Marcia Lapidus Kaunfer

Marcia Lapidus Kaunfer is the daughter of two teachers. While still a child she dreamed of becoming a teacher, and later earned a bachelor’s degree in Jewish education from Hebrew Teachers College and a bachelor of arts degree from Brandeis University. To make the bridge between general and Jewish education, and to bring to the Jewish classroom the latest teaching techniques, she enrolled as the first Jewish education major in Harvard’s Master of Arts in Teaching program, earning her degree there in 1967. From 1966 to 1968 she taught at Temple Reyim Religious School of Newton, Massachusetts. In 1968, as an intern under the guidance of Rabbi Joseph Lukinsky, Marcia Kaunfer taught at Kehillath Israel Religious School in Brookline, the same school where she had been a Hebrew school student.

Between 1975 and 1985 she taught a variety of courses at Temple Emanuel and at the Bureau of Jewish Education of Providence, Rhode Island. Since 1983 she has taught grades five through eight at the Providence Alperin Schechter Day School. As one of its founders, she has seen that school grow from an idea into a place where 180 children in grades kindergarten through eight study, a place where her life is intertwined with the lives of those students and their families through her classroom teaching as well as through adult study and Shabbat and holiday celebration.

Ms. Kaunfer was chosen as one of the first of a group of Melton Center curriculum writers and teacher trainers, and has continued in that capacity for the past seventeen years. As part of that work she prepares curriculum materials, edits teachers’ guides, conducts teacher workshops, and tapes teaching videos. She received the Goldberg Teaching Award for Innovative Teaching Materials in 1986 and the Louis Hilson Award from Hebrew College in 1990. She is featured as the master teacher in “The Genesis Project,” a thirty-part video series produced by the Bureau of Jewish Education of Rhode Island and the Melton Center. This award-winning series demonstrates the finest teaching, in Ms. Kaunfer’s classroom, of the Melton Center’s Bible curriculum.