In a news release to the community Janette Silverman, community educator wrote: “The fourth annual national Grinspoon-Steinhard Awards for Excellence in Jewish Education has named Miriam Halachmi, Education Director at West End Synagogue, one of 46 recipients of this year’s awards. Each of the honorees is a teacher who is passionately engaged in educating children in Jewish learning, conveying to them a love of Jewish history, Torah, Talmud, Israel and Hebrew language. Miriam has for many years been the epitome of what Jewish education is, in Nashville—educating adults and children alike, infusing everyone she comes in contact with, with a love for study and Judaism. She can be seen teaching at West End Synagogue, the GJCC and Vanderbilt University exciting, encouraging and stimulating her students, congregants and increasing the commitment to lifelong study in Jewish Nashville.” The Jewish Federation of Nashville and Middle Tennessee nominated Miriam Halachmi for the award. She was one of the few winners who did not teach in a large metropolitan area.

Ms. Halachmi was reared in Binyamina in northern Israel. She received her teaching degree from the David Yellin Teachers’ College in Jerusalem. There she specialized in teaching humanities and in Teaching Hebrew as a second language. She received advanced training in counseling at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and in psychology at the State University of New York at Buffalo. She specialized in working with gifted students at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan.

Miriam Halachmi joined West End Synagogue in 1978 after teaching at Akiva School for one year. Prior to coming to Nashville, she was a guidance counselor and a teacher in Israel. She was also an exchange teacher in Buffalo, N.Y., where she taught in the Kadima day school, in the community Jewish High School and the Bureau of Jewish Education’s teacher’s college.

Even though she is our school director, she has always taught since “you need to remember what the teachers have to deal with”; also, “I enjoy the interactions with the students and I love to teach.” She has been bringing state-of-the-art educational programs to the synagogue. In 1993 she attended the Whizin Institute’s program on family education and has constantly updated our curriculum. She won a scholarship to attend a special one-month-long program at Brandeis University to learn new methods of teaching Hebrew. The following year she was one of only eight students chosen to continue the program.

About teaching at Vanderbilt for the last eighteen years she says, “West End Synagogue gives me the opportunity to interact with all age groups except college.” Teaching there gives her a chance to reach Jews and non-Jews and expose them to Israeli and Jewish culture through the Hebrew language. Some of her former students have joined our congregation. Her favorite adult education class is her women’s group “Torah Tachlis” that encompasses all ages and all congregations. The group began with the first verse of the book of Genesis and starting its fifth year of study “is only in Exodus Chapter 23. We joke that the Buzz-A-Bus will bring us to our study of Leviticus.”

Ms. Halachmi is an active member of the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education (CAJE). She serves on their Mifgash committee that selects Jewish educators from all over the world to meet once a year at the CAJE conference. There they work together to create new ways to encourage all Jews to feel a strong connection to each other. Through the work of this committee a teachers’ exchange program between Kfar Saba and Nashville began. Ms. Halachmi’s work on that program reinforces our Partnership
2000 with Hadera, a Federation project that ties our community to Israel.