Walking into his bare Palo Alto office, Ron Reynolds got his priorities straight very quickly. First, buy a phone. Next, pick up a fax machine. Then, establish a new Jewish high school.
Kehillah Jewish High School, which aims to draw students from Burlingame to San Jose, is still searching for a centrally located, temporary site somewhere in the Palo Alto-Los Altos Hills vicinity. Netting a head of school and principal has been less arduous, however, as Kehillah recently filled both positions with Reynolds and fellow Southern Californian Marion Peterson.
The South Bay school is set to open its doors — wherever it may be — in September 2002. It will be the third Jewish secondary school in the Bay Area, joining the Jewish Community High School of the Bay, which opens this month in Tiburon, and Hebrew Academy, which serves high-schoolers in San Francisco.
As Kehillah’s head of school, Reynolds is the chief administrator and will be involved in fund-raising and outreach. Peterson, the new principal, will work more directly with curriculum and hiring and supervising teachers.
Reynolds spent the past 22 years as the director of school services at the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education, keeping his “finger on the pulse of Jewish life across all boundaries, all ideological groupings and school types.”
“Everyone I called down there begged us not to take him away,” said Jacqueline Bocian, Kehillah’s founder and president of its executive board. “He’s a man with a passionate desire to start something and design an institution from the ground up.”
It was the opportunity to direct a startup school that lured Reynolds away from Southern California — and, he admits, from his beloved Los Angeles Dodgers.
“I loved my work there, but I was distanced from the front lines. It was a system-building and management kind of job, comparable to someone working in a school district office,” he said. “I missed the opportunity to touch the lines directly, to build an institution. When the opportunity to become directly involved at ground zero with a Jewish high school arose, I found that completely compelling and absolutely exciting.”
This isn’t the first time Reynolds has been in compelling and exciting Jewish territory. As a kibbutznik on the Jordanian border just south of the Sea of Galilee in the early 1970s, Reynolds recalls being shelled “every day.”
“I was a farmer. In fact, that’s what I put on my resumé,” he said with a laugh. “How else you explain a two-year gap in your life?”
Reynolds and his wife, Miriam — an Israeli of Polish and Iraqi descent — plan to live in San Jose and attend Conservative Congregation Beth David in Saratoga.
Peterson, the new principal at Kehillah, never came under artillery fire — in Los Angeles or elsewhere. As principal for the past 10 years at Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles, Peterson shares Reynolds’ enthusiasm for creating a new Jewish institution.
“With any new venture, there’s always a sense of the unknown. I think there have been enough major changes in my life that, rather than frighten me, the sense of the unknown gives me a desire to get started right away,” said Peterson, who hopes to finish her doctorate in education through Stanford and the University of San Francisco.
“One of the most exciting things about teaching is engaging the heart and teaching the mind. To be able to establish that as a philosophy in a school from the ground up is irresistible.”
Peterson, a former power forward on the USF basketball team, was an English teacher, principal and girls’ basketball coach at Yeshiva University High.
A modern Orthodox Jew-by-choice for the past five years, Peterson has been fascinated by Judaism for as long as she can remember.
“I was moved to [convert] all of my life. I have always been enamored of Judaism,” said Peterson, who plans to live in Palo Alto and worship at Conservative Congregation Kol Emeth and the Palo Alto Orthodox Minyan. “I specifically came to Yeshiva University High School 10 years ago because it was a Jewish high school. I immediately began to read everything about Judaism I could get my hands on.”
Reynolds and Peterson plan to hire at least seven or eight teachers to instruct an entering ninth-grade class of roughly 25. In time, as grades are added each year, they hope enrollment will expand to 350.
“There’s a great quote from Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses.’ At the very end of it, Ulysses sets out on a journey. And in spite of his old age, it says the focus of life is ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,'” said Peterson. “I can’t think of a better quote for starting a school.”