At 75, Teaching Is Still Her Guiding Light

Molly Oshan likes getting her hands dirty. Whether it’s melted chocolate for edible dreidels, flour and water for homemade matzos or slabs of clay for her unique sculptures, this award-winning teacher likes a mess.

Oshan, 75, has used a hands-on, creative approach to teach Valley kids for 45 years. One of her first classrooms, in fact, was a converted chicken coop, now the site of Tarzana’s Temple Judea.

“I came home from school each day and plucked feathers off me,” she recalled with a chuckle. “You can’t ever get them all off, you know.”

Never content to brush off a child’s question with a simple answer, Oshan has delighted several generations of students by demonstrating just how things are made and where they come from.

Take, for example, one child’s query about how gefilte fish, a traditional Jewish food, ends up in a jar. Before you could say “Manischewitz,” the kids were up to their wrists in whitefish, pike and onions, forming the mixture into the familiar fish shapes.

“She did lots of artsy-craftsy stuff with us, like cooking,” said former student Jonathan Berg, 16, of Glendale. “If any of us had problems, she would sit us down and help us solve them. She was very supportive of everything that we did.”

“You have to make teaching fun,” Oshan said. “If you give them the love of learning when they’re little, they remember it forever.”

Oshan’s love of teaching was fostered half a century ago in Detroit, where she was a teenage volunteer at a local Hebrew school. After she married and doctors told her she was unable to have children, she decided to devote her life to kids through education.

Happily, it turned out the doctors were wrong, and the three daughters and two sons who came along in rapid succession only deepened Oshan’s desire to reach out to children.

“I brought my own kids to the temple school where I taught first as a volunteer, then as a paid teacher.”

Oshan received her training from the Los Angeles Bureau of Jewish Education and over the years has taught preschoolers, kindergartners and first-graders at a number of temple schools, including Temple Sinai in Glendale and Temple Emet in Woodland Hills.

In 1991, Oshan received a monetary award from the Bureau of Jewish Education for excellence in teaching. She donated the money to educational programs for children. In March, the consul general of Israel marked her contribution to education at a ceremony in Glendale.

“Molly is a very dedicated teacher,” said Betty Shiner,former executive director of Temple Judea. “The boys and girls didn’t want to leave her class. She’s simply wonderful in dealing with children.”

Oshan is not yet ready to put away her teaching tools, despite a long battle with diabetes that eight months ago left her completely blind.

This fall she said she hopes to volunteer at a facility for disabled children and to lend a hand at the Braille Institute, where she attends weekly classes.

Seated on an easy chair in her Encino home surrounded by an array of sculptures she created after she lost her sight, Oshan adjusts the dark glasses perched on her head and ponders the work that lies ahead.

“I never want to stop working with kids. After all, I don’t teach with my eyes, I teach with my heart.”

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