It’s hard to imagine that Bryna Bruder-Wechsler was, as she puts it, devastatingly shy as a youngster growing up in Montreal.
Bryna Bruder-Wechsler uses music to connect her students to Judaism. [Frances Kraft photo]
Elliott Michaelson – who used to work at Beth Torah Congregation, where Bruder-Wechsler has taught music for the past three years, and is now at Congregation Darchei Noam – says she has “exactly the kind of personality that supplementary schools need” in order to capture kids’ attention, given that their time at school is limited.
But the music teacher at Beth Torah’s supplementary school – which is called Hebrew’s Cool – said that when she was a small child, she used to hide behind a wall, or behind her mother, a former violinist in the Montreal Women’s Symphony Orchestra, to sing for guests.
At age 10, she began performing with the Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre group and started what would become a career in Jewish music education.
Now a mother of three boys – ages 6, 8 and 9 – Bruder-Wechsler, 44, has a B.Ed. from McGill University and can be found at Beth Torah twice a week.
As well, she teaches at Netivot HaTorah Day School’s south branch, leads the choir at Leo Baeck Day School’s south branch (she has been with the school for 20 years, ever since she began teaching there shortly after her arrival in Toronto), and is a facilitator of two tot music and art programs.
As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor father, Bruder-Wechsler, who attended United Talmud Torahs through Grade 6, said she has a fondness and appreciation for “not only Yiddish, but being Jewish.
“It’s my legacy to keep connecting the kids to who they are. You can really do it through song, if you feel it – and through the right songs. You can promote conversation and good dialogue, and just connectedness.”
“Coming from a survivor family, I feel that [kids] knowing who they are is of utmost importance, and that’s what gives me the energy to do what I do with such passion.”
Michaelson said that Bruder-Wechsler connects with students in a whimsical way as she “waves her magic guitar.”
She engages students with songs that are accompanied by enthusiastic motions – tapping knees and shoulders, and snapping fingers faster and faster – and with “quiet, sit-down-on-the-carpet” Hebrew songs, too, discussing the words so that students will understand them.
A highlight of Bruder-Wechsler’s teaching career was having 100 of her students sing, among other selections, “a funky Siman Tov u’Mazel Tov” at her wedding in 1999.
“I wanted them to experience a Jewish wedding,” she said. “They were amazing… It was the best wedding ever.”
A lesson from the teacher: “It’s important to keep Jewish kids knowing they’re Jewish, and to try to do that through song. They will feel their Judaism through meaningful song.”
