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When Linda Diamond's 5-year-old son Michael didn't meet anyone his age at Shabbat services, she decided to try out Highland Park Conservative Temple-Congregation Anshe Emeth for a change of pace. After Michael said, "I wish every day was Shabbat, so I can go to Mrs. Herman's class," Linda knew that this was the synagogue where she belonged.

Dr. Marlene Herman has been giving "Torah Time" sessions at HPCT-CAE since joining the synagogue 36 years ago, treating a group of about 20 children during services each Shabbat morning to innovative lessons about the weekly parsha. Michael Diamond is now 31, but still brings his children to Herman's class when he visits Highland Park, Linda said.

"She is an awesome teacher of Torah to our children," Linda, an administrator and member at HPCT-CAE, said.

On April 29 at Temple Beth Ahm Yisrael in Springfield, Herman received the Medinat Gan Keter Shem Tov Award for education and teaching Torah to children from the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism.

At Herman's classes, children learn the parsha through the text itself, but also through singing and even arranging food patterns that are relevant to that week's Torah portion. For Parshat Bamidbar in May, Herman's students counted pieces of cereal in groups of seven to represent the census of the Jewish people as well as the counting of the omer.

"The children know that you only play with food in Mrs. Herman's room, but not at home," Herman said.

Herman, 66, has been conducting similar Torah groups since the age of 15, spanning her childhood in the Detroit area through her life in Manhattan before she moved to Highland Park in 1973. When her husband Edward, an attorney, agreed 27 years ago to support the family on his own salary, Herman, an audiologist, dedicated her life to volunteer work. Besides the Torah classes, she volunteers at four different local Hadassah branches.

"[Giving Herman this award] is about her commitment to the greater Jewish world," Lisa Harris Glass, executive director for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism's New Jersey region, said. "She's a person with a global Jewish view and touches so many Jewish lives."

"I think she's a very creative and talented woman who has had a wonderful impact on the youth of the Highland Park Conservative Temple," Barry Mael, chief service delivery officer for the USCJ, said. "She's a very well-respected and important person in that community."

Before Herman arrived, HPCT-CAE held weekly prayer classes for children on Shabbat. Herman, however, found that different children had competing preferences for what tunes they liked to sing, and she felt that learning Torah would be a better consensus builder among the group.

"It's always an exciting thing to see how Torah fits into my everyday life and then to see how children relate to it," Herman said. "Torah is an evolving and ongoing experience."

Thirty-six years after she started at HPCT-CAE, Herman is now at the stage where scores of her students are the children of her original "Torah Time" participants.

"That is the payment I didn't realize I would be in for," Herman said.