Ruth Pinkenson Feldman

Dr. Ruth Pinkenson Feldman was born in Philadelphia to two loving parents who instilled in her a lifelong appreciation of learning and of teaching. They taught her that “You don’t teach subjects, you teach people.” They also taught her to believe in herself. Her Jewish learning taught her how and why.

Ruth earned her cum laude BA in Philosophy and Child Study in 1971 at Tufts University in Medford, MA. She continued her studies at the Bank Street College of Education, where she received an MS in Early Childhood Education in 1974.

In 1980, she became the founding director of the Learning and Development Program, an infant-toddler program, at the Germantown Jewish Centre in Philadelphia. By incorporating parent education, it helped to form the basis for a strong Jewish community. In her five years there, Ruth firmly established a Bank Street-inspired program that was play-oriented, exploratory, and, perhaps most unusual at the time, incorporated parent education and family holiday programming. Twenty-four years later, “The Mishpachah Program” still exists. While creating this program, Ruth worked on her doctorate at Temple University. Her dissertation, “The Impact of Jewish Day Care on Parental Jewish Identity,” brought a strong theoretical background to her work. She received her EdD in 1986.

From 1995 to 1996, Ruth was a Jerusalem fellow. In addition to focusing her energy on re-envisioning early childhood education, Ruth studied with Nechama Leibowitz, from whom she learned, among other things, the process of close-reading a text and the active construction of Jewish knowledge. Ruth became part of the interpretive community.

Following her year in Israel, Ruth spent three years as a consultant for Early Childhood Education at the Auerbach Central Agency for Jewish Education in Philadelphia, PA, where she established a network of early childhood professionals and a salary scale for early childhood educators. She also developed workshops and modules to enhance Jewish education in afternoon religious schools.

In her current role as Director of Early Childhood Services at the JCCA, she has been a dedicated innovator and teacher, creating the Brill Fellows Seminar in Israel, the web-based curriculum “This New Month,” which introduced the concept of Jewish time to over 100 nursery schools across the country, and “An Ethical Start,” a Jewish values curriculum based on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers).

Ruth has taught at Gratz College, the University of Pennsylvania, and Beaver College, among others. She has received grants from numerous foundations and her writing can be found in various publications, including The Jewish Family Book, What We Know About Jewish Education, and Sh’ma.

In all that she does, she is supported by her loving husband, Gary, and her children, Uri, Leona, and Noam.