Rabbi Alvan Kaunfer, a leader in R.I. Jewish education for 33 years, is leaving his post to teach at Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., and the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

The Providence Journal / Andrew Dickerman

PROVIDENCE Rabbi Alvan Kaunfer, a prominent leader in the move to expand and transform Jewish education in Rhode Island, is about to leave the pulpit at Temple Emanu-El to teach future rabbis and educators in Boston and New York.

“They are calling it a retirement, but I call it a transition,” the rabbi said the other day, reflecting on the impending change. While the 61-year-old rabbi plans to remain in Providence, he plans a busy schedule, commuting to Newton, Mass., one day a week to teach a course, “Rabbi as Educator,” at Hebrew College, and to New York, where he will teach about God and spirituality at Jewish Theological Seminary.

“I see it as passing on any wisdom I’ve gained to the next generation of up-and-coming leaders.”

His experience over these last 33 years has included his founding and directing the state’s first Conservative Jewish Day School in Rhode Island and his work with two successive senior rabbis, Joel Zaiman and Wayne Franklin, in teaching and offering pastoral support to members at the Conservative East Side synagogue.

It also includes three years as head of the Rhode Island Board of Rabbis, when he worked with other faith leaders to give support to victims and families of the Station nightclub fire and to a wide community dealing with the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

A Brookline native and father of two, Rabbi Kaunfer disclosed recently that he never aspired to being a pulpit rabbi. He even skipped the sermon course at Jewish Theological Seminary, thinking his life would be entirely devoted to teaching and education and that he’d never have to deliver a sermon.

But on arriving here in 1975 after two years as an assistant principal of a big Jewish day school in Toronto, he says he was enticed into giving synagogue work a try by Rabbi Zaiman, “who was doing a lot of interesting and innovative things.”

But it wasn’t long before the young rabbi saw something missing. Although the state had one Jewish day school — Providence Hebrew Day — that one was Orthodox and didn’t allow girls to read the Torah at worship services.

Kaunfer felt the community needed a Jewish school with more of a “modern” approach, like the Conservative day schools that had sprung up around the country named for the Jewish educator and scholar Solomon Schechter. With a friend, he volunteered to open a new school one grade at a time, starting with a kindergarten in 1978.

“It was difficult because some people, even some members at Temple Emanu-El, didn’t feel we should be starting a competing school, when Providence Hebrew Day School was close by. But as it turned out, at least in the early years there really was no competition. Both schools were growing.”

Rabbi Kaunfer, who left the Temple Emanu-El pulpit in 1983 to become the school’s fulltime director and principal when it had five grades, said it’s clear the school always drew a different clientele, families who wanted an intensive Jewish education for their children but in a non-Orthodox setting. “They wanted a school with more openness to questioning, a modern approach to the texts of the Bible and a more open approach to Jewish observances such as allowing girls and boys to take part in services equally.”

In the aftermath of a large gift from the Alperin family, the school came to be known as Ruth and Max Alperin Schechter School. The 1980s and 1990s turned out to be an especially good time for Jewish education here and across the country, a contrast to the troubles facing many Catholic and other religious schools facing enrollment declines.

Rabbi Kaunfer says there were a number of reasons why Jewish schools were doing well. Sending one’s child to a Jewish day school meant not having to send the child to an after-school program or Sunday school and the tuitions were still lower than non-parochial private schools on the East Side. But the big reason, he believes, was identity: “Jews were becoming more conscious of their ethnic identity and no longer felt the need to send their children to public schools to be considered good Americans.”

Then there was the Russian Jewish factor. Even before the collapse of communism, waves of Jews were pouring in from the Soviet Union to seek a better life, including a freedom to worship. The Jewish community here committed itself to placing the children into either of the two Jewish schools as a way of helping them revive their Jewish heritage.

The move succeeded. Rabbi Kaunfer, who gave up being principal in 1991 to assume a more active role in the synagogue, says he frequently runs into immigrant families who tell him how appreciative they are over what the school has done. “It gave their kids a leg up and a way to move ahead and still have pride in their Jewish heritage. It was really an entree into Jewish life for young people and their families.”

Though he had originally feared going into the pulpit, thinking that people would feel he had nothing to say, Rabbi Kaunfer said he was surprised to find that people enjoyed his sermons, particularly when he would weave in stories about his travels abroad and his bike riding expeditions. He told a story about finding a family of Orthodox Jews in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa, proving, he said, that one can be a Jew anywhere.

But even as synagogue rabbi, Rabbi Kaunfer continued to influence the direction of Jewish education in Rhode Island, helping to persuade the community that it was time to “broaden the umbrella” once more. At his urging and the urging of others, the day school for the last two years has made a deliberate effort to welcome Jews of all kinds, even the unaffiliated.

It is now known as the Jewish Community Day School and has an enrollment of 150 students. Another Kaunfer project has been the effort to expand the educational offerings available to adults, through Koffler-Bornstein Families Institute of Adult Jewish Studies at Temple Emanu-El, which offers semester courses and mini-courses throughout the year. Rabbi Kaunfer says he believes that teaching children and adults is equally important. You need to teach the children in order to carry on the heritage, he says, but adults also need the help to continue on with their own “transitions” and spiritual journeys.

The rabbi has also been conducting, from his base in Providence, an on-line course on prayer. The beauty of teaching on line, he says, is that he can reach students anywhere. Two of his students this semester are living in Jerusalem and he has had students in Argentina and Mexico.

Admittedly, he says, there’s a picture on his desk that offers a clue as to why he and his wife, Marcia, are so high on his being able to teach in New York. “Those two girls over there are my grandchildren,” he said. “They live in New York and if I teach at JTS I’ll be able to see them more.”

Temple Emanu-El will be honoring Rabbi Kaunfer with a tribune on June 1 at the Alperin Meeting House, but reservations are already full.

rdujardi@projo.com