Toby Kaplowitz, the director of lower school Jewish life and learning and K-8 director of student life at Krieger Schechter Day School in Pikesville, always knew that she wanted to work within the Jewish community, but she didn’t always want to work in Jewish education.
Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, Kaplowitz attended Jewish day school from preschool through 12th grade. She went on to college at Yeshiva University where she studied psychology and music, thinking she wanted to become a psychologist. But when she took a gap year between her undergraduate studies and graduate school, the trajectory of her career path changed. “I took the psych GREs. I started thinking about applications to different graduate programs, and then I changed my mind,” said Kaplowitz.
“I was always very involved in various Jewish communal activities since high school — I loved that. I loved working at Yachad, which is an organization for Jewish young adults with disabilities. I did a lot of volunteering, and when I was in college, I was [president of the] Jewish programming student council,” she added. “This job became available — Rabbi [Avi] Weiss is a synagogue rabbi of one of the largest Orthodox synagogues in the United States, but also, he’s very active in political activism and different communal work. So, when an opportunity came available to work for him, I thought, ‘Wow, this would be a really great learning experience for me.’”
During her gap year, she took a job working with Rabbi Weiss, current rabbi in residence at Hebrew Institute of Riverdale — The Bayit, founding president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School and founder of Yeshivat Maharat.
“Working there really changed my perspective on what I wanted to do,” she explained. “I felt that I could do more and I could make a more significant impact working in education than as a psychologist.”
Kaplowitz went on to receive her master’s in Talmud and Jewish law from Stern College’s Graduate Program in Advanced Talmudic Studies, and then received a master’s in studies and education from Bank Street College of Education.
After working at Yeshiva University in the Jewish communal services arm of its Jewish education division, Kaplowitz and her husband, Rabbi Elliot Kaplowitz, moved to Boston to become a JLIC couple at Brandeis University, a program of the Orthodox Union, in partnership with Hillel, that places Orthodox rabbinic couples on college campuses to serve as Torah educators.
In Boston, Kaplowitz taught at a Jewish day school in Sharon, Massachusetts. When it was time for her eldest son to attend first grade, they went looking for a community they could settle down in.
“We checked out a lot of different communities and we came [to Baltimore]. We visited, we saw the schools, we saw the shuls. We really liked it here, so we decided to more here,” said Kapolwitz.
Before KSDS, Kaplowitz worked full-time as a teacher at Beth Tfiloh Dahan Community School for seven years. Then, in 2020, Kaplowitz took on a larger role at KSDS.
Today, she is a member of Netivot Shalom, where her husband has been the rabbi for more than 10 years. At KSDS, Kaplowitz is the sixth-grade advisor and oversees the lower school’s Judaic studies learning and curriculum, as well as K-8 student life.
“I work on any program, any trip, any activity, anything that happens outside of the academic classroom, and even a lot of things that do happen in the classroom are under my umbrella of what I oversee and what I try to work on,” Kaplowitz said. “I try to help create, with all the amazing teachers and the administrators here, a really enriched, powerful learning environment here in the school that goes beyond the academics. The academics here are incredible, really powerful and really innovative, and the teachers are super talented and very invested, and we also do a lot of things that really enrich the students’ day outside of the classroom as well.”
