Temple Beth-El’s Tonya Glantz honored for excellence in Jewish education

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Tonya Glantz, a pre-K teacher at Temple Beth-El, is the winner of this past academic year’s Jenny Klein Memorial/Grinspoon Award for Excellence in Jewish Education. 

The Harold Grinspoon Foundation and the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island partner annually to honor outstanding Jewish educators in the greater Rhode Island area who make a lasting impact on the lives of Jewish children and contribute to excellence in Jewish education.

Sarah Mack, rabbi at Temple Beth-El, says teaching young children at the Providence synagogue is a unique experience for Glantz “because she spends most of her daily life working with adults.  Professionally, she is a college professor who has a masters of social work and a Ph.D. in education.”  

Glantz, who teaches at Rhode Island College and at Johnson & Wales University, says “teaching young children is about joy and discovery and building a Jewish identity through our class adventures and friends. This awareness really inspired me to embrace mitzvot as the central focus of my curriculum, where holidays and festivals afford opportunities to bring mitzvot to life.

“As a class, we explore concepts related to different mitzvot, build knowledge through exploration and imagination, and strengthen what each mitzvah means by engaging in activity that brings kindness, care and Jewish values to life in the children’s temple community, family and the world.”

Rabbi Mack also says that Glantz “has been on our faculty for a long time and serves as a great resource to other teachers, offering ideas, opportunities to work together and constructive criticism.”

The award, which includes a $500 honorarium from the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and $1,000 from the Jewish Alliance for a professional development program, will be presented on Sept. 6 at the Joseph and Leba Zelniker Conference at the Alliance’s Dwares Jewish Community Center, in Providence.

The topic of the conference is experiential education. Coincidentally, in her part of the nomination process, Glantz wrote that “what I learned from my wonderful [pre-K] students is that being Jewish is about experience and action and making personal meaning out of what is being learned.” This theme will be emphasized at the conference.

The Jenny Klein Memorial Teacher Award was established by the Alperin-Hirsch Family to recognize an outstanding teacher in area religious schools. It pays tribute to one of the community’s premier veteran educators. When she was 91, Klein recalled how she was chosen to be a teacher in New York at the age of 16. She was still teaching 75 years later. As one of her students Ruth (Duffy) Page says, “She took her mandate seriously, and she took her Judaism seriously, and she took us seriously …. She was a Jewish role model.”

The North American Grinspoon Awards for Excellence in Jewish Education have recognized over 800 outstanding educators in the U.S. and Canada since 2000. Today the award celebrates successful innovation in Jewish education through a partnership between the Harold Grinspoon Foundation and the participating community.

For additional information, visit www.hgf.org/teacher-awards.

LARRY KATZ (lkatz@jewishallianceri.org) is the director of Jewish life and learning at the Jewish Alliance of Greater Rhode Island.

Grinspoon Award, Temple Beth-El, Tonya Glantz, Zelniker Conference