STAMFORD – Elise Passy credits two fortuitous meetings for her decision to become a Jewish educator. One was the principal at the religious school she attended in her native Houston.
“I was a ‘bad kid,'” she says, “but I had a really amazing principal who said, ‘If you know everything already, you can work with the younger kids.’”
She did so, through high school, and went on to major in Jewish studies at American University. After graduating, she was hired to direct the Bureau of Jewish Education (BJE) of Greater Washington in Rockville, Md., the youngest person to hold the position.
The BJE offered Passy and two fellow Jewish educators grants to study at the Melton Institute in Israel, on the condition that they commit to teach religious school. But soon after she returned, the stock market crashed and the bureau suffered budget cuts. She went back to Houston to complete her degree at the University of Texas, and continued to teach.

Elise Passy

After graduating, Passy worked at the Evelyn Rubenstein JCC of Houston in youth and summer-camp programming. That’s when she met the second person who would seal her commitment to Jewish education. Dr. Ron Wolfson, professor of education at American Jewish University (then University of Judaism), was invited to the JCC to speak, and Passy drove him to the airport after the presentation. On the way, Wolfson convinced Passy to enroll in a Master’s program at the school, where she also picked up a BA in Jewish literature.
Passy wanted to work in a foreign country but didn’t speak another language, so took a position at Congregation Beth Israel in Vancouver as educator and youth director. While leading a group of teens at a USY event, she met her husband, a New Orleans native working as a youth director in Washington State.
When his brother took ill and died, the Passys moved back to Texas to be closer to family. Elise was hired as the first-ever family-education coordinator at the Bureau of Jewish Education in Houston, and taught religious school at a Reform congregation. She had a child and sought a less demanding job, so she joined the faculty at the Beren Academy, a Jewish elementary school, where she taught secular studies and computers, and worked on differentiation strategies for gifted education. The family moved to Skokie, Ill., where Passy, now the mother of three, worked as an administrator at the Akiba-Schechter Jewish Day School on the south side of Chicago.
In 2003, they moved back to Houston, where Passy worked for Hadassah, first as executive director of the Houston chapter, then at the national level in marketing and outreach. When the Madoff scandal broke in 2009, Passy’s job was among the many casualties. She worked as a consultant to the Conservative day school in Houston. In July, Passy was hired as director of the Bureau of Jewish Education at the United Jewish Federation in Stamford, succeeding Dr. Ilana De Laney.
“My passion is to connect people to Judaism who don’t fit into the traditional model,” she says. “How do we create opportunities and avenues to get them interested? I would connect with somebody who said, Let’s figure out how that connects to you. How can this aspect of Judaism be part of your life? Day school teachers have the entire day to do that, to weave Judaism into Judaic and secular-studies classes. But the people who can really have impact are those in the supplementary schools who are on the front lines. We are blessed with very creative people in this community. I want to make sure that the day school has all those resources and support, but that the people in the complementary schools and in adult-education programs or who are doing things online also have the tools and support, because it’s a harder sell and they have to be more creative.”
As a start, the BJE and rabbinical council are introducing the community-wide STEP, the Stamford Torah Education Project.
“Everybody’s path is different, and we want to get people to take a step in Jewish education,” Passy says. “We’re looking at Torah not only as a book but as a way of teaching, so your step could be doing a program at the JCC or with Hadassah and the women’s breast-health organization, In Our Genes. It may be via the PJ Library, reading a Jewish book with your children and finding other books by that author. Or you’re going on a trip to Europe and this time, you make a point of visiting a synagogue. The hope is that the program will have people thinking consciously about Jewish education and seeing how much we’re learning all together. Like making a financial pledge, this is making a commitment of time to yourself.”
STEP will officially launch at Tapestry, the BJE’s annual community-wide Jewish learning event on Nov. 19. Participants will post and track their activity on a website that will include links to family- and adult-education opportunities throughout the community.
In early November, the BJE will be part of “Around the Water-Cooler,” a pilot program with StandWithUs, an Israel-advocacy and educational organization. The interactive “hot topics” class featuring Israel experts, will meet every Thursday at noon at the Stamford JCC, but students can also participate via a computer, with an Internet connection and a webcam.
“My mom is a general contractor so the best analogy is that Ilana built this great house with an amazing foundation, and now it’s time, after nine years, to ask people what they want in their house,” Passy says. “Is it Israel education, support for teachers, collaborative ways to work together, getting kids together from the various communities to do things outside their synagogues? I don’t really know the community yet, which is both good and bad. So what we’re looking for the stakeholders to say, ‘Why doesn’t the BJE do fill-in-the-blank? My email is open, I blog, and so I encourage people to have those conversations to help me figure out what we can do together.”

For more information on STEP and other BJE programs visit www.ujf.org.