Sinai Akiba Headmaster Announces Retirement After 35 Years, Part 1

It was the day before their winter break and students at were buzzing with anticipation. The lower grades gathered in an assembly for their annual pre-Hanukkah musical celebration. Tiny kids were dressed in tie-dyed t-shirts, paper crowns, and white gloves for their dramatic black-light performance.

Academy headmaster Rabbi Laurence Scheindlin stood beside a man-sized menorah at the center of the room to give a teaching about the holiday, which celebrates miracles and light. Holding up the highest, center candle of the Hanukkah candelabra he asked if anyone knew the English meaning of its name, shamash.

“The servant” a little voice piped up, the perfect lead-in to a teaching for the holiday.

“It’s higher than any of the others,” the rabbi said, “because someone who helps out other people is a person who is the most important. And every time we do something for another person…we are performing a miracle.”

This would be the last Hanukkah assembly for Rabbi Scheindlin. After 35 years as headmaster, he will be retiring from the academy at the end of the current school year. 

“I think it’s enough,” said Scheindlin, 67. “But I’m not ready to retire from work or life."

Scheindlin arrived in 1977 at what was then Akiba Academy after serving for eight years as a pulpit rabbi in the Conservative synagogues in Chicago and Jacksonville, Florida.

“I found that over time I wasn’t really satisfied with rabbinate work but realized that everything I found satisfying was in education. And I decided to switch to education at a time when the Jewish day school movement was really just in its inception.”

Scheindlin estimates there were maybe four non-Orthodox Jewish day schools in Los Angeles at the time. Now there are about a dozen. Akiba Academy, once an independent institution renting space from , merged with the Conservative synagogue in 1986, becoming Sinai Akiba Academy.

The school was small in the 70s, only 170 students plus a pre-school. Rabbi Scheindlin’s own sons were students at the academy.

“I found a school that was devoted to high standards in academics, to a warm and authentic Jewish experience and it was open to a diverse community," Scheindlin said. "Those things have remained the same.”

What has changed is the style of education, the availability of updated resources and techniques. Scheindlin counts the implementation of “activities-based” learning at Sinai Akiba his greatest accomplishment.

“It’s not teachers lecturing to kids, it’s not a bunch of practice sheets. It’s kids really involved in doing things, in activities through which they are developing and building up the ideas themselves,” the rabbi explained.

“It’s been a long term project and it’s great. It’s wonderful when you can set out to do something and you work at it and you struggle with it, and then you go into classrooms and you see it’s actually happening. And the kids are loving it.”

He is excited to see them employing the same techniques to Jewish learning, applying the same rigorous intellectual inquiry to religious questions. He wanted his students to see, “if they were able to do that with Judaic studies as they do in general studies, that they would come to value Jewish life in a really special way.”

Check Westwood-Century City Patch tomorrow for the second part of this interview. If you'd like to share memories of Rabbi Scheindlin, post them in the comments below or email them to saraf@patch.com.