Marilyn Kraar, Director of Lifelong learning

An educator and licensed clinical social worker, Marilyn Kraar has served CEEBJ in several capacities over the past several years. She has worked as the Bnai Mitzvah tutor, the interim director of education, and also taught the first Anshei Mitzvah class. She has been the school's Hebrew specialist since 2007.

Marilyn is a native of Atlanta, Georgia. She received a bachelor's degree from Boston University and a master's degree in social work from Simmons College. She pursued post graduate studies at the Cambridge Family Institute and has been in private practice for over 20 years. Her work counseling families, cancer patients and those dealing with grief has been especially important to her.

Fluent in Hebrew, Marilyn has nurtured a lifelong love of Judaism, Israel and Torah study. She has served as an adjunct lecturer at UWM, a chaplain at Aurora Sinai Hospital, and was the chairperson of the Institute of Judaism. More recently, she spent six months studying at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem.

An avid gardener, amateur chef and art lover, Marilyn lives in Whitefish Bay with her husband, Jeff Irwin. Their daughter, Rachel Irwin, works as a journalist in The Netherlands.

From Our Director of Lifelong Learning

Teaching Kindness

 
We begin our Religious School this year on September 12, a couple of weeks after public school begins. This year teachers and administrators in Massachusetts spent their summers becoming familiar with a new state law that requires public schools to institute an anti-bullying curriculum.

To the extent that it underlines the importance of the problem and demands that schools figure out how to address it, it is a move in the right direction. But legislation alone can't create kinder communities or teach children how to get along. That will take a much deeper rethinking of what schools should do for their students.

Susan Engel, senior lecturer in psychology and director of the teaching program at Williams College, and Marlene Sandstrom, professor of psychology there, have done research on child development that makes it clear. There is only one way to truly combat bullying-- we need to teach children how to be good to one another, how to cooperate, how to defend someone who is being picked on and how to stand up for what is right.

Most important, educators need to make a profound commitment to turn schools into genuine communities. Children need to know that adults consider kindness and collaboration to be every bit as important as, in our case here at CEEBJ, are Hebrew, holidays and prayer study. And as obvious as it might sound, teachers can't just preach kindness; they need to actually be nice to one another and to their students.

Being a good, kind person is so important in Judaism that we have several ways to say it. In Yiddish we say "be a mensch". "Yehi ben adam" is the same thing is Hebrew. Derech eretz means "the right way to behave"; kavod habriyot means "respect for all God's creatures". How we treat one another is so important that we can't be forgiven on Yom Kippur until we have apologized directly to the person we have wronged.

In Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, it says that when you hurt someone's feelings, you end up doing harm to yourself as well. Every time you hurt someone, you can develop the habit of hurting others. This habit eventually becomes part of you and can turn you into an insensitive, uncaring person

Let us, here at CEEBJ, teach kindness. Let us continue to create a school and synagogue community where everyone can feel comfortable, where an essential criterion for a well-educated student includes a sense of responsibility for the well-being of others.

I am delighted to be here and look forward to meeting you. Jeff and Rachel join me in wishing each of you a shana tova, a sweet, good, and healthy 5771.

Marilyn Kraar