Dear friends,
I am excited to share with you the good news that Rabbi Sari Laufer will join the Stephen Wise Temple and Schools family this July as our Director of Congregational Engagement. Rabbi Laufer’s responsibilities will include oversight of our Center for Youth Engagement, which encompasses our Religious School, Wise Temple Youth, and Camp Wise. We are excited to bring on a dynamic thinker who will build on what we’ve already accomplished by helping us to engage our existing CYE families more effectively and attract new families to our community. More broadly, she will work closely with clergy, staff, and lay leadership to design and implement strategies to engage and connect congregants of all ages more deeply in our mission to make meaning and change the world.
Rabbi Laufer is well suited to these tasks. A graduate of Northwestern University and a recipient of the prestigious Wexner Graduate Fellowship, Rabbi Laufer is blessed with an exceptional mind and is a gifted writer. For the past ten years, Rabbi Laufer has served Congregation Rodeph Sholom in New York City, a large Reform synagogue that operates a religious school, early childhood program, and day school for grades K-8. At Rodeph Sholom, Rabbi Laufer’s responsibilities have included teen engagement, religious school programming, and “early engagement” with a focus on connecting early childhood families more deeply with the Jewish community. She has also maintained a broad range of rabbinic responsibilities including teaching adult education classes, officiating at lifecycle events, and leading t’fillah and delivering sermons as part of the regular worship life of the congregation. She has an extensive background in informal Jewish educational settings including teen experiences and Jewish summer camp and is a passionate teacher for students of all ages, believing deeply in the power of family engagement and lifelong learning. Although she grew up on the East Coast and has worked in Manhattan for over a decade, she knows the “Best Coast” very well: Rabbi Laufer studied for four years in Los Angeles as a student at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion and is married to Ben Cutter, a native Angelino. She and Ben are the proud parents of Jacob (Kobi) and Orli who will be joining Wise School and our Parenting Center in the fall.
Our search committee (President Steven J. Fishman, Chet Kronenberg, Victor Svilik, and Sharona Shenassa); our Human Resources Committee, led by Past President Glenn Sonnenberg; and members of our Clergy and Senior Leadership Teams played active roles in the search process. I am grateful to all of them for their leadership, guidance, and support.
As we celebrate the newest member of our team, we also take the opportunity to express our gratitude to Andrea Gardenhour, outgoing Director of our Center for Youth Engagement, for her service to our community. As I informed you earlier, Andrea and her family will be moving to Idaho over the summer and we will gather to honor them at our Shabbat services on Friday, May 19th. Please join us that evening as we thank Andrea with the help of our students, clergy, and lay leaders.
Over the summer, we will provide multiple opportunities for you to meet Rabbi Laufer and welcome her, personally, to the Stephen Wise Temple and Schools community.
To learn more about Rabbi Laufer, click here for a full bio.