Jewish Standard Staff
Teaneck rabbi wins prestigious teaching award
Mishnah and music” trip nicely off the tongue, and the iMishnah project at the Ramaz School, which combines these two elements, is just one of the reasons that the school’s Rabbi Kenneth Schiowitz has won a Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award for Excellence in Jewish Education.
The award honors outstanding classroom-based teachers working in formal Jewish education settings throughout North America. Schiowitz, a Teaneck resident and religious leader of Cong. Shaare Tefillah there, has been teaching at Ramaz for six years, where he is the rosh beit hamidrash at the upper school.
He began the iMishnah project two years ago after reading an article in The Jewish Standard about a similar endeavor. “The iMishnah project enables students to connect to the words of the Torah/Mishnah through a medium other than the traditional, cognitive one,” Schiowitz said.
Standard staffers and alums win awards
Said Standard Editor Rebecca Boroson, “I’m very proud of all the winners — and proud of everyone else on this consistently wonderful staff.”
Two Standard staffers won two awards each: Josh Lipowsky, assistant editor, won a first prize in deadline reporting for “Community musters a minyan so survivor can have Jewish funeral,” about efforts by Chabad of Teaneck to hold a Jewish funeral for a Holocaust survivor who had only one living Jewish relative. Lipowsky won a third in the same category for “Families of terror victims welcome new law,” about a law permitting American families of terror victims to sue foreign sponsors of terrorism.
Schechter concludes Bible study in memory of classmate
Soon after 10-year-old Miriam Avraham was killed in a car accident in October, the students of Solomon Schechter Day School’s middle school took it upon themselves to study the entirety of the Tanach in her memory.
Every middle school student and many members of the faculty signed up to read five chapters of the Tanach in their sixth-grade classmate’s memory, after the school announced the project at a memorial service in December. Students and teachers gathered at the New Milford school on the eve of Shavuot last month to mark the conclusion of that project with a siyum, a traditional celebration at the end of a period of study.
