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A life spent teaching Jews has been a true labor of love for Dina Maiben, who marks her 20th anniversary as education director at Temple Shaari Emeth in Manalapan.

It all began in Salt Lake City, Utah, at Congregation Kol Ami. "The teacher who inspired me was Carmela Nielsen, my first Hebrew teacher," Maiben said. "When I was in high school she also taught the Middle East studies department and got a grant to teach Middle Eastern languages there, so I got to have her for Hebrew at that point as well."

Maiben majored in Middle East studies and Hebrew at the University of Utah, including the University of Israel in Haifa for part of her junior year. In 1983, she relocated to New Jersey, an arena she saw as a good possibility for pursuing Jewish education as a career. She began teaching at several synagogues in the area including Shaari Emeth, and "kind of found a home there."

Maiben observed, "There's a much greater emphasis on Hebrew than before: in terms of the reading program, basic phonics, and more Hebrew language integrated into the place. In the '80s it was a very textbook-driven curriculum. Now we do a lot more hands-on kind of stuff, there's more arts-and-crafts integrated in as well as other creative arts -- writing, drama, family tree tracing. The students spend time on this, they think about it, and they add their own personal touches to it."

This year Shaari Emeth heard that the Reform congregations in Israel were having financial problems because of the U.S. stock market, "so we made a special tzedakah drive to support Reform congregations in Israel. We try to do things for Israel starting when the kids are young." The older students forge a bond with Israel by bringing in teens from Arad and Tamar in the Negev to spend a week with kids in Monmouth County. Spare time? Suffice it to say Maiben has definite avocations. She has a passion for archaeology, especially biblical archeology.

"Whenever I'm in Israel I make sure I go to certain sites on a rotating basis because they keep finding stuff," she said. "Several of the big excavations are in the City of David. It was excavated originally in the 1800s, then 1960s and then nothing for years. But now there's enormous activity there. They've found the original gates that were built by the Jebusites; and the waterways by which King David and his troops excavated the city, plus all kinds of different pools and burial sites."

As for future goals, Maiben said that 30 years ago, the school had a number of kids whose parents couldn't read Hebrew. Part of that, she said, had to do with women not getting a Jewish education in the 1960s.

"One would assume by this juncture that this problem has self-corrected," she said. "Instead, the exact opposite has happened, and we have nationally more kids with no Hebrew support at home. Education for women has improved but is not universal. Dads also struggle with this. If they didn't go through an actual Hebrew school but an 'instant tutor' two months before turning thirteen, they didn't get the reading either. So, we're going to do much more to integrate technology into the Hebrew curriculum, because a computer can provide some of that support that's missing otherwise."

Maiben's father's family is Spanish-Portuguese via Holland and England; her mother's family is Central European. Growing up, "The only real access to Sephardic anything was my grandfather," she said. "When your traditions aren't mentioned in the textbooks, it's a problem."

For instance, food customs: "The Passover restrictions had nothing to do with what was going on in my family. We're told you can't have rice and beans but we were having it! Kids have to see themselves in the curriculum that you're doing. It pays to have different-looking pictures. If every textbook picture shows a child with curly dark hair, dark eyes and fair skin, that doesn't cover the whole reality of the Jewish world in which we live. I can't begin to count the number of kids in the school who are adopted, who are biracial, who need to be ingrained in the framework of what is and what looks Jewish. So we don't just discuss Ashkenazic foods. We talk about borrekas at the same time that we mention matzah balls and kreplach."