Reuben Gittelman Hosts Annual Grandparents & Special Guests Day

The halls of Reuben Gittelman Hebrew Day School were packed Thursday morning with people unsure of how to get to their classrooms.

They weren’t new students on their first day at the school, however. In fact, pretty much all of them have been out of school for quite a few decades.

On Thursday, held its 14th annual Grandparents & Special Guests Day, where grandparents can come to the school and sit in class with their grandchild, and if the student’s grandparents couldn’t make it for any reason, they were allowed to have other special guests come in.

“Education is something that is passed down from generation to generation,” said Judy Klein, director of admissions at the school. “It’s nice that one day a year we can get all these generations in a school together.”

Early in the morning, the grandparents and guests met in the gym, where there was coffee and some food. Then, at 10 they got to go to the classrooms and watch or participate in whatever activity that particular class was doing. Each class, from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade, had special guests.

“We consider ourselves very family-oriented,” Klein said. “It’s sort of like 'Cheers' here. We all know each other, which is great. It also makes it harder to get away with anything. There’s nobody anonymous here.”

And that was easy to see, as confused grandparents and guests wandered the halls looking for a specific classroom or help in finding it, Klein and others at the school knew their names, or their grandchildren’s names and what classes they could be found in.

What made it difficult for some guests was switching classes. Lois and Gil Price of Suffern had to split their time between three classes on Thursday: pre-kindergarten for Shane, kindergarten for Jordon and third grade for Gabriella.

“They get a wonderful education here, between the Hebrew one and the secular,” Lois Price said. “There was nothing like this when we were growing up. It’s a joy to see everything they learn about.

In Jordon’s kindergarten class, the students were doing some arts-and-crafts with their guests, glueing colored leaves and a tree onto construction paper or drawing.

Lois Price said she and her husband like coming to the event because they see their grandchildren in social settings, but this allows them to see all the work their grandkids are doing.

“We haven’t missed a Grandparents Day since our granddaughter started at the school,” she said.

While that’s only been a few years for Price, there were some other Grandparents Day veterans at school like Estelle Brill, who was visiting her grandson Michael Brill in his sixth grade class. This is Estelle Brill’s 11th Grandparents Day, as she has two granddaughters who have graduated from Gittelman.

“The interaction between the grandparents and children is great,” Estelle Brill said. “We get to watch them learn, and even learn a bit ourselves.”

Brill and her grandson were in history class, where they learned about Mesopotamia and the Babylon numerical system, which Brill said was new to her. Earlier in the day, she said she went with Michael to a Hebrew studies class where she also learned about how younger generations of Jewish families celebrate certain holidays.

“I’m still old fashioned when it comes to Yom Kippur,” she said. “But things have changed, I haven’t. I still don’t want to use appliances or drive or anything like that on Yom Kippur, but things have changed, I haven’t.”

But Brill admitted that’s also not totally true. She said on a recent Yom Kippur, her son called and told her that her grandchildren were going to blow the shofar at temple. Brill originally said she couldn’t make it because she couldn’t drive and it was too far, but her son said once again that her grandkids were blowing the shofar on Yom Kippur.

“So I got in my car, drove there and watched,” she said.

But she also got to learn about some traditions changing in the Jewish world with recent generations.

“It’s great that girls have Bat Mitzvahs and are just generally treated as equals in school. They get to go into adulthood with a great education,” she said. “I didn’t have a Bat Mitzvah until I was 50.”

In Michael Brill’s sixth grade class, they watched a short animated film recapping what they’ve learned about Mesopotamia and then used the Babylonian numerical system to create word problems for their classmates to solve. The kids would craft the word problems with their guests and then write them up in the front of the room on a SMART Board.

“The grandparents were really excited to use the SMART Board,” said Fallon Coffield, who teaches sixth, seventh and eighth grade history at Gittelman, including Brill’s sixth grade class. “Most of them had never seen one before and didn’t know how they worked.”

For Coffield, it was her first Grandparents Day, as this is her first year teaching at the school, which she said she thinks worked to her advantage for the day.

“Everyone was just really excited to be here, and really excited to meet me, I think because I’m a new face,” she said. “So many of them have been coming here for years and know the teachers really well already, so meeting a new one is a bit exciting.”

Of course, grandparents are also excited to meet teachers who have been at the school more than a year, like Edna Pasternak, who teaches a first grade class. She led her group of students and guests outside for part of their class. Outside, everyone was given a tiny sheet of paper where they were supposed to write down something bad they have done in the past year. After doing that, they crumbled up the paper, put it in a bowl and Pasternak lit the papers on fire. After a few minutes, she poured water in the bowl, stirred and had her class pour the water into the roots of a nearby tree.

“The idea is to turn bad things into something good,” she said. “We’ve been doing that activity for the lats 18 years, but couldn’t the last two because of rain.”

After that, she took the class back inside, and eventually, the class’ general studies teacher took over for Pasternak, who teaches them Hebrew studies. This allowed Pasternak to head down the hall to a second grade class, where he own grandson was about to make a quilt.

“See? We’re all about family here,” Klein said.