TORONTO — As a Jewish educator in the United States, Rhonda Rosenheck had been following the progress of Toronto’s Paul Penna Downtown Jewish Day School for years, never imagining that she would end up running it.
Rhonda Rosenheck
“I thought it was interesting to watch the school grow up,” said Rosenheck, who moved here from New Jersey at the end of the summer to become its principal.
She succeeds Janet Nish-Lapidus, who is retiring. Nish-Lapidus remained at the school until Sept. 29 to ease the transition, because Rosenheck had committed to working for the summer at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Connecticut, running its internship program.
“I think a compelling factor in my interest in the school was the real celebration of diversity in its population and potential population,” Rosenheck said.
The Penna school – subject of a 2008 book by Alex Pomson and Randal Schnoor, Jewish Day School in the Lives of Adult Jews – is unique for its non-traditional location away from the suburbs, and for its diverse student body. With almost 160 students from senior kindergarten to Grade 8, its community includes same-sex and intermarried parents, single-parent families, and children with a variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds.
One of the reasons the 12-year-old school’s celebration of diversity, not just tolerance, resonated for Rosenheck is her own background, she said.
A self-described “mutt, Jewishly,” Rosenheck said her mother’s family was Orthodox, and her father, a photographer, was “a New York labour union, anti-religion Zionist.” Her family attended a Conservative congregation, and her mother, a social worker, taught Hebrew school in a Reform congregation while Rosenheck was growing up on Long Island.
As well, she added, her maternal grandfather was from Salonika and had a minimal Jewish background, while her grandmother was Orthodox.
“You have to learn how to bridge that difference and still be cohesive,” she said.
A budding entrepreneur in the early 1980s, Rosenheck – who studied English literature and took a few business courses as an undergraduate at Binghamton University– stumbled into Jewish education unexpectedly when she was teaching Hebrew school to earn some extra money.
“To my shock and horror, my enthusiasm for business diminished in direct proportion to the amount of time I had to spend on teaching.”
Rosenheck, 48, who has been involved in Jewish education since 1983, also has a master’s degree in Jewish education from the Jewish Theological Seminary and has participated in educational programs through Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Mandel Teacher Education Institute in Ohio and the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.
But she says she has remained entrepreneurial in the educational field. Prior to her most recent position as education director for a company creating online Jewish educational programming, Rosenheck co-founded the Schechter Regional High School in New Jersey, was principal of the Ivry Prozdor High School in New York, and served as consulting head of school for a Long Island day school that was about to close.
“A community at a point where there’s growth and change is exciting for me,” she said.
But Rosenheck also takes pleasure in the smaller things, such as her interactions with children seeking approval for a project or even a brief respite in her office.
As well, to her delight, students at Penna call her by her first name. “I’ve always wanted to just be called ‘Rhonda,’” she said. “I’ve never found it to impede the level of respect that I got.”
Rosenheck’s main goal now is to implement the board’s decision to “grow the school,” which has acquired more space in the Miles Nadal Jewish Community Centre, where it is housed. This winter, the space will be renovated and turned into classrooms, Rosenheck said.
As well, she added, part of the plan is to strengthen Penna’s nascent middle school as “a compelling component” of the school.
