There is an old Jewish folktale about a poor man from a small village who dreams of a treasure buried by the bank of a river, next to a bridge, leading to a castle in a big city. After dreaming this same dream night after night, he finally goes to the city to look for the treasure. There, he finds a bridge that looks exactly like the one in his dream! But there are guards at the bridge and he is afraid to approach it. After three days of waiting for the guards to leave, he can contain himself no longer and tells the story of his dream to one of the guards. “A treasure, right here?” the guard responds. “No, there is nothing here. But it’s funny, because I keep having a dream of a small house belonging to a poor man in a small village, and there is a treasure buried underneath the floor of the house.” After listening to the guard’s description of the house, the poor man races home. He digs beneath the floor of his house and finds the treasure.
Sometimes, you can look far and wide for what you seek and find it right under your nose. This is precisely what happened with our Temple’s search process for a new Director for our Early Childhood Center. The search committee looked far and wide, collected over 40 resumes and interviewed eight candidates from all over. In the end, the treasure was right here, in our own Temple, all along.
I am pleased to share with you the wonderful news that the new director of our Early Childhood Center will be Temple Sinai’s own Carissa Ivy Sachs. Some of you may know Carissa as Saryn and Kian’s Mom. In addition, she is an experienced, successful early childhood educator and social worker. Carissa served for a number of years as the Director of the Barrow Street Nursery School in Manhattan, building it from a small, struggling program to a large, successful one. After moving to Tenafly and sending her children to Temple Sinai Early Childhood Center (which she had attended as a child herself!!), Carissa founded Ivy Prep Ed, LLC, a boutique agency providing educational services for special-needs children. Now, she will be bringing her many talents and deep knowledge of early childhood education and development to the school which she attended as a little girl and where she has educated her own children. Carissa is indeed a treasure. We are so fortunate to have her as the new director of our ECC!
Carissa will be supervised and supported in her work by another Temple Sinai treasure, Rabbi Beth Kramer Mazer. In case you don’t know, Rabbi Kramer Mazer has been our Temple’s Rabbi-Educator for three years, directing our Religious School and teen programs. In previous positions, she has also been an early childhood director, so she brings ample experience to her new role in our ECC.
In the next week or so you will receive information on how you can meet Rabbi Kramer-Mazer and Carissa and find out more about their backgrounds and vision for Temple Sinai’s ECC. For now, I am just tickled pink to be able to share this fantastic news about our new team at the helm of our ECC!
May you have a great summer and a wonderful year ahead at Temple Sinai!
L’Shalom,
Rabbi Jordan Millstein
P.S: I hope your kids had a great last day of school and that you can join us this Friday at 6:00 p.m. as we say farewell to Risa Tannenbaum, who has done such a magnificent job running our Early Childhood Center for 13 years, and Jaki Raider, who assisted her so ably. You can attend in person (proof of vaccination or PCR test required) or attend on Zoom.
