“Teaching is so wonderful because you have the power to open children’s eyes to the world,” Ateret Cohn told The Chronicle in 2002 (June 28 issue) on the occasion of her retirement from teaching. “I just loved it.”
But in her some 50 years as a Jewish educator in the Milwaukee area, she didn’t just open the eyes of children. As Doris Shneidman, founding director of the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, said, Cohn “was a teacher of all generations…. She taught grandparents, young moms, Torah in synagogues, taught my children in religious school.”
And she was an inspiration to people of all ages, as well. After she died Nov. 11 at the age of 83, her son Michael (Fran) Cohn of Milwaukee told The Chronicle, “I’ve been hearing stuff from so many people — former students, former campers, friends of hers, people she worked with — that she had a profound impact on them, one that inspired them.”
And testimony to this comes from all over the country. Michael Cohn recalled hearing about an interview with former Milwaukeean Richard Lovett, now head of Creative Artists Agency in Los Angeles, in the Jan. 9, 2004, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles.
Lovett attended Camp Interlaken (now the Steve and Shari Sadek Family Camp Interlaken), during the time that Cohn was its director, roughly through the 1970s, and said that experience “was most influential in shaping my Jewish identity.”
Cohn “helped everyone focus on each kid’s talents as opposed to their weaknesses, and helped create a sense that Jewish life is about celebration, hopefulness and inclusiveness,” Lovett told the Jewish Journal.
No ‘maybes’
Cohn brought that attitude even to teaching about the most horrible subject in Jewish history, the Holocaust. She felt that it was vitally important for Jews to learn about it.
She was the first teacher of the Holocaust class for eighth-graders at the Milwaukee Jewish Day School, where she taught for an estimated 10 years, ending in 1997. In 1994 she founded the Holocaust Education Center at what was then the Milwaukee Association for Jewish Education (now the Coalition for Jewish Learning), which today is the Holocaust Education and Resource Center.
But “I never taught horror, only righteousness,” Cohn told The Chronicle in 2002. Shneidman, who sat in on some of those classes, remembered one in which Cohn spoke about how the Jews, imprisoned and starving in the Warsaw Ghetto, nevertheless found ways to maintain a vibrant community.
And she taught this approach to other teachers. Laurie Herman, library/media coordinator at CJL, is now the Holocaust class teacher at MJDS and a veteran of Cohn’s classes on teaching the Holocaust.
“[Cohn’s] favorite quotation she used in that class was from Pirke Avot (Sayings of the Sages 2:6): ‘Where there are no men [i.e., people who behave humanely], strive to be a man,’” said Herman.
As seriously as Cohn took teaching, she was able to do it with both love and humor. She said to The Chronicle in 2002, “I told kids that if they didn’t do their homework, I’d kiss them in front of the whole class…. I was able to use humor to motivate the students, especially those who didn’t want to learn.”
Herman, who had been a librarian at MJDS when Cohn taught there, said, “She just loved those kids and they felt it. In the hallway, she was always giving this one a hug or that one a kiss.”
And whatever she did, she did with intensity and conviction. Rabbi Jay R. Brickman, spiritual leader emeritus of Congregation Sinai, said he had attended adult learning sessions with her, and she was “very alive and very definite in her views. She believed with every particle of her being. She did not dwell in maybes.”
Cohn, nee Brodsky, was born in Chicago in 1922 and grew up in an impoverished neighborhood during the Great Depression of the 1930s. “I think that tough life made me what I am,” she told The Chronicle in 2002.
From early on she loved to read, and she “coaxed my local librarian to let me take out more books than was allowed,” she said. She credits her grandmother for awakening her interest in Jewish subjects; and she attended the College of Jewish Studies, now the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, in Chicago.
She was active in the Zionist Youth Movement in the late 1930s to about 1940, and there met Jake Cohn, her husband. They lived in Madison for a while, then moved to Milwaukee around 1951, according to her son Michael.
Over the years, she taught at “practically every Sunday and Hebrew school in the city,” she told The Chronicle in 2001 (Feb. 23 issue) as well as at the Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center. She held many leadership positions, including director of the Judaica High School of the Milwaukee Association for Jewish Education.
She received much recognition for her work. In 1982, said Herman, Cohn received the first Educator of the Year award from MAJE. In 1991, she was one of the first three Jewish educators nationally to receive the $20,000 Covenant Award from the New York City-based Covenant Foundation. In 1999, the Pardes Institute in Jerusalem named a section of its library for her in recognition for her support of the institute.
Her husband died in 1989. In addition to son Michael, she is survived by son Leo (Laura) Cohn of Leeds, England; and five grandchildren.
The funeral was held Monday, Nov. 14. at Congregation Beth Israel. Burial was in Beth Hamedrosh Hagodel Cemetery.
The family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Ateret Cohn Endowment Fund in care of the Harry & Rose Samson Family JCC.
Loading ...