How to Live an Inspired Life in a Profession You Love

While at the time high school can feel like forever, the reality is that the years fly by and students face a lot of pressure to find their life path. Our goal to ensure our graduates leave inspired by Torah, mitzvot and chesed, makes the pressure on students to attain greatness a tall order.

Our Chanukah iyun, featuring four incredible lay leaders, demonstrated for our students that the paths to professional success and to serving Hashem can be one in the same. Each of our speakers spoke about tremendous success in meeting their career goals, while doing what they love and helping others. They explained that their lives as Orthodox Jews enhance their work and help them become their best selves.

We are so grateful to have heard from the following four incredible speakers today, who brought our school tagline to life.

Sunny (Siegel) Levi (’95), spoke about her journey to become a 6th level Master of Tae Kwon Do as an Orthodox Jewish woman, wife and mother. As a student in ICJA, she was mostly focused on training for the Olympics, as well as becoming an actress with an agent in Hollywood. Some personal challenges led her decide she wanted more meaningful in life, and together with her husband, she lived and learned in Israel. She still manage to win the Pan Am games along the way, continued testing in her black belt levels and today teaches Tae Kwon Do to children and women in her Lincolnwood studio.

Nili Krausz is a PhD candidate in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Northwestern University. She spoke about her work to develop prosthetic limbs for amputees and her journey from Bais Yaakov schooling to university, where she was the only female in most of her engineering courses. One of the highlights of her talk was when she showed students a prosthetic arm and let one volunteer control it in a demo.

Bruce Leon is president of TandemHR, a benefits consulting business in Oak Park that employees 150. Bruce spoke about building up his business and working with all kinds of employees and clients. An exciting (and very kind) bonus to Bruce’s talk was when he passed out Starbucks cards to every student in honor of Chanukah!

Dr. Aryeh Sova, spoke about his path to become a clinical psychologist for children. He explained how he sees his work as part of his way of serving Hashem, by helping others. When he davens, he says, he prays for wisdom to help his clients and a refuah shleima for those who need one.

Together, all four of the speakers demonstrated for students what it means to put our tagline into practice–striving to be bnei and bnot Torah in the modern world.

We are so grateful to these four outstanding community members for spending one Chanukah morning with us.

Watch their answers to the final question here: