We Are Family

Kerry Ben-Evi is standing at the front of the Harriett & Hymen Lake Cultural Center Auditorium at The Roth Family JCC, scanning the rows of small faces and crossed legs. It is Friday. It is Shabbat. And Kerry knows the song she wants.

She turns to Cathy Cotter, the preschool’s music specialist and her partner for longer than either can precisely recall.

“Cathy,” she says, “put on the CD with the pickle on it.”

They have not used actual CDs in years, but this is how the two operate. The song lyrics go: We sing Shabbat, we sing Shalom, Shabbat Shalom [everyone claps] Shabbat Shalom. Kerry does not know the song’s proper title. What she does know is it was on the CD with the pickle on the cover. And Cathy knows exactly which song she means.

“Between her brain and my brain, there is half a brain,” says Kerry. “But we understand each other.”

Tradition!

Kerry has worked at the Richard S. Adler Early Childhood Learning Center at The Roth Family JCC for 31 years. The students she once taught now bring their own children through the same doors. Kerry is the preschool’s Judaic specialist, responsible for making Judaism feel alive for children in infancy through age five.

Her daughter, Sivan Emery, and her granddaughter, Abby Emery, also work at the school. Sivan is an administrative assistant, and Abby is a part-time substitute teacher.

In 1994, Kerry (an Israeli native and New York transplant), was teaching Hebrew school at a local synagogue when the rabbi’s wife said the JCC was looking for a teacher for a Jewish enrichment preschool class. Bonnie Friedman, the early childhood center’s then-director, hired Kerry on the spot. Kerry spent about a decade in the classroom before the next director, Carol McNally, offered her the Judaic specialist position.

Kerry knew exactly how she wanted to approach her new role. The children would cook, plant, dress up, build, taste, and smell.

“My goal was that the children will learn not from the book,” says Kerry. “They’re going to learn hands on, with see, smell, touch. To think out of the box every day.”

Sowing the Seeds

What surprised Kerry, both then and now, is how many Jewish families and children arrive at the school with almost no Judaic foundation. That gap is the whole point of her work.

If a two-year-old leaves Kerry’s classroom knowing the smell of challah and the sound of the shofar, she has done her job.

“We are the ones planting the seed,” says Kerry, who enjoys cultivating young minds alongside her daughter and granddaughter.

Sivan first worked at the JCC when she was 15, helping after school. She eventually married and started a family. Benjamin, Abigail (Abby), Ella, and Daniel all attended the preschool.

Abby, who once sat on her grandmother’s classroom rug as a student, came to work at the school in the summer of 2023.

“When I was younger, we moved every few years because my dad was in the military, but the JCC was the one stable place,” says Abby, noting that some of her former teachers are still there. “I would return in the summers or when he was deployed.”

In the fall of 2024, Sivan returned to the school, too.

When Sivan worked there as a teenager, her first role was as an afternoon assistant in Judy Galkin’s classroom. Now, decades later, Judy is the early childhood center’s office manager, and Sivan sits beside her once again.

“From the very beginning,” says Sivan, “I felt surrounded by a community of many moms who supported and guided me.”

And now, Sivan adds, “I get to see my daughter and my mom all the time.”

Reaping the Rewards

For Kerry, the Shabbat program is the centerpiece of her week.

“I don’t want to be on the stage doing a performance,” says Kerry. “It feels like we are doing it with the children and they are part of it.”

She has also trained the parent community, gently and over the years, to participate. In other places, Kerry has seen teachers chatting and parents wandering with phones during the program. Not here. Here, everyone sings.

Kerry’s love for Judaism is contagious, for families who are Jewish and non-Jewish alike. She tells the story of a child who greeted his priest every Sunday with Shabbat Shalom. The priest learned to say it back. And she talks of another girl who wanted only one thing for Christmas: a shofar. Kerry helped the youngster’s mother locate one and taught the child how to blow it.

Although Kerry does not dictate to parents how to celebrate their Judaism, she offers this simple advice about Shabbat:

“If you want to bring something special into your children’s life, make Friday a special day,” she says. “The children are going to learn that every Friday is a special day because they are not doing something they do every day.”

Kerry is like a magnet for young people, not only at work, but at home, too. Kerry’s grandchildren have chosen, one after another, to live with her during college rather than move into the dorms. First Benjamin, then Abby, then Ella. The youngest, Daniel, plans to be next.

“‘Wait for me. I’m coming too,’” Daniel tells his grandmother.

Ask Kerry how she’d eventually like to be remembered by the community, and she pauses.

“The lady with the big smile on her face, I guess,” she says.

But ask Kerry about the lasting impact of her work at the school, and she is quick to answer.

“Later on, the education grows that seed into a tree,” she says. “We plant the seed of love of Israel. We plant the seed of love of our tradition. We plant the seed of love of Judaism.”