UCityClass1957

After graduating Washington U. with a BA in languages (German & Classics), I received a Wilson fellowship to
go to Yale to study Classics. I got an MA in Classics by which time I decided college teaching was not for me
and I still wanted to spend some more time in east coast so I got a job teaching high school in a Long Island
town and an apartment in Brooklyn. That lasted one year during which two crucial things happened – I got
married and both of us decided to try Israel for a year.
We spent that academic year (1964-5) in the development town of Upper Nazareth where taught in two junior
high schools and my wife Nomi in one of them as well.
A combination of personal recommendation to the principal of a high school in Rehovot and the fact that we
wanted to be in the center of the country brought us to Rehovot in July 1965. I taught in the high school there
from 1965 to 1976 when I moved to the school in Ashdod where I taught until I retired (June 2004). So I taught
40 years in Israeli high school.
In 1979 we moved from Rehovot to Ashkelon which is equidistant from Ashdod where we thought the quality of
life and the possibilities for bringing up our four children (David – 1965, Micha – 1967, Sara and Ilana – 1972)
were preferable.
In 1970 we participated in the founding of the first conservative synagogue in Rehovot and since moving to
Ashkelon have been quite active in the conservative synagogue here, teaching bar mitzvah kids and
synagogue skills to adults.
Since retirement, I have intensified participation in the synagogue, renewed my clarinet playing (I have a
Russian accompanist named Olga), we play originals or transcriptions of Mozart, Brahms, Debussy etc., teach
English to a class of pensioners mostly Russian immigrants with grandchildren in the US or Canada and
participate in small study groups in Talmud and English and American poetry.