Sinai’s storyteller in chief
Abigail Hepner Gross on how being a Sinai parent changed her life
We know that the Sinai Schools forges tight bonds between its neurodivergent students and the teams of teachers and therapists who work with them, between its students and the students of the larger schools where they spend their schooldays, and between the students themselves.
What we haven’t looked at, until now, is how the school creates bonds with families, and it can be a generation-to-generation experience.
We will look at that phenomenon by looking at the story of Abigail Hepner Gross of Englewood, Sinai’s first communications director. (The Sinai Schools will honor her, as well as Avi and Aviva Vogel of Teaneck and the Bear Givers at its annual dinner on Sunday, February 23. See box.)
Ms. Hepner Gross began her relationship with Sinai through her son Judah.
First, it’s best to meet her before she became the mother of her three sons. (No, she insists, “I think that starting at the beginning is not a good way to tell this story. My being the parent of a child who needs Sinai is the dead center of the story.” But, full disclosure, we’re friends — even fuller and not irrelevant disclosure, we’re friends who met through our jobs. And yes, in fact it is best to meet her early, because that’s how she became who she is. And who starts at the dead center?)
So, Ms. Hepner Gross’s story starts in London, where her parents met. Linda Roer, her mother, is the daughter of parents who’d gone from Russia and Poland to London’s East End at the turn of the 20th century; the East End was a poor, bustling immigrant neighborhood, full of Jews working toward upward mobility. Her father, Gershon, was born in Germany and got to England as a young child. “My father’s family looked at my mother as an English girl, not a Jewish girl,” Ms. Hepner Gross said.
“My grandfather was Polish, so he had a Polish sensibility. He saw the writing on the wall, and said we have to get out. My grandmother was a Berlin girl. He had to drag her out. The family settled first in Switzerland, but as that became increasingly unsafe, they moved across the Channel.
“My father studied medicine in England, and my mother studied French at the University of London,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “They came over to the United States at the end of 1968. England was going through a depression then, and it affected academics and intellectuals. It was called the brain drain. If you meet English people in their mid 80s now who live in the United States, probably they came over then.”
Ms. Hepner Gross was born soon after her parents moved to America.
Her father was in academic medicine. The family moved a lot when she was a child. And they maintained their British sensibility. She was an American, but “it was strange to me to see people who had American parents,” she said. “I know a lot of parents who were survivors, or whose parents were first-generation Americans. It was interesting to me that Jews could have been in this country for multiple generations.”
An old cassette tape of her makes clear that when she was a child, Ms. Hepner Gross spoke with a British accent. (She does not now.) She read English children’s books — “we read Beatrix Potter, and my parents got us all the Mr. Men books. When I went to the school library, I took out a Nancy Drew book, and I remember wondering ‘what is this rubbish? I read C.S. Lewis!’”
Her parents “are very cultured,” Ms. Hepner Gross continued. “Wherever they went, they started a music society. When we got to L.A.” — the family moved there in 1976, and then they stopped moving; her parents “still live in the same house that we grew up in” — “we went to the opera and to Shakespeare plays. We went as very young kids. I hadn’t heard anything other than classical music until I was in middle school.”
Her parents are unusual in other ways as well. “My father was a physician for most of his life, but he is also a Bible scholar and a poet,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “He wrote a book called Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.
“It’s over 1000 pages,” she added.
And there’s even more. “He has written more than 25,000 poems,” she continued. “My brother wants to enter him into the Guinness Book of World Records for that. Even though he is visually impaired, he keeps writing. His blog is published every week in the Times of Israel
“And my mother is his trusted editor — and oh, the arguments they get into over syntax and word choice!”
Not only were the Hepners very British, and very literate, and very cultured, they also were very Jewish. “I went to a day school, and then to a yeshiva high school,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “My dad helped create Young Israel of Century City. He moved on to different places, but it’s still there, and it’s a massive shul.
“The Orthodox community in Los Angeles was tiny.” It’s not like that now — it exploded soon after she left for college — but back then it was minuscule. “I had 18 girls in my class, and not all of them were Orthodox,” she said. “It was so small that it felt incestuous.”
So she left L.A. for college. She went to Barnard; she met Robert Gross, who was at Columbia, and soon they married. She went to law school at Boston University, and he went to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; he’s an architect.
They moved first to Brooklyn, where she worked in the district attorney’s office and had their first son, Max, and then they moved to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where Mr. Gross grew up.
Robbie Gross’s mother, Pearl Weiss Gross, is a survivor; so was his father, Jack. Like all survivors, Ms. Gross has a story; Mr. Gross, who died in October, also had one, and his is extraordinary, even by the high bar set by all Holocaust survival stories. We will tell it at another time, because it demands to be told.
For right now, it’s enough to know that Pearl and Jack Gross and their three young sons — Robbie’s the youngest — moved to Allentown, where he was a builder, and eventually, a generation later, their son Robbie moved back, with his wife and their own three young sons, to join the family business.
Later, Abigail and Robbie and their sons moved to Englewood.
“When you have three tiny little children, it’s overwhelming,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “I don’t know how different parents think about the future, but when things aren’t going the way you think they should go, it is overwhelming.
“Sometimes, with some children, it’s almost immediately apparent that this is a child who will lead a different life than the one you’d expected for him. But I think that more often than not, it takes some time before that becomes evident.”
That was her experience.
“Judah was very bright, very verbal from a young age. He was clearly so sharp that it took us a while to realize that something was different. It was a slow realization that things weren’t going exactly as we thought they would. And that was particularly true because things were in a gray area.
“At first, it was just that he seemed to have trouble with motor skills, so we gave him some occupational therapy. And then we took him for an evaluation, and the neurologist we saw said, ‘Oh, he’ll grow out of it.’ That misled us tremendously. He’s so smart, but he wasn’t always able to cope with things.
“It was hard in our family,” Ms. Hepner Gross continued. “We didn’t know enough. Sometimes he’d be under the table, lying in a little ball, and people would say, ‘What’s going on with that kid?’
“But when you have a professional saying that he’s very bright, with some deficits, but he’ll just grow out of it…”
Judah, like his brothers, went to a local day school. “They were gently trying to tell me that it wasn’t working, and they kept trying to modify the assignments they gave him. Maybe it’s some disability, they said. He couldn’t write letters, so I kept asking them to make accommodations, but that could only work so far and for so long. It was very hard for us to hear what we were hearing.”
What they were hearing, at first very gently, then a little less so, was that “you should look at Sinai,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “And I was like ‘ohmygod no! That is not my child! How could you say this to me?’”
All Ms. Hepner Gross and her family knew about Sinai, back then in the early aughts, was that it was for special needs kids, and that couldn’t be her kid.
“Back then, I didn’t know any Sinai kids,” she said. “But we went for a day, to look at it, and he spent a day in the classroom.” Judah was in fifth grade; school had started a few weeks earlier. The Sinai classes he looked at were at RYNJ in River Edge — to be formal, at the school now called Cross River Sinai School at Rosenbaum Yeshiva of North Jersey. (It’s one of four elementary schools that house Sinai schools; there’s also one at Kushner in Livingston, at SAR in Riverdale, and the Yeshiva of Central Queens in Flushing. There are also four Sinai high schools, one in Livingston and three in Teaneck.)
Judah loved it, and his parents enrolled him.
“A few weeks after he started, he said, ‘Mommy, I finally believe you. I’m not stupid. And I didn’t know that there are other kids like me.’
“That was powerful,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “It was beautiful for him to be there. He could make friends. And he could go into the mainstream classes and be part of the school. But that was a progression. It took a long time. He had to learn the basics.
“He had to be taught self-confidence.” Once you’ve gone that long thinking that there’s something wrong with you, it takes a long time to feel that confidence.
In saying this, Ms. Hepner Gross was echoing something that other Sinai parents had said — that aside from the specific learning, emotional, or developmental deficits that Sinai students have, one of the most important things they have to learn is to trust themselves again. To feel pride in their accomplishments, and confidence in being in their own bodies and souls in the wider world.
If she has any regrets about Judah and Sinai, it’s that “in retrospect, I think that it would have been so much better to have done it earlier,” Ms. Hepner Gross said.
It was the change that she saw in Judah “that fueled my passion for the work I did for Sinai,” she said. “That’s how I ended up at Sinai professionally.”
Sinai’s method is to tailor a child’s education to that child’s needs. It provides each student — who have a range of issues, diagnoses, and available futures — with an individual mixture of education, therapies, support, guidance, and love. It also uses the entirely non-accidental fact of its placement in larger day schools to teach both neurodivergent and neurotypical students about accepting differences and being open to the possibilities that acceptance allows.
When Judah began at Sinai, Ms. Hepner Gross had been working part time at a local law firm; a friend, who was a partner there, had told her that the firm needed someone to do marketing. Ms. Hepner Gross is a lawyer, but she was more interested in the new challenge of marketing than of returning to the law, so she took the job. “I’m self-taught in marketing,” she said, but as it turned out, she was very good at it.
It also gave her a marketer’s-eye view of Sinai. “It gave me the lens to be able to see, and to say to the people at Sinai, ‘Hey, you guys have no idea what you’re doing with marketing.
“It was right around the time when Loretta Rothwachs,” the school’s founding dean, creator, and guiding spirit, “was stepping away and becoming dean emeritus, and either she or Sam Fishman” — then as now Sinai’s managing director, and a former Sinai parent himself — “said I should come in and talk about it.
“I did. I went to talk to them. I am very good at giving people my opinion.”
Her opinion, based on her own experience as well as what she heard from other parents, is that “people think that Sinai is a last resort. It’s for nebbish-y kids,” kids with no future, no hope, no life ahead of them. “I said it is not a little thing that people think that. And they are wrong. You have so much to offer!
“I don’t remember many details from that first conversation, but I do remember that I came home, and maybe later that day or the next day, Sam called me, and said that he wanted to talk to me, and I said to Robby, ‘Oh no. They want me to volunteer, and I don’t have the time.’”
But no. “They wanted me to come and help with our messaging. I said that I already have a job, and Sam said okay, leave your job. It was very flattering. So I did. I left my job, and joined Sinai, in a job with very little definition. We came up with the title of director of communications. And I just knew that my mandate was to get the message out better.”
That was in 2012.
“The job started as part time, but then very quickly developed into full time. At first it was to develop marketing material. There was no website. This was back in the days when Sinai was in a little office in Teaneck. There were very few people in the business office. The schools were growing.
“The first thing I had to get across to people was that Sinai is an incredible resource for the community. I wanted parents to know what it is. There was so much stigma to overcome.”
Ms. Hepner Gross’s passion for the school was fueled by Judah’s growth there.
“When a child is in the right place, when they suddenly want to go to school, when they like going to school, when they come back happy, after they had been so miserable, after you had to struggle so hard for the teachers to understand your kid…” she said.
“People who work at Sinai have this passion. They’re like me and Sam, former parents, or like Rabbi Rothwachs, who was born into it.” That’s Rabbi Dr. Yisrael Rothwachs, now the Leo Brandstatter z”l Dean, Loretta Rothwachs’s son, whose work at the school is not an inherited obligation but a bone-deep and inescapable love of the work and of his students and of the mission.
“It’s such meaningful work,” Ms. Hepner Gross continued. “It was my goal to make sure that parents knew about it, and also that people donate to Sinai and support it. The whole community needs it. We are so lucky to have it.
“I once thanked someone who made a very generous donation and didn’t have any children there.” She didn’t need the school except in a theoretical way. “But she told me that she hadn’t met all her grandchildren yet.” (What she meant is that she assumed that she’d be having more of them.) “I have to make sure that it’ll be there in case I do need it,” she said.
Judah is flourishing now. “He couldn’t have gotten what he needed at any other school,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “They taught him so many things. Not just overcoming the learning disabilities, but social skills. Not just self-confidence but teaching him how to advocate for himself. To be able to ask for help. To say, ‘this is hard for me.’
“Art therapy was fantastic for him. He’s so artistic. It was so good for him to be able to express himself through art.
“I am tremendously grateful to Sinai for helping Judah get where he is today. To get into Rutgers, to go to Rutgers, and to graduate from Rutgers with honors. And there were several other kids who graduated from Sinai who were at Rutgers with him. It’s not an easy school.”
Now that Judah has graduated not only from Sinai but also from Rutgers — his twin brother Darius graduated from Princeton in 2024 too, and their older brother Max from NYU in 2022 — Ms. Hepner Gross made the difficult decision to leave Sinai.
No, that’s not accurate. Ms. Hepner Gross has left her job at Sinai — it’s now in the capable hands of her successor, Debra Passner — but she hasn’t left Sinai. She can’t. Part of her heart is there.
A large if seasonal part of Ms. Hepner Gross’s work at Sinai was to put together the annual dinner, and the documentary film that is shown there every year. Those films, which tell the story of a Sinai student, and every year focus on students with very different deficits, needs, and goals, have been a project she shares with Mr. Fishman, and increasingly she’s become the senior partner, learning to conceive, produce, and direct them.
Now, building on that work, she’s starting a business, at impactvideocreative.com, making films that tell the stories of people’s lives, films that they can show their children and grandchildren (who of course often feature in them). She’s also making documentaries that help nonprofits show what it is that they do.
To make those films, she’s using skills that she learned at Sinai.
She, her husband, and her mother-in-law also are leaving Sinai a tangible gift.
“I recognize that there’s no better way than these films to explain that once you’ve seen one Sinai student, you’ve seen one Sinai student,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. There is no cookie-cutter Sinai kid. Each one is different. At first, the films were seen only as a fundraising tool, but “now we also see it as a tool for parents to see what it is that we do.”
Jack Gross, Ms. Hepner Gross’s father-in-law, was a brilliant autodidact whose formal education was terminated by the Holocaust when he was 13. “He was thirsty for knowledge,” Ms. Hepner Gross said. “He could talk about anything, history, music, anything. He learned it all on his own. But he valued formal Jewish education.
“He was very philanthropic, but he never wanted anyone to know that. He never agreed to be honored. He never wanted the light to shine on him. He never created a foundation. He just gave money. Sometimes we didn’t find out that he’d given until decades later.
“So he supported Sinai during his lifetime with no recognition, because he didn’t want any, but he saw what Sinai was doing.
“So when we wanted to honor his memory, we set up a scholarship fund. The Jack Gross z’l Memorial Fund. He’s not in a position to resist it now.
“It’s a scholarship fund. Robbie, my mother-in-law, and I established and seeded it, and others can contribute to it, in conjunction with the Sinai dinner campaign. It will exist in perpetuity, so a scholarship will be given in his memory to a family every year, and the family that receives it will learn about him.
“It was most meaningful for my mom that it goes to someone’s actual education,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s one thing to have your name on something — that’s good — but to know that it’s going specifically to a kid was the most appealing thing to my mom.”
“Abigail often describes the experience of Sinai students and parents as a journey,” Mr. Fishman said. “In a nutshell, Sinai has been profoundly consequential to her, and she has been profoundly consequential to Sinai. Her journey has been led by her enormous heart, her sensitivity, and her tremendous talent.”
When she was hired, “we were looking for somebody who could effectively communicate what exists in the hearts of Sinai parents, what our students are about, what heartaches and triumphs they face, what is unique about the lengths to which we go, and what that means to our students and their families.
“We believed that Abigail was the right person to run Sinai’s communications — and we were right.
“She was our storyteller-in-chief. It’s hard to adequately describe the power and impact of her groundbreaking work at Sinai. It’s because of that work that the public image of Sinai is dramatically different than it was a decade ago.
“She is a dear friend and colleague, and she made a difference to all of us.
“When I think about why Abigail has been able to have the significant impact that she’s had, both on Sinai and on the community as a whole, it’s because she was able to strike a wonderful balance of incredible skill — she’s bright, articulate, organized, and driven — and at the same time she has a huge heart.
“You have to be able to use all those skills she has, but it’s not the words. It’s the heart.
“What we look for in our teachers and our therapists is not just the skills to do their jobs but also that they’re driven by their hearts. Abigail is such a great example of that because she has that balance. She is an amazing storyteller and ambassador to the world,” Mr. Fishman concluded.
“We have seen major grants and literally millions of dollars of gifts come to Sinai through our dinners, and Abigail played a huge part in creating an exceptionally well-run program and making films that often move people to tears,” Arielle Greenbaum Saposh, Sinai’s associate managing director, said. “She expanded our mission, allowing it to reach more people who need us. And she understood that it’s not about creating a great video, but about that call you get from a grandparent who saw that video.
“Greater recognition means we can help more kids. More fundraising dollars means that we can help more kids. Our therapies can improve continually, in part because of Abigail’s passion and hard work over the decade.
“It has been a painful goodbye for us when Abigail let us know that she would be leaving Sinai, but we are genuinely happy for her, because she is pursuing her passion as a storyteller and a filmmaker. She can use those skills to help more people and more organizations tell their stories.”
Mr. Fishman returned to the Jack Gross Memorial Fund. “The family thought that it would be appropriate to establish the scholarship fund, with the hope that it would help more children who need Sinai have access to a Jewish education, regardless of their abilities. Abigail and her family are allowing others who either knew Mr. Gross and respected or loved him and who know Abigail and want to honor her to donate to this fund.”
As for Abigail Hepner Gross, her heart will always be with the Sinai Schools, and the lessons she learned will accompany her for the rest of her life.
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