Ilan Vitemberg is one of the five winners of the Helen Diller Family Awards for Excellence in Jewish Education.
The awards honor educators who have made an extraordinary impact on Jewish youth in four categories: early-childhood programs, day schools, congregational and community schools and informal programs. Award winners each receives $10,000, in addition to a $2,500 grant for their institutions.
Vitemberg split the award for informal programs with Helaine Green of Congregation Beth David in Saratoga.
A native of Kibbutz Megiddo in Israel, Vitemberg combines his commitment to social justice with his background in theater as a catalyst for social change as the Diller Teen Fellows coordinator. He is also founder and member of Trees of Hope, a Bay Area organization representing Rabbis for Human Rights.
Green’s religious education class at Congregation Beth David pairs survivors with students studying the Holocaust. Together, they record memories, write essays and make artwork, which they present to Sacramento legislators. Green also is a chaperone in the March of the Living program, which takes students through Poland concentration camps on the way to Israel.
Ella Kasminskaya won for early-childhood programs. Her class for 4-year-olds incorporates her love of music and the arts, as well as the Jewish values she learned during her childhood in Uzbekistan.
Rachel Tamara Klein — who won the day-school award for her work teaching 8-year-olds at Brandeis Hillel Day School in San Francisco — helped develop a program with the Jewish Home for the Aging that trains children for projects with Home residents. She also guides first-year teachers at the school through a leadership program.
Michael Heimlich, the winner in the congregational school category, teachers special-needs classes, teen programs and Hebrew for fourth- to sixth-graders at Peninsula Temple Beth El in San Mateo. He engages students with the Torah and Judaism by helping them see themselves as part of a community of learners.
Another award, the Grinspoon-Steinhardt Award, recognizes outstanding classroom Jewish educators, in a partnership between the Harold Greenspoon Foundation, the Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation, and local agencies and federations in North America.
Sandy Cohen-Wynn, a family educator at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco and one of the Grinspoon-Steinhardt winners, developed the Bureau of Jewish Education’s Art Network, and led a communitywide art workshop for the Holocaust Center of Northern California’s Day of Learning.
Sacha Kopin, another Grinspoon-Steinhardt winner, teaches ethics and values to sixth-graders at Temple Sinai Religious School in Oakland. She is also a Midrasha teacher in Oakland, Berkeley and Contra Costa County.