The first time Karen Hafter came to Society Hill Synagogue, she was eight days old. That was for her naming ceremony. As a third-generation member of the synagogue, Hafter knows the shul inside and out — which makes her appointment to the position of director of youth and family education a few decades later that much more meaningful.
“Society Hill has always been home to me,” Hafter said. “I love education, I love teaching. It has been my entire world, and getting a chance to come back here to Society Hill Synagogue … it felt kismet.”
Hafter came back to Society Hill this spring after spending time as a teacher in Philadelphia-area schools. In 2023, she came home to be closer to family and friends after spending four years in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as part of the Teach for America program, which places recent college graduates in low-income communities as educators.
“When I moved back to Philly, it was to be with family and to find my community again,” she said.
She described Tulsa’s Jewish community as small but mighty, but it wasn’t home. In college and in Teach for America, Hafter got to see other parts of the country. But after experiencing those places, she knew that she was supposed to be back where it all started.
“I loved Tulsa and I loved Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs in Upstate New York, but there has never been another place that has the feeling of family and community and acceptance and joy and communal struggle the way that Philadelphia has always had for me,” she said.
Hafter is not one of the people who always knew what career she would choose. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. She said that she was sitting with her parents during her senior year at Skidmore and “freaking out,” because, while she was excelling academically at the school, she wasn’t sure what it was going to lead to. Her mother gave her advice that set her on her path.
“My mom asked me what I love to do, and I said, ‘I love tutoring.’ She said, ‘I’ve got a crazy idea — would you like to try teaching?’” Hafter recalled. “I was initially very resistant because it’s a hard job. It takes so much out of you and it feels like people don’t appreciate [teachers] in society.”
However, Hafter reflected on it and realized that the work was important.
“It does not matter what the world thinks and how the world values and cares about teaching,” she said. “What matters is how much you value it and how much you care about it.”
That moment was important for Hafter because she realized how much her own teachers impacted her, and in turn, how much she could impact today’s students. As a student in the Lower Merion School District, Hafter found that the educators she was assigned to did so much more than just teach the curriculum.
“I had teachers who took the time to care for me to realize that I was a kid with really big emotions, and was struggling to express that and process that. They took the time to be patient with me and to guide me through it,” she said.
Her first taste of life as an educator came when she was still a student herself, working as a madricha at Society Hill Synagogue. She enjoyed that, but she said that the time she spent in Teach for America really clarified her approach to teaching.
“It taught me to leave my bubble. Joining Teach for America and going out to Tulsa for the first time, I was forced to really confront what my values were and if they worked outside of my tiny little community,” she said. “What I found was that the core of who I was — passionate, caring, a true educator — that worked.”
It also reminded her to focus on what’s important.
“Some of the outside things, like the concern with material issues, and the status of coming from the East Coast, that got in the way, and TFA really had me look at myself and say, ‘If what matters to me is teaching, then that needs to be the guiding focus at all times,’” she said.
Now that she’s back at her childhood synagogue, Hafter has plans to establish Society Hill Synagogue’s connections with the larger Jewish community. That means field trips, joint events and more.
“It is through coalition that we find community and safety and learning and where we are pushed beyond what we know,” Hafter said.
She also wants to see the curriculum lead kids toward internships and other opportunities to learn outside of the synagogue walls. Maybe one day, all of that could even lead to another alum taking over her post.
“Eventually, long term, I would love to have this job go to a former student who once again thinks that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to come back home,” she said.
Society Hill’s Synagogue’s Hebrew school enrolled 105 students last year. Hafter said that the goal is to increase that number.
“We have room for more. This family is ever expanding, and there is room for every kind of Jewish person here,” she said.
In Hafter’s mind, there is nowhere she’d rather be.
“There’s a phrase that got tossed around when I was a kid — that Philadelphia is ‘sticky,’” she said. “To everyone who is reading this after the heat wave, it is quite literally sometimes horribly sticky, but it is also figuratively a place that you just have to come back to. I have been and will remain a lover of history and of learning about how this city and this country came to be. When I think about Philadelphia, I think about origins. It is the origin of our country, and it is the origin of me.”
