Vicky Kelman

Vicky Kelman was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1943. Contemporary events helped shape her outlook on life. Her name, Victoria Eve, expresses her parents’ hope for an imminent end to the war and her own optimism. Perhaps even more significant was her growing up in the heyday of the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose “Wait ‘til Next Year!” motto inspired Vicky’s never-give-up spirit.

Vicky attended religious school at Brooklyn’s East Midwood Jewish Center, guided by Henry Goldberg and Aryeh Rohn (z”l), both of whom were also active in the emerging Ramah camp movement. Vicky’s first summer at Ramah in the Poconos in 1957 was a life-changing experience, reinforcing the importance of living 24/7 in a vibrant Jewish community. Vicky continued to spend many summers at Ramah camps, later met her husband, Stuart Kelman, there, and eventually saw their four children — Navah, Ari, Etan and Elana — enjoy Ramah as campers and staffers.

After graduating from Cornell University, Vicky completed advanced degrees in education at the Jewish Theological Seminary and Columbia University Teachers College. During graduate school, Vicky was also a Fellow of the Melton Research Center. Her studies with Drs. Seymour Fox, Joseph Schwab, and other pioneer teachers of the Melton Bible experiment, inspired her conviction that teaching is the pre-eminent intellectually challenging profession.

In 1969, the Kelmans moved to Los Angeles, CA, where Vicky taught at the Hebrew High School, worked at Ramah in California, and became part of the team working on the Melton synagogue school curriculum — along with Dr. Gail Dorph, Dr. Carol Ingall, Marcia Kaunfer, Dr. Barry Holtz, and Dr. Eduardo Rauch (z”l). Working with Melton afforded Vicky an opportunity to look closely at a variety of Jewish schools, and led her to believe that even smooth-running schools were often “missing something.” She concluded that the missing element was the family, and that successful Jewish education must include the whole family. Creating frameworks in which Jewish families are strengthened through contact with Jewish ideas and community has been the focus of Vicky’s work since then.

In 1984, Vicky published Together: A Child-Parent Kit (Melton, 1984), which is now recognized as the first publication in the yet-to-beestablished field of Jewish family education. That year the Kelmans also moved to Berkeley, CA, and Vicky began working as a free-lance “missionary” for Jewish family education. Among other activities, she created and directed the first Ramah family camp and published several books on Jewish family education.

In 1989, at the invitation of Dr. Ron Wolfson of the University of Judaism, Vicky joined a one-week think tank about Jewish family education, the precursor of the Whizin Institute for Jewish Family Life, of which Vicky has since been a leader.

In 1994, the Jewish Community Federation of the San Francisco Bay Area created The Jewish Family Education Project at the Bureau of Jewish Education. Vicky became its founding director, giving up her Johnny Appleseed-like modus operandi for the challenge of nurturing the whole process, from seed to fruit, in one community. The project was designed to help communal institutions build their capacity for family education. Influenced by her participation in the Mandel Foundation Teacher Education Institute, Vicky made professional development the engine for building that capacity. Her devotion to training the community’s family educators and learning from them has been the hallmark of her work there.