By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
One of the poorly kept secrets of Jewish communal work is that while plenty of people dedicate their professional lives to Jewish education and continuity, only a select few ever get recognized for their efforts. Which is why it’s a big deal when a national organization recognizes teachers for their dedication to their students.
Such is the case for Beth Huppin, the 5th grade Judaics teacher at the Seattle Jewish Community School. Huppin was named one of three recipients from around the country this month to receive the Covenant Award, bestowed by the New York-based Covenant Foundation and given to educators for their creativity and innovation in raising the bar for Jewish education.
“I feel very honored,” Huppin told JTNews.
But adding, in what her head of school said is Huppin’s trademark humility, “It’s not just about me. Nobody does anything meaningful in life alone, and I feel like I work with some fabulous people, and I’ve had wonderful teachers and a supportive family, supportive colleagues, wonderful students, all those things. It makes me grateful.”
Huppin has spent more than 30 years working in Jewish education, starting as a teacher’s aide in her hometown of Spokane as a teenager. She was a camper, counselor, and, for a short while, director at Camp Solomon Schechter near Olympia.
As a student at the University of Washington, the now-well-known Jewish Studies professor Deborah Lipstadt encouraged Huppin to transfer to Brandeis University so she could earn her degree in that subject. She received her Master’s in teaching from the former University of Judaism. She credits many of her own instructors over the years for inspiring her to teach not just at SJCS, where she has been since 1995, but also in the teen and adult education classes she leads at Congregation Beth Shalom.
“I’ve had many wonderful teachers,” Huppin said. “This whole thing has really made me think about how lucky I am to have run across so many different terrific teachers.”
The winners are peer-nominated, and in this case Huppin was nominated by SJCS’ outgoing head of school, Debra Butler. Though the two worked together for only a few years at the school, they have known each other and worked within some of the same educational circles for 20 years. In that time, Butler said, she has been able to see Huppin’s growth as a teacher.
But, Butler added, “As much as she has grown an educator, it’s amazing to watch how much the students grow because of her.”
Butler said she’s excited about the recognition her colleague has received.
“It’s a well-deserved honor,” she said. “She’s passionate about what she does and the kids feel that and they respond to her.”
One of the programs for which Huppin was cited is a monthly project in which she takes her 5th grade class downtown to serve meals to the homeless for Operation Sack Lunch — it’s a way in which she said Jewish values like tzedakah can be lived rather than learned in books.
“Whenever we talk Torah, we talk about how it applies to our lives,” she said.
Once the students reach her class in their final year at SJCS, it isn’t like Huppin is teaching these values from the beginning, however.
“It trickles up,” she said. “They get to me thinking Torah already speaks to their life. I just continue what my colleagues do.”
The process to becoming a Covenant Award winner is not necessarily an easy one. Huppin was up against more than 100 nominees at the beginning of the process. Harlene Appelman, the Covenant Foundation’s executive director, told JTNews that number was then weeded down to 10 finalists. The foundation interviewed several of Huppin’s colleagues and, once selected, a camera crew came to Seattle to film Huppin for a documentary about the year’s winners.
“We do a documentary of each of our award recipients so they don’t have to talk about what they do and we don’t have to talk about what they do,” Appelman said. “We’d rather show them in action.”
Appelman said Huppin’s unique abilities to reach out to anyone she educates helped the foundation decide upon her.
“Beth has always reached out to kids and adults and teens, and her ability to embrace everyone for what they are and bring that to the whole community for what it is is the part that isn’t displayed in many Jewish educators,” Appelman said.
The other two award winners are a Hillel director and a director of Holocaust education, both in the Boston area. They all receive a $36,000 stipend for themselves as well as $5,000 for their organization. They will be honored at a ceremony in November in New Orleans.
Huppin said that as someone working in the trenches, so to speak, she was excited she could be chosen for the award.
“I feel that really recognizes a fact that somebody’s got to be in the classroom day in and day out,” she said.
But Huppin was steadfast in her view that the honors are not hers alone.
“I couldn’t do this by myself,” she said. “I’m only successful at what I do because I’m part of a really magnificent team.”