Tobie Brandriss

Tobie Brandriss has been deeply engaged as a Jewish educator for much of her life, though she formally began her career in Jewish education only six years ago. Her father z’l, Chief Rabbi of Northern France after World War II, set a compelling example. Throughout her childhood, Tobie heard from her father that the key to Jewish continuity was in educating children.

Tobie studied biology during college and began her career by teaching biology at Hunter College High School, a school for the intellectually gifted in New York City. Only six years older than her first students, she immediately took to her new profession. Committed to the Socratic method of teaching through questions, she helped her students probe the natural world and discover the relevance of biology to their lives. In 1993, she became involved in curriculum design and development at a national level as the recipient of a Sci-Mat Fellowship from the Council on Basic Education/National Science Foundation. Her resulting article, Heroes for our Students, appeared in The American Biology Teacher magazine in 1999. More recently, she designed a curriculum module in bone physiology for NASA, field tested curricula for the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study and the National Association of Biology Teachers, and trained teachers in their use. She was elected to serve on Hunter’s Personnel and Budget committee with responsibility for observing, evaluating, and making re-hiring decisions for the nontenured faculty at Hunter High School.

In her personal life, Tobie was involved in Jewish communal activity as a founding member of Project Ezra, an initiative assisting the Jewish elderly poor on New York’s Lower East Side, and in the budding Jewish feminist movement, as a founding member of the women’s tefillah group in Washington Heights. For years she tutored her peers and then her daughters and their friends in Torah reading and leading prayer services, witnessing the effect that raising young women to be actively involved in prayer services had on their self-images as enfranchised members of the Jewish community.

When Rabbi Naphtali Harcsztark, founding principal of the newly forming SAR High School, asked for a proposal of what a good high school science program would look like, Tobie was excited by the opportunity to envision an innovative program that incorporated Jewish themes and considerations. He then invited Tobie to join the faculty of SAR and establish such a program.

Two years later, SAR High School opened its doors, and the students began to achieve more in science than Tobie could have dreamed.

Perhaps her greatest source of pride is the citation that SAR High School received in the “2007 Advanced Placement Report to the Nation” published by the College Board as “leading the nation in AP Biology… a model for schools worldwide.”

Her husband and three children, who love SAR as much as she does, have cheered her on throughout the process.