Rivy Poupko Kletenik, at The Blogs

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Apr 18, 2024, 7:47 AM

Who are you this year?

So many personas and characters in the Haggadah. Moshe our teacher, hiding from sight, the scholarly rabbis sequestered, wondering about the obligation to tell the story of our redemption from Egypt – Hillel who sandwiches sacrifice with bitterness into...

Apr 2, 2024, 7:11 AM

Shani Louk, we ask your permission

Polish Jews captured by Germans during the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Poland. Photo from Jürgen Stroop Report to Heinrich Himmler from May 1943. (CC via Wikimedia)

How can we honor those whose photos, taken without permission, reveal them in the most horrific circumstances of victimhood?

Mar 5, 2024, 7:50 PM

Do Not Go to See, ‘Zone of Interest’

That was my gut reaction when I met a high schooler right after seeing the 2023 film. It is up for five Academy Awards this Sunday. The person with him protested that it was an excellent film, and he...

Jan 26, 2024, 7:19 AM

You crossed a line

(courtesy)

This time you crossed a line. Since the brutal October 7th attack on Israel and its response in Gaza, “STOP” signs in our neighborhood have been vandalized with your scribbling about Israel. Below the word “STOP” you have written,...

Dec 12, 2023, 7:09 AM

There’s No Place Like Home for Chanukah

Home is a word that warms the heart. So much of our growth and life is grounded in our childhood home. I was blessed with a magical childhood. A home infused with Jewish tradition. Warm memories of weekly majestic...

Nov 21, 2023, 1:17 AM

Should We Skip Thanksgiving this Year?

I already have a complicated relationship with Thanksgiving. It was a holiday that passed unnoticed in my childhood home. Contributing further to the nonobservance was the annual Bnei Akiva, religious Zionist youth group weekend held each year in Pittsburgh...

Nov 7, 2023, 7:10 PM

What shall we tell the children?

After services were over this past Shabbat two young fathers approached me. Over the Kiddush din, I slowly began to pick up the question that the two of them were asking me. The Sunday before, our shul, Minyan Ohr...

Nov 2, 2023, 12:36 AM

A Poem for Vayera

“Can I hide what I do from Abraham?” Though You are hidden, we feel your Presence. “I know that he will instruct his children” Children, their chairs in school are empty. “To guard the path of justice and right” Guard? Struggle for justice and...

Oct 26, 2023, 11:37 PM

Lech Lecha – A Poem for This Moment

Who could not read this week's Torah portion and not feel an incredible sense of pertinence? Its text could almost be overlaid with today's discourse as one might do so with the overhead projector's transparencies of yesteryear. “Go from your...

Jul 20, 2022, 3:36 PM

Praying for your team to win? The problem isn’t the Supreme Court

Seattle Hebrew Academy girls sports team, July 2020. (Facebook)

When a coach had my school's students recite Shema before games in the hopes of a divine assist, I had to wrestle with my sense that it was a losing play

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About Me

Rivy Poupko Kletenik, a 2002 Exceptional Jewish Educator Covenant Award Winner, just completed sixteen years as Head of School at the Seattle Hebrew Academy. Rivy is an enthusiastic writer and devotee of poetry and literature. Her column “What’s Your JQ” appeared for years in the JT News and then “Jewish in Seattle Magazine” and she is thrilled and proud to be awarded the Simon Rockower American Jewish Press Association Excellence in Commentary.