Prof. Sara S. Lee was a Jewish educator who combined charisma with caring and vision with realism. She was a central figure in the decades-long effort to improve Jewish education in North America who helped transform day schools, Hebrew schools, and other Jewish institutions over her long career. Lee graduated cum laude from Radcliffe in 1955 and worked as a lay leader for Hadassah and the Heschel Day School. In 1977 she earned an MA in Jewish education from the Rhea Hirsch School of Education at Hebrew Union College and began teaching there, serving as the school’s director from 1980 to 2007. She made the school a leader in the field through research and experimentation in learning methods and her interfaith work as co-director of the Lilly Endowment Colloquium for Catholic and Jewish Educators. She also edited three books on Jewish education, A Congregation of Learners, Touching the Future: Mentoring and the Jewish Professional, and Communities of Learning: A Vision for the Jewish Future.
Lee’s influence in the field of Jewish education extended far beyond the hundreds of students she has mentored and leaders she has inspired. Believing that the work of the educational leader should extend beyond the classroom and school to the congregation and community, Lee broadened the Rhea Hirsch School’s mission to include experimentation and research on the transformation of core institutions of Jewish learning, such as the day school and the congregational school, and adult programming.
She did path-breaking work on a framework for interreligious learning. A 1993-1995 grant from the Lilly Endowment led to the development of the Catholic-Jewish Colloquium for senior educators from Catholic and Jewish institutions in North America, co-directed by Lee and Dr. Mary Boys of Union Theological Seminary, and she co-authored with Boys, Christians and Jews in Dialogue: Learning in the Presence of the Other (Skylight Paths Publishing, 2006).
Her work in the field of Jewish education has been widely recognized. She received the 1997 Samuel Rothberg Prize in Jewish Education from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as a Doctor of Hebrew Letters, honoris causa, from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, New York, in 1999. In 2005 she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Leadership of Jewish Education in the Diaspora, awarded by the President of the State of Israel and the Education Department of the Jewish Agency for Israel. In 2010, Hebrew Union College established the Sara. S. Lee Chair for an Emerging Scholar in Jewish Education, with funds raised by RHSOE alumni.
