Former Milwaukeean Laura Berman Feffer, now 26, still remembers the day that Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands in front of President Clinton on the White House lawn in 1993.
Not that she really understood the event as she watched it on television with the other members of her Milwaukee Jewish Day School class. But she knew it was something powerful and important because it made her teacher, Adina Altshull, weep.
“I’ll never forget her watching with the tears running down her face,” Feffer said in a telephone interview from Kalamazoo, Mich., where she now lives and teaches high school English. “I could tell from her that we were witnessing history.”
That kind of passionate involvement is what Feffer remembers about Altshull, who this month retired after 20 years of teaching Hebrew and Jewish Studies at MJDS.
“She was so passionate about what she did, I think it made for an engaging learning environment,” said Feffer. Feffer further said that “part of why I chose teaching as a profession was having teachers like Altshull, who brought learning to life and cared so much about the students.”
Another former Altshull student inspired to become a teacher is Kara Jacobson Sanchez, who now teaches Spanish at Stanford University in California. Sanchez remembers that Altshull was not only “passionate about the subject matter,” but also “a loving teacher” who showed authentic interest “in each individual student.”
“She would just glow when students would come up with original or interesting interpretations about a story,” Sanchez said. Even though she “must have taught the same story dozens or hundreds of times, she was able to be fresh” and was “really excited about all of our discoveries.”
In fact, Altshull wouldn’t just glow. MJDS founding director Doris Shneidman said that Altshull “would knock on my door, come into my office and kvell,” and would say, “‘You would not believe what the kids talked about’ or what a particular child knew or a child’s depth of understanding.”
“That would happen pretty often,” said Shneidman, who retired from the school in 2000. “And I loved it.”
Furthermore, Altshull’s caring would last even after the children graduated. When Feffer became a teacher, she was surprised to receive a “mazel tov” note from Altshull, who had “heard through the grapevine” about it. “That meant a lot, more than she probably knows,” said Feffer.
Altshull herself during an interview at MJDS told The Chronicle that many of her students come back to visit her after graduation. “It is a wonderful feeling,” she said. “This is your reward as a teacher.”
Lifelong teacher
Altshull, 68, has been a dedicated teacher practically all her life. Born in pre-Israel Palestine and growing up in Tel Aviv, she fulfilled her Israeli military service as a teacher of Hebrew to immigrants, she said.
In 1963, she first came to the United States to be an emissary for the Young Judea youth movement in Los Angeles. There she met native Milwaukeean Harvey Altshull at a Zionist Organization of America youth committee meeting. They married in 1966 and moved to Milwaukee.
In 1975, the couple moved to Israel to try tomato farming in a Negev moshav; but even there, Altshull continued teaching. The farming “didn’t work,” she said, so they returned to Milwaukee, he to work for the state government (which he continues, she said), she to teach at MJDS.
The Talmud says that “All beginnings are hard,” and so Altshull found her start at MJDS. “It was a completely different culture,” she said.
She came from a place where people “lived Jewish life every day” and where “love for Israel went without saying.” She now had to teach a “different kind of kids” who “live in an environment where you are a minority and you don’t feel Jewish all the time.”
And so she decided she “had to try to instill” in her students not just knowledge of Hebrew language and Jewish texts, but “love and connection [and] curiosity” with regard to Israel and Judaism, she said.
And she strove to do this “in a fun way” as much as possible, so students don’t get the impression that Judaism is just about “you’re not allowed to do this,” but so they remember fondly such things as decorating a sukkah, she said.
She also said that when teaching such classes as ancient Jewish history from Joshua through the reign of King Solomon, she tried to “show the way of life our ancestors lived” and that they “were not superhuman,” and “to use the biblical text to instill critical thinking.”
As much as she has enjoyed teaching at MJDS — she said she feels that the school’s students, parents and staff are “my second family” — she also said, “I’m ready” to retire.
But she won’t be idle. Her plans include taking classes in art and Yiddish at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and visiting her children and their families in Israel; and she will “go back to my first love, reading a lot.”
In keeping with Altshull’s dedication to teaching about Israel, MJDS set up an Adina Altshull Israel Education Endowment Fund about five months ago. This fund is administered through the Milwaukee Jewish Foundation, the endowment development program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation.
Proceeds from the fund will be used for additional MJDS Israel education programming throughout the entire school. People interested in contributing to this fund should contact MJDS.
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