Jewish Sightseeing HomePage Jewish Sightseeing
 2003-06-06 Rabbi Simcha Weiser
San Diego Region

San Diego

Soille San
    Diego Hebrew
    Day School
 

A tradition of teaching


Soille's headmaster passes on his passion to 

a new generation of Jewish students

San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, June 6, 2003

Education Files


 

By Donald H. Harrison
 
Rabbi Simcha Weiser, who has been headmaster of the Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School for 22 of its 40 years, counts among his greatest delights learning about graduates who have gone on to become officers of their synagogues or board members of Jewish day schools in the cities where they live.

In that, no doubt, he is a link in a chain on which the late Rabbi Yaacov Kulefsky and the retired Rabbi Shlomo Goldstein preceded him. Goldstein was one of the teachers whom Weiser credits with motivating him to become a better student at the Hebrew Academy of Washington, D.C. And Kulefesky? He was the head of Ner Israel Rabbinical College in Baltimore and
the rabbi whom Goldstein credits with being his mentor.

Kulefsky to Goldstein to Weiser— from one generation of Jewish teachers to
another.

In keeping with that theme, not only Weiser will be in the spotlight at Soille San Diego Hebrew Day Schoolıs 40th anniversary scholarship banquet on Sunday evening, June 15, but so will alumni Yael Schwarz, Dr. Abraham Broudy and Dr. Karl Jacobs, who will recall memories of their years at Hebrew Day.

The evening's festivities will culminate with the dedication of a sefer Torah, symbolically linking generation after generation of teachers to the giving of the Torah on Shavuot.

Weiser told Heritage that as a young teenager he was far more interested in the Washington Redskins than in Rashi. "I was a very mediocre student, to be honest with you," he said. "I was not the most model citizen in school. I did fine academically, but was going through the motions like most of my classmates."

Then along came Rabbi Goldstein. "If you didnıt do well on a test, he'd come over to a child and say, 'Hey, you didnıt do well. Why didn't you do well? What is the problem? How can I help you study better? How can I help you take better notes? How can I help you understand the material better? Because I expect you to get much better grades than this. I expect you to succeed because what I am teaching you is important!"

Goldstein was one of the youngest members of the faculty, and American-born. Many of the other teachers at Washington's Hebrew Academy were Holocaust survivors, recently moved from Europe, who seemed to feel American kids never could understand what real Judaism was about, Weiser recalled.

Weiser remembered that at first he resisted Rabbi Goldstein's efforts to have him take his studies seriously. "My deal was 'Hey, Rabbi Goldstein, I have an idea for you. You leave me alone and I will leave you alone.' And his attitude was: 'That is just not acceptable. You are going to do well.
You are going to learn, you are going to accomplish. What I am teaching you is important and it is important for you!ı"

After a few years, Goldstein left teaching to become a successful lawyer. Now that he's retired, he's teaching again, and remembers Weiser by his boyhood name of "Steven." (Weiser took the name "Simcha" when he received his ordination or smicha as a rabbi).

Why does Goldstein think he had such an impact as a teacher? "Part of the reason, perhaps, was that I was not much older than Steven and the other students," he speculated in a telephone interview. "I was 26 and they were around 14. The other teachers were beyond middle age. Today when I teach, I find that the younger teachers have a better relationship with the students
than I do."

Goldstein, who grew up in Los Angeles, remembered on one vacation visit home, he tentatively decided to leave his yeshiva in Baltimore and try to find one in Los Angeles. "Rabbi Kulefsky was my rebbe; he called me up and had a long conversation with me, that I should really return," Goldstein recalled. That such an important person, the rosh yeshiva, took a personal
interest in him was inspirational, he said.

The year after Goldstein was Weiser's teacher, another remarkable teacher came along. He was Rabbi Avraham Baharan, member of a long-time Jerusalem family, whom Weiser remembers as a "charismatic" person.

"He forged a much more personal relationship," Weiser recalled. Baharan had a remarkable memory, which he demonstrated by playing three chess games with his students simultaneously— without ever looking at the chessboard.

Students would tell them where they moved their pieces, and he would visualize their boards and tell them what move to make for him. "Although we occasionally beat him, he held his own," Weiser marveled.

After a Shabbat meal, "he would speak to us and we would study something together and he really walked the extra mile and engaged us as individuals."

Onward to Yeshiva High School of Greater Washington, and there was another mentor, Rabbi Zechariah Mines, a person "whose home was open to us, who spent casual time with us, who took the time to get to know us as individuals," Weiser said.

Weiserıs mentors shared one important characteristic: each took a personal interest in his students' progress.

During Weiserıs long years of study for ordination at the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva in New York, he followed two tracks: one that could lead him to be a pulpit rabbi and another that did lead him, upon graduation in 1979, to the field of Jewish education.

"I was pretty convinced in my last years of yeshiva that my interest really was education," Weiser said. "I felt as if there was a huge need. I felt that there were so many kids going through the classes of Jewish day schools uninspired, untouched, and I really wanted to see that changed.

"To be honest, I also figured a day school has a bigger place in the life of the Jewish community than does the synagogue. I have tremendous respect for the synagogue and tremendous respect for pulpit rabbis, I really do. But given the choice, if you ask me 'where is the bigger opportunity to have an impact on the community?' I felt that this was a better place."

Besides affecting the lives of students, "schools like ours engage families," Weiser said. "Families have to make parenting decisions. They have to decide first of all if they want a Jewish education and how intense a Jewish education it should be. You are educating the whole family."

* * *
After incorporating in 1964, the San Diego Hebrew Day School moved so often that it might have been called the "school on wheels."  Its first home was the old Jewish Community Center on 54th Street. Next, it moved to Temple Beth Israel at Third and Laurel Street. Then to the home of a former restaurant (Aspen Mine Company), and after that to Tifereth Israel Synagogue. Next, it went to Beth Jacob Congregation, and when that proved too small, the school's nursery and kindergarten were relocated to a home on Adams Avenue. Then the nursery (preschool) was moved to another home. Seven homes in less than seven years.

In 1971, Hebrew Day School purchased a historic public school building on 8th Street in National City. It seemed like a good idea at the time, especially since students were being drawn both from San Diego and Tijuana.

But none of the students lived in National City, and after his arrival here in 1981, Weiser soon determined that if the school were to grow and flourish it would have to move again.

"Being in National City was a tremendous, tremendous detriment," Weiser said. "Rabbi Marvin Hier of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles clarified this to me. He has a Lower East Side (of New York City) manner about him, and he said: 'Look, Rabbi, youıve got three strikes: You're in the old neighborhood, it's an Orthodox school,' and, I forget the third, maybe that we had no strong financial support group. 'Youıve got to change that; no matter what it takes, get out of there!'"

"So the second year I was here, we were in trailers, portable buildings... in the College Area. We had our parents out on the Sunday before school, planting shrubbery and making sure that it looked like a school. That was a throwback to the old days of the Hebrew Day School moving every year. I really didn't want to see that, but that showed the intensity of conviction
that we had to get out of National City, because staying in National City meant consigning the school to the past."

When San Diego public schools decided to lease out unneeded land, Hebrew Day went to the grounds of the former John Muir school, across the street from the old Congregation Beth Tefilah. Later, it moved to the former grounds of Cleveland Elementary School and, finally in the 1993-94 school year, to its present site, a property it purchased at the corner of Afton Road and Aero Drive in the Kearny Mesa area. It took the name Soille San Diego Hebrew Day
School in memory of Rabbi Henry and Esther Soille, who helped the school during their lives and who left a financial legacy to it upon the rabbi's death.

"Location, location, location" was not all of Weiser's worries. Hebrew Day School was once the only Jewish day school in San Diego, but others were then competing for students. In 1980, the year before his arrival, the San Diego Jewish Academy got under way, and in 1981 Beth Israel Day School got started. Furthermore, Chabad announced that it would soon be beginning its
own day school.

To make matters more complicated, board members of the United Jewish Federation were dubious at best that Hebrew Day School was viable enough to qualify for funding. Only 40 students were enrolled when Weiser arrived.

"I looked around and thought, 'Does this community really need a Hebrew Day School?" Weiser related. "And that was not an easy question to answer."

In deciding that the day school, in fact, was necessary, he promulgated a vision that "it really wasn't a question of the school being the biggest, but a question of the school doing its job of raising awareness in the community of the importance of Torah study and seeing to it that anyone who walked through the doors felt a sense of comfort, warmth and feeling at
home."

To have an "anchor" for the school's Judaic program, the new headmaster recruited Rabbi Chaim Hollander, who had graduated from the Chofetz Chaim Yeshiva some years before Weiser and who then was teaching in New Orleans.

"The first challenge was getting kids into the school," recalled Hollander, who today serves as pulpit rabbi at Young Israel Synagogue in San Carlos in addition to his teaching duties at the day school.

"People felt that the building in National City was unclean, not secure, unsafe," Hollander recalled. "Rabbi Weiser promised people that it would be brought up to standards, and that we would move in a year."

Weiser made telephone call after telephone call to parents, urging them to re-enroll their children in the school. He told them about Hollander, about his philosophy of involvement with their students, and by the time the new term opened a month later, there were 115 students enrolled. Weiser also placed many a phone call to Jewish philanthropists, successfully seeking
funding to keep the school viable.

"There was no real (Judaic) curriculum in place," Hollander remembered. With eight years of experience teaching Judaic studies in different schools, Hollander said he was able to "wing it" pending the development of a more professional curriculum for the following years.

Together, the two compatriots, who had known each other only casually before, forged a Judaic program which set as goals that "children should be able to read Hebrew fluently, be comfortable with the prayers, be able to read prayers, be able to pick up a Chumash and be able to translate it well enough to understand, to be able to read the Rashi commentary, understand
what his point is, and then finally to have experience or a feel for the Talmud," Hollander said.

In the middle school years, boys would study Talmud while girls would take "Yahadut" in a program developed by Weiser's wife, Betty. This Yahudut program "goes into the basis of Judaism in great depth, with lots of philosophical material," Hollander said.

Weiser's father had balanced his life as an Orthodox Jew with a career as an accountant for the U.S. Defense Department. Similarly, "balance" became a hallmark of Weiser's view of the school's academic programming. Judaic studies were important, but so too were the secular studies. They had to be so excellent that graduates of the middle school could qualify for any
private high school (or public school) they might desire en route to a top-rated college education. Weiser said parents should never be forced to choose between "Harvard or Judaism."

When Weiser arrived, Elaine Lepow was teaching third grade as well as English in seventh through ninth grades. She remembered an occasion when she was teaching ninth-grade English and was asked to come downstairs to have her picture taken with the third-grade students. Rabbi Weiser volunteered to take over the ninth-grade English class temporarily. She had been teaching
about noun clauses and gave him the book, assuming that would not be an area
with which he was familiar.

After the photograph was taken, she ran back upstairs and found him "explaining noun clauses in depth and diagramming them with the kids. It was my first understanding of the thoroughness of preparation of this person to be not only headmaster of the school and rabbi for our school community, but extremely well prepared to go into economics because his math background was
strong, and even into noun clauses in English."

Lepow, who today serves as the schoolıs principal, said although when Weiser arrived he was younger than everyone else on staff except one custodian, he had the charisma to forge a team. "He is extremely intelligent and by nature very sensitive," almost, in her view, "a Renaissance man who can meet issues whether they are financial, rabbinic, personnel, of deep emotional impact,
or just academic interest."

Of immediate significance to Lepow was that under Weiser, "there was never any censoring of what I was teaching. I had the freedom to teach everything I felt was important, whether in third grade or junior high. In addition to that, I found someone I could discuss Shakespeare with intelligently and get into some of the main threads that I was weaving between our philosophy as
Jews and that of the universality of the play."

Under Weiser and Lepow, "we hired Karen Wellner, who became involved in the San Diego County Science Fair, and we have been winning awards ever since," the principal noted.

"We also spun out from that to make sure that our kids were given opportunities to compete in math contests, poetry competitions, secular things ..."

As an administrator, Lepow learned a philosophy from Weiser reflecting what he had learned from his own teachers: "Within our own faculty, we are constantly meeting, evaluating, going over and assessing all the time, how do you meet the needs of every single child in the school, not just every single child in your classroom?"

Faye Snyder, today director of the preschool, had served as the day school's lead preschool teacher for a year prior to Weiser's arrival. She said she believes a good school needs to have fewer than 400 children, "because the principal of the school has to know every child. To know every child you have to know every adult that is connected to the child, and any other child
who might be connected to that child, but is not in that school.

"Currently, Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School has an enrollment of 265 students (48 in preschool), and I know every child and every person connected to every child," Snyder said. "So does Rabbi Weiser. There arenıt too many headmasters who can do that. He is busy, yet he makes it his business to know everybody."

* * * 
Simultaneous devotion to Torah and secular studies was rewarded in 1992, when San Diego Hebrew Day School was named one of the nation's "Blue Ribbon" schools by the U.S. Department of Education. That led to Weiser, Lepow, former school president Eilene Cummins and Dr. Michael Mantell, who then was the school's president, flying to Washington for a variety of ceremonies, including a meeting on the South Lawn of the White House with President Bill
Clinton and a kosher luncheon in the Capitol with U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon). Other indelible memories for Weiser: the warmth with which Lynn Schenk— then a congresswoman, today chief of staff to Gov Gray Davis— spoke about her own Jewish upbringing, and the chance to attend a reception with other educators in the Library of Congress, in a newly restored room that even his father, a life-long government employee, had never been inside.

On any given school morning, Rabbi Weiser typically is standing at the front door of Soille San Diego Hebrew Day School, greeting students as they come in. "I ask them how they are doing and I tell them the price of admission to Hebrew Day School is a 'smile on your face,'"  the headmaster said.

"Youıd be surprised how many kids walk around with an expression that says 'the world is not my friend.'  I want them to realize this is a place that is safe for them, that cares for them."

Greeting the children, Weiser said, "you can get a lot of insight. You can see if there is tension in the family, if no one is taking the time to give a kid a hug."

After 22 years aS headmaster, with a second generation of his students attending the school, Weiser describes himself as a "grandfatherly figure, a friendly figure, not the authoritarian figure" that the principal of his own boyhood school days represented.

When a student's family is beset with difficulties— a death or the trauma of divorce— "I will call up the parents, offer to meet with them and their children...and in the adolescent years, if there is a rift in the family and the parents are having a hard time parenting a child, we become involved. We make it a partnership with parents."

Hollander commented that even after more than two decades at the helm of Hebrew Day School, Weiser is always alive with new ideas about how to make the school better, how to reinvigorate its program, how to keep education ever fresh.

"I have tremendous goals for the school," concurred Weiser. "There is room in the community for many schools, but I want Hebrew Day School to be an engine of progress. I want to see the school do more in terms of parent education in the next few years. I am also thinking about a program of once-a-week family learning in the Day School, having them come to school
for an hour or an hour and a half and have the kids and parents together."

Weiser estimates that, over the years, the number of students who graduated from Hebrew Day School or spent enough time there for the experience to be formative is somewhere between 800 and 1,000. Since leaving the school, many of these graduates "have spent time in Israel, or at a yeshiva, or doing specifically Jewish things— activities that absolutely can be traced back
to the school," he said.

For example, at UCSD, two students who have been leaders of the pro-Israel campus movement are Wayne Klitofsky and upcoming banquet speaker Yael Schwarz. Both are Hebrew Day School graduates. While not taking total credit, Weiser said "the fact that the school gave them that kind of confidence, and sense of security to do so, is something that makes me very
proud."