Schechter Chai-lights is a monthly newsletter for parents of alumni, alumni, current families, and friends of Schechter connecting you to all things SSLI, the latest news, events and more.
We hope you will share your thoughts and stories with us.
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October 18, 2021 / 12 Cheshvan 5782 |
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Going Forth
This issue of Chai Lights coincides with Shabbat Lech Lecha, and so by way of introduction, I thought I would include some thoughts that I recently shared with our students on the weekly parsha.
In Lech Lecha God tells Avram and Sarai (who by the end of the parsha have the modified names Avraham and Sarah) to go forth. Specifically God tells them to leave their home and everything they know, and go to a place God will eventually show them. God makes them a lot of promises, but the start of it all is simply to go. There’s one peculiarity, however, in God’s command. God doesn’t simply say lech la’aretz asher areka -- go to the land that I will show you; no, God says: Lech lecha. What does this mean, lech lecha? Lech is of course ‘go,’ whereas ‘lecha’ means ‘to yourself’ or ‘for yourself.’ We know that putting those words together in biblical Hebrew intensifies the action, but that syntactic point aside, what might the command mean literally?
Could God have meant ‘go to yourself?’ How could Avram be any more in himself than he already was? Ok, maybe God meant ‘go for yourself’ -- that’s a possible path. Go, not because it’s for Me, but go for yourself because it’s important to you! That’s potentially an important way to understand this first command to the original father and mother of the Jewish people.
But I think there is more to it than that. We know that Avram did something very important that no one had apparently done before. He looked out at the world around him and asked a critical question? Who made this world? Could it be that all these idols and gods that the people believe in could have done this? Avram said no. He realized that there had to have been one master plan for creation, and therefore one master who did the creating. Avram looked around and said there is something out there that I didn’t understand before. There is one God.
God, therefore, chooses Avram to make His covenant with, but God didn’t just begin by telling Avram and Sarai where to go and what to do. First God said Lech lecha. Go towards and for yourself. Now that you’ve looked carefully out at the world, I want you to look carefully at yourself. Go and find yourself, go towards yourself and discover what it is that you want, what you want to know and to do.
This is of course the precise goal of a Schechter Long Island education: to help our students explore not only what’s in front of them, but what’s inside of them, questioning what they know and how they know it, and ultimately applying that knowledge to their future life goals.
Dr. Scott Sokol, Head of School
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There are many in our SSLI community who would not be classified as a ”frontline worker”, but by virtue of their professions have been in contact with their students, clients, and patients since the start of the pandemic.
While attempting to normalize for others a situation that defies anything more than adjustment and adaption, many individuals who work in education, mental health, and the wellness professions find themselves emotionally, physically, and cognitively exhausted, cynical, and suffering from burnout.
We are very fortunate to have our own “unsung heroes”, two alumni and a parent of alumni who were willing to share their pandemic journey with us.
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Being a student at Schechter for 13 years shaped who I am today. My teachers at Schechter taught me how to be compassionate and understanding of others. Whether participating in peer connectors with Senora Cahn or being involved with the different programs for Tzibur with Becky, respect and compassion for others was always instilled in me. Being able to give back and help others was an important message at Schechter and it helped me decide to become a Speech Pathologist. I knew I wanted to be able to help children find their voice.
As a Speech-Language Pathologist at an elementary school in Queens, I have seen the negative effects of the pandemic on my students first-hand. My students primarily consist of children who require assistance with articulation and language processing issues. Before the pandemic, I would pull these students out from class to have one-on-one in-person customized sessions. These sessions often consisted of interactive games to keep the students engaged. Beginning in March 2020, I was no longer able to conduct these sessions in-person. Instead, just like everyone else, I was forced to perform my job virtually which was not only a challenge for me but was a tremendous challenge for my students, many of whom live in unstable home environments such as homeless shelters. Access to a computer or an internet connection was not always a given. Students often failed to “show up” to scheduled sessions. When they did show up, the students were often distracted by background noise, their siblings, or entertainment options such as television or video games. Getting my students to focus in-person is difficult enough; getting my students to focus during a virtual session is almost impossible. I started to see that my students, most of whom had been progressing nicely during the year, seemed to have plateaued or regressed.
I am thankful that I am now back to conducting in-person sessions with my students. I can’t help but feel, however, that my students lost more than a year of much-needed progress. I am doing my best to help them make up for lost time, but it is difficult. I keep reminding myself that children are resilient and will likely be able to overcome the lost time. I hope that I am doing enough for these kids. Only time will tell.
Adee Honig (SSLI '02 & SSLI parent)
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It was interesting timing when Eileen Bohrer reached out to me about my experience working as a mental health clinician with youth during COVID-19. It has been almost a year now since I was interviewed while working from home during COVID-19 about my personal resiliency having experienced childhood trauma and the work that I did with children in Boston public schools.
As an adult working in the mental health field, I have noticed one of the major injustices is the lack of access to resources for children with socio-emotional difficulties. Thinking back to my time as a traumatized ten-year-old, not doing well in an overcrowded public school system, it was recommended to my mother that she enroll me in private school. There are many people responsible for me attending middle and high school at Solomon Schechter of Long Island and I realize how incredibly privileged I was to have had access to the resources and communities that supported me through difficult times.
Working inside the Boston public schools, I witnessed many children who had been exposed to unspeakable experiences that they weren’t equipped to handle on their own. I have worked with children with parentified behaviors, children with extreme anxiety, and children who were neglected and removed from their home. Despite all the hardships these children have endured, they did not have the resources or communities that I was privileged to have when I was a child.
The mental health agency I worked for placed me at William E. Russell Elementary School in September of 2018. All of the children who I supported were categorized as low-income black and brown families that lived in the Dorchester, Roxbury, and Mattapan areas of Boston. Many of these children were immigrants from places such as the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Haiti that had relocated to Boston a year or two before I started working with them. Some of their parents were legal and some were not. These children were often stuck in the middle of many different broken systems without other options.
When I first learned, late at night in March 2020, that Boston Public schools would be closing early that next week, I immediately feared that I would be losing my job overnight. Before COVID-19, there were many boundaries and barriers towards getting children the treatment and support that they needed for their socio-emotional and behavioral challenges. I now feared that it would be impossible, without them being physically present at school, to find ways to support them.
The teachers, administrators, and staff at William E Russell Elementary School are some of the best that I have seen. If it wasn’t for their hard work, many students would have dropped off the grid during COVID-19. We all shared many hats during this time to ensure the children received an education as well as online counseling. I woke up children in the morning who were late to class via phone calls, text messages, parent calls, sibling calls, and followed up with parents about the barriers to getting their children online for school. I waited on hold for Xfinity to set families up with their free internet package when they couldn’t figure out the online system to do so themselves. I learned about the technology provided from the school and offered unofficial tech-support. Although my agency had mandated that I was not to do any work physically in the community, some of the teachers and administrators, that worked directly for the school, were able to coordinate, and go out into the community visiting family’s homes, setting eyes on students and checking to see what else could be done to assist.
While the majority of us employed by the school and my agency, maintained our jobs during the worst of COVID-19, many of the children’s parents were unemployed during this time. More barriers were created when parents started to return to work before schools were open to children. Some of the children were placed at day programs at the Y or received priority timing to return to school. However, many parents were struggling and the children were aware of everything that was happening around them. There were students that did not have a place to spend the day and some who were lucky enough to be left behind at home under the watch of their teenage siblings.
Some caregivers were more open to finding support and were responsive to any help they could receive, but others were not. With the increased allowance from Masshealth for utilizing telehealth to provide services, clinicians are now able to provide more services to people than ever before. However, with only so many mental health agencies in Boston willing to work with MassHealth clients; all of the clinicians at my agency found themselves with caseloads that were becoming too large to properly support. Turnover became high, and the atmosphere in the clinical sphere, toxic.
At the end of the day, one can only do what one is physically able to do. After almost fourteen months of working from home and trying to meet the needs of so many children without the support I needed, I was burned out. I became tired of working for an agency that cared more about money and productivity than supporting the children and families that relied on them for services, especially during a pandemic. I continued to push myself to meet the needs of my families until April 2021 when I had an opportunity to relocate to New Hampshire. Unfortunately, every state sets its own guidelines towards mental health licensure. In Massachusetts, my only barrier to becoming a licensed provider was an exam that had been canceled due to COVID-19 restrictions; but in New Hampshire, I need to take some extra courses as well. I look forward to the future when I can provide clinical services outside of an agency setting, and will perhaps return to school for my doctorate so I am able to further push these systems towards a place of change.
Until then, I remain a fierce advocate for positive reforms in mental health law, quality, and access. I also remain an outside advocate for the children I worked with at William E Russell Elementary. The school reopened for in-person attendance and is trying to raise money to meet the increasing needs of the students.
As I learned in the past from Deuteronomy 15:11, "There will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you to open your hand to the poor." My work has shown me that it is important especially now to open our eyes to the world around us and do what we can to ensure equality and access to all.
Maria Dominguez (SSLI 2010)
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Musings of a Family Therapist
Life was stressful enough before the pandemic. Families were struggling with crazy schedules, juggling carpools and work, parenting, social media, homework, childcare, extra curriculum activities, responsibilities to extended family members, wellness - while also trying to exercise, do some personal care, and have time for spouses and friends. And that’s just the everyday things.
I felt like families were hanging on by their fingernails to the side of this mountain of responsibilities trying not to fall off and crash; many on the verge of imploding. Kids were also feeling the pressure as the demands on them increased in all domains.
And then came this pandemic. Two weeks turned into 3 months, then a year. As the summer of 2021 approached, we thought we were seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The vaccine arrived, kids went to camp and participated in summer programs, families began to travel and reconnect with sorely missed family and friends. We barely began to exhale and the Delta variant arrived. We were all extremely worn down, and this hurled us all backwards: Are things going to get worse again? What does it mean for our unvaccinated children who became more at risk? Are children going ‘virtual' again? Are we going back to our offices? Can any of us go back to life before Covid? We keep talking about the ‘new normal, but what exactly does that mean when things keep changing? Covid became a chronic stress, fraught with unknowns, with no ending in sight.
And it was not just Covid that unhinged us. Our capacity to adapt was further strained by many other factors: the election, the resurgence of extremism, pervasive racial injustice, anti-Semitism, and natural disasters that happened all across the country.
Therapists were in high demand over the past 1 1/2 years and mental health professionals have been working overtime. As the year unfolded, more and more families were reaching for help and it was hard to say no. I, for one, worked overtime. Kids of all ages were feeling isolated, anxious, scared, and lost as they were challenged to adapt in every aspect of their lives. Adults were also struggling to keep up with the rapidly changing rules and expectations in every sphere of life and were feeling exhausted and burnt out. Many were drinking a lot. I’ve heard adults exclaim, ‘I’m just done,’ in exasperated voices, more times than I can count.
And as I talk to other therapists it is clear that we too have been feeling exhausted and somewhat burnt out. Are we suffering from ‘compassion fatigue', a catchy phrase being tossed around psych journals? I don't' think so. Speaking for myself, I think I have plenty of compassion left in me. The hard part has been feeling powerless. There was no trick or strategy I had to share as I sat on zoom, keeping families company as Covid traveled through their homes. All I could do was travel alongside them, validate that it really sucked, and help them count the days until they were in the clear. Many people had to leave jobs involuntarily and voluntarily. Relationships were taxed. We worried, and couldn't do enough or anything at all. Some families struggled more than others but the overwhelming feelings shared by many, were exhaustion, helplessness and not being able to ‘fix’ anything.
But as I tried to regroup and reflect, I recognized another common side effect of the pandemic. Every family I worked with began to talk about the 'silver linings' that they stumbled upon. I don’t mean to minimize the suffering and loss that so many people experienced over the past 18 months. But there were silver linings. Not running all the time, doing all the time, gave us more time to 'be'. People reported connecting to each other in deeper, more meaningful ways. Families were zooming Shabbat services and meeting in driveways for Havdalah. I heard about house projects, gardens, art projects, family bike rides, exercising together, and so many dogs found new homes.
“Our pod's” might not have been comprised of the people we would have expected them to be, but we connected. We leaned into and on each other for support and comfort. We witnessed each other's struggles, and we cried together. We sat together in this place and persevered.
And I have come to realize that this was the ‘strategy’, the knowledge that I had to offer. “It’s always better when we’re together” (to quote Jack Johnson). We are social creatures and need connection. When life gets hard, being with' our people ... helps. We give each other the strength and tenacity to get up and move forward.
In Emily and Ameila Nagoski’s book “Burn Out,” they present science that supports this phenomenon. (I really recommend this book, btw). They define burnout as having three components: feelings of emotional exhaustion as a result of caring too much for too long; feeling depleted of empathy and compassion, and feeling that there’s nothing you can do that makes a difference so why try. The majority of people I have spoken to over the past year have felt this way, including myself at times. According to the Nagoski sisters, burnout happens when our emotions feel insurmountable and we get stuck in a cycle of stress that plays like a broken record in our bodies. “The most difficult feelings- rage, grief, despair, helplessness- may be too treacherous to move through alone. We get lost and need someone else, a loving presence, to help us find our way”. What was more amazing to read were the findings of their data as they tracked people trying to heal. They found that there are specific behaviors that signal to our bodies that we are safe. The list contains no surprises: activity and movement of any kind that lasts over 20 minutes, breathing, positive social interactions that last for 20 minutes, a prolonged hug, laughter, doing something creative, and a good cry. These behaviors release our bodies and our hearts. So, it is no wonder that as we struggled through Covid we also helped each other feel safe because we were able to laugh and cry and lean into each other for support. Some of us even got to be creative and exercise.
Life knocked us all down. We got clobbered by an emotional tsunami and, although it feels a little better, it's still far from over. It's going to take time for each of us to figure out where we have landed when this is over and in the past. All of our lives have changed. We have sat together knowing that the past 2 years have really been too much and have caused many of us to stretch our ability to adapt to its limit, while at the same time we share the ‘knowing’ that we have the capacity to heal by staying connected and being there for one another. For this, we can all be grateful.
Tina Wertenteil-Rotstein. I am a Social Worker in private practice who works with families. I’ve been treating children and adults for over 30 years. I’ve been married to my husband Paul for 40 years and our 3 children all graduated from SSHS. Our son married his High School sweetheart who also graduated from SSHS. Hopefully, their daughter will be the first of the next generation of Schechter graduates in our family.
Tina is a new member of the Schechter LI Board of Trustees.
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We are happy to usher in a season of cooler temperatures, delicious seasonal produce, and exciting new opportunities. Fall gives us the chance to embrace some healthy habits that are unique to the season which include getting out in more temperate weather to exercise, shopping at the farmer’s market (good for the environment and the economy), and making soup. With a chill in the air, we look forward to making a pot of soup bursting with fresh vegetables and spices.
Soup is well studied as an effective remedy when you’re sick. Vegetables deliver the vitamins and nutrients your body needs to fight infection; meat gives protein, and the warm broth provides fluids and helps clear sinuses. According to research soup may also be anti-inflammatory which can help ward off infection.
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Dear Schechter community,
I’m Genia Taub. A proud mom of three Schechter alums: Alexander 23, Benjamin 20, and Isaac 18. Our three sons began their Schechter journey in kindergarten and 13 years later they graduated Schechter of Long Island - like a second bar mitzvah for each of them! Pretty sweet! Great education! Home away from home!
I must say that even though my boys are off continuing on their educational journey we will always feel Schechter is a warm, cozy, and nurturing home away from home - as it has been for us all these years. I still call Ofra - oops I mean Mrs. Hiltzik our school angel.
As a parent that loved being involved with my children’s school, I jumped right into volunteering my time at Schechter. I was involved in the Learning To Look Art Program for 12 years - which was super successful and I taught cooking classes in elementary - delicious and fun! I loved being at school, prepping, teaching, interacting with our awesome teachers, and walking down the hallways seeing all those happy, smiley students. I also appreciated how Schechter embraced parents volunteering and bringing creativity to our school. I knew I found my dream school for my family. And, our closest family friends throughout the years were made at Schechter. Schechter blessed and grateful!
My boys are growing up. We’re all finding our passions and evolving. I’m finding time to do more of what I love to do. I love teaching and supporting others on their health journey. My soups which are my favorite dishes (bowls) to create are my way of nurturing - love in a bowl! I’m so honored to share my recipe/s with you all - my Schechter family forever!
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We thank Genia Taub for sharing her expertise and enthusiasm with us!
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Refocus On Your Goals:
After the month of holidays, the month of Cheshvan (the only month on the calendar without a holiday) is a great time to buckle down and refocus on everything you want to achieve. It’s a perfect time to evaluate your intentions, your progress, and what you need to reach your personal and professional goals.
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This month @Schechter LI
To see more pictures and events, please follow us on
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Schechter Lions are off to a Roaring Start.
Varsity Cross Country Track, coached by Jeff Connelly is placing better and better each meet!
Last week, Freshman Logan H. placed 3rd overall in the meet against LUHI. At 6 minutes a mile, he is running circles around the competition.
Varsity Soccer is coached by Jordan Abrahamson. This is the first time Schechter has had a soccer team in over 4 years. The team, Captained by Senior Sam S. is currently 2 – 1. Keep up the hard work! Come watch them play, they love a cheering crowd.
Shout out to Coach Josh Jurysta and the Girls Varsity Volleyball Team. These girls are mighty on the court! Current record of 3 – 1 and looks like there is no stopping them. Since spectators are not allowed in the gym to watch, you can tune in on Zoom, the link is made available before each game.
Check Newsday online High School Sports to see scores reported after each game!
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Mazal Tov to Dr. Amanda Boris (SSLI '07) and Ben Daniels
on the birth of their daughter Mia Rae. Mia was born on June 25th and is named after Amanda's Grandpa Marty and Grandma Ruth.
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This month's tributes:
In Honor/ In Memory
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If you would like to honor a person's memory or mark a celebration with a contribution to Schechter LI, you may make an online donation, or send your donation to the Development Office. The family will be notified of your contribution.
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To discuss making a donation to Schechter LI, please email Eileen Bohrer, Director of Institutional Advancement to ebohrer@schechterli.org or call 516.935.1441 ext.1131.
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On behalf of the
Schechter School of Long Island
We are so pleased to invite you to view the eclectic
private art collection of
Diane and Howard Wohl
Thursday, October 28, 2021
7:00 to 9:30 PM
141 Heather Lane
Mill Neck, New York
Light Dinner and Wine Tasting
This exclusive event is for donors pledging $5,000 or more towards SSLI’s Annual Campaign.
Space is limited. RSVP by October 8, 2021, to
Yvonne Lyon, Advancement Manager
For the safety of all guests, we ask that you submit proof of COVID-19 vaccination minimally 2 weeks prior to the event to the email above.
Dietary Laws Observed
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GivingTuesday is a global generosity movement. It was created in 2012 as a simple idea: a day that encourages people to do good. Since then, it has grown into a year-round global movement that inspires hundreds of millions of people to give, collaborate, and celebrate generosity.
Join the movement and SSLI on 11/30/21... Program coming soon!
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SAVE THE DATE
DECEMBER 2 - 4
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