. This is a teacher, Kletenik noted, who has a different set of earrings for each Torah portion and “comes to school in a certain outfit that connects to what she’s teaching and the kids have to figure out what it is.
“She has this really whimsical imagination,” Kletenik added, “She really is beloved.”
Since 1979, Rabbi Moskowitz has taught virtually every Judaics course at the Northwest Yeshiva High School, in addition to several weekly adult courses. Some of his students now are the children and even grandchildren of those he taught previously.
“It’s hard to think who could have reached more people,” said Rabbi Bernie Fox, NYHS’s head of school. “He is a very, very dedicated teacher and he is a person that is constantly involved in his own self-development. He never stagnates.”
Fox cited two ways Moskowitz has positively reached his students: “His capacity to make all of his teachings relevant,” Fox said, and “his ability to facilitate the student in understanding the messages in the text…. He’s making the students think.”
The Greenberg Award had been under discussion for several years, Toren said. At this point, the particulars of the award have not been decided upon beyond this first announcement.
“We don’t know how often it’s going to be, how much it’s going to be, what the criteria are going to be,” he said. But, he added, “there is a strong sense we do not want to be doing this every year.”
Who would receive the award — seasoned veterans like the Moskowitzes or an educator early in his or her career who shows great promise — should be an item of discussion among the trustees, as would parameters on how the stipend should be used, Toren said. They will not be seeking nominations.
One factor in the award is dependent upon the fortunes of the foundation, which gets the vast majority of its income from its real estate holdings.
“This year, we’ve been very fortunate that we’ve done well relative to our budget projections,” Toren said.
Samis is unique in that its funding model reduces the cost for any K–12 student to attend any of the Jewish day schools in Washington State. The Greenberg Award will not affect those grants or any of the other institutes it supports, including Jewish overnight camps.
Though he compared the award to national education awards bestowed by the Covenant Foundation or the Milken Foundation — at least in the way they surprise the winning teachers and institutions — Toren said his board is not attempting to put Samis on the national stage.
But he does have something to say to the rest of the country: “We think other communities should be doing this,” he said. “It’s a way of calling attention to the importance of day school educators. We would love it if other communities did this.”
The Moskowitzes were clearly excited about the Greenberg award, but not just because of the money that came with it. Greenberg, a lifelong educator and for 30 years the rabbi at Congregation Ezra Bessaroth, had been their close friend and mentor. He died in 2007.
“He just stood for so much good in the world,” Leya Moskowitz said. “He was a very extraordinary person.”
Toren said that given its nature, naming the award for Rabbi Greenberg was fitting. Aside from his rabbinical and teaching duties, Greenberg would visit each of the area’s day schools every year and sit in on teachers to assess the quality of the education.
“He himself was a master teacher,” Toren said. “He was deeply committed to and concerned about Jewish education in our day schools.”