Meet Sheryl Primakow

Born Sheryl Cherniack, she is a native of Providence, R.I., and grew up and earned her undergraduate degree there. She and her husband, Mike Primakow, owner and operator of Badger Light Co., have lived in Milwaukee for more than 35 years and raised two sons.

During that time, Sheryl worked at many organizations in and outside the Jewish community, from the Wisconsin Humane Society (assistant to the director for human resources) to the Milwaukee Jewish Day School (director of development and admissions) to the Whitefish Bay School District (school counselor). For the past six years, she has been the MJF director of community planning.

Chronicle editor Leon Cohen interviewed Primakow on Aug. 22. Edited excerpts from that conversation follow.

Let’s start out with you in Providence.

I grew up a member of a Conservative congregation. I was involved in temple youth group. I went through public schools, then went to the University of Rhode Island for my undergraduate degree [in] communications.

Did you have a career ambition at the time?

No. I had a major in communications and a minor in education. And for a long time I thought I wanted to teach. I really just stumbled in the communications field and let it take me wherever it would.

How did you begin your career in Milwaukee?

I worked very briefly for the Pfister Hotel as a sales and catering associate. Then about a year later I got a job as director of education and publicity for the Wisconsin Humane Society. I did that full-time [and] part-time for almost ten years. That’s where I got fundraising and marketing, and used the educational background at the same time.

How did you get into Jewish community work?

Interestingly, my first Jewish communal work was in the Women’s Division [of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation] in the Young Women’s Leadership Program. And I was asked to join this program.

I had one baby, I was still relatively new in town, and I thought it would be a great way to get to know people. And in the course of that, I learned about the Jewish community. And then I started doing Jewish volunteer work. I started as a volunteer through Women’s Division, I worked through JFS, I did work for the [Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center], Women’s American ORT.

I would say that probably for about seven or eight years. At the time I was working part-time or home full-time with my children when they were young, so I had the ability to get involved in the Jewish community.

And then when I was ready to go back to work, I was fortunate enough to have just enrolled my kids at the [Milwaukee Jewish Day School]. The day school was a new, growing organization.

And two years into [my children’s] tenure at MJDS, I went to work there. And I did that for almost ten years. That was my first professional role in the Jewish community, and it was a wonderful place for me to be involved, to be able to work where my children were, but most importantly to be on the ground floor of an organization that was growing year by year.

While I was working at the day school, I got involved with my synagogue, Congregation Sinai.

I left the day school after ten years because I felt it was time for something different. I went back to school [University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee] and I got my master’s degree in counseling and educational psychology.

Because it was something I’d always thought about doing. I was fascinated by the human mind, how it impacts learning, how it impacts organizational development. I found myself very often in my work working in the middle of people, to build consensus, to bring people together, to create something. And so much of it was the ability to understand people and be able to work with people.

This also followed a period in my life where we personally had a lot of loss in our family, and it was time for a change. I needed a break, and so I decided to sink myself into school for a couple of years, and I was very fortunate to be able to do that.

I worked for four years for Whitefish Bay School District as a school counselor. I spent a year as drug and alcohol counselor for the district and at risk counselor for the high school kids, and three years in the middle school.

It was the best experience I ever could have had to prepare me for life. It’s all about compromise, it’s all about learning what you can and can’t control.

What brought you back into the Jewish community?

Actually, Bert Bilsky [then Jewish Community Foundation executive director and MJF associate executive vice president] brought me back. There was an opening for a planning director. And Bert, who’s been a long, dear friend, had always talked to me about some day coming to work for the federation. And he kept saying to me, “I know you love those kids; but I also know you miss the Jewish community.” And he was right.

Planning director is not the same thing as being a psychologist.

But it is about trying to find a way to make things work, even though at times they may be difficult. It is finding the compromise, it is finding a way to work with one another. It’s listening to the other person. I think that my counseling degree helped me learn to be a very good listener.

And when you really take the time to listen to people and then think about what you’ve heard, you can help them. And in planning I have to do that all the time.

You can’t make plans without the people. It’s about getting the people together so that the plans can move forward. All plans are is a piece of paper if you don’t have the people on board.

As interim executive director, what are you planning on doing?

I feel that given what I have worked on all year, with our reimagining process, that I what I can do for the federation right now is keep us moving forward toward that transformation that we had been thinking about and dreaming about and talking about with our community.

I would not have said yes to this if I didn’t feel beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have an excellent, strong staff, and excellent leadership. And more than that, that we have a community behind us that wants us to be a strong federation, and wants us to really analyze what the best role for the MJF is within this community going forward.

Is there a time limit on your position?

We are taking it one step at a time. At this point with an annual campaign starting, and work to be done in transformation, the priority is to get both of those up and running as smoothly as they possibly can.

I love this Jewish community. I am honored to be in this position. And I think that if there’s one thing I learned as planning director, it’s the richness of this community, and how strong we are because of the organizations and people within it.

There are an awful lot of people I talk to, planning directors in other communities, that don’t have the diversity of programming and opportunities that this community has.

It makes it a struggle sometimes. It’s hard to financially support everything that we have. But we are very deep, rich – I don’t mean rich in a financial sense, but rich in what we have to offer the Jewish community. And honestly I can’t think of a better place to have raised my two sons, and I see their commitment to Judaism in them from having grown up in this community and been part of it.