Our Voices

With deep appreciation and genuine admiration, I honor Karen Wisialowski, who has served our community as trustee, board president, and for the past ten years, as our chief community officer, as she retires from PTS at the end of June. In all these positions, Karen has brought her characteristic intelligence, commitment to the betterment of the community, and her deep Jewish morals and values. After working together for twenty years, Karen is a trusted colleague and dear friend who has been central to my rabbinate and to our PTS community.

Karen was the incoming president of the board of trustees when I was hired as senior rabbi. We prepared for our new positions by talking on the phone weekly at 6 a.m. west coast time over a period of months. These early morning chats were a real testament to her work ethic and commitment to preparation. From my very first conversations with Karen, I knew she was something special—kind, smart, capable, interesting, and a true visionary.

Karen was a wonderful president, and she was a terrific collaborative partner as we shared leadership of the congregation. She modeled making decisions that were best for the collective whole rather than the few, setting aside personal preferences for what was right for the congregation. Karen was both a brave and thoughtful leader, and she made decisions from a place of deep Jewish grounding.

After her presidency, Karen stayed active as a committee chair and in the circle of past presidents. In 2014, the congregation began a visioning process that conceived of a new kind of role for our top administrative position. Our goal was to hire a chief community officer who would lead us in a new and deeper direction of community building. How fortunate we were that Karen brought her unique blend of financial knowledge, commitment to community, and organizational expertise to the newly created role.

For the last ten years, as our top administrator, Karen has brought her creativity, deep love of Judaism, and incredible attention to detail to work every day. She has both the impressive ability to juggle many things at once and the grace and nimbleness to go from one kind of event or meeting to another with ease. Think of a finance meeting followed by a shivah minyan.

Her decade working in finance in her earlier life served her and the congregation immensely well. Under Karen’s leadership, PTS emerged financially whole from the pandemic, and she worked tirelessly in the early days of that period not just to help us all pivot to online everything but to secure government loans that meant we were able to keep all our staff and emerge at the end in a secure financial position. Every week we had to make an assortment of big decisions, and Karen was a wonderful thought partner during those difficult days.

Karen has hired and manages and extraordinarily capable and energetic office staff. Her team-building efforts have resulted in a group that is both high-performing and cohesive. The people Karen hired and trained care about one another and the congregation deeply.

One of the things that I admire the most about Karen is her ability to always find ways for us to grow. I’ve never heard her summarily shoot down an idea—mine or someone else’s. Instead, you can almost see her wheels spinning as she says, “That’s a really good idea” or “Let me think about that.” It is that open-mindedness that has resulted in new initiatives, new positions, and new ways of doing things.

Over our years of working together to serve PTS, I have appreciated and come to rely on Karen’s absolute integrity and honesty. There have been many times, when faced with a difficult decision or complex situation, I would turn to Karen. I learned early on to take her counsel to heart and benefited enormously from work-shopping ideas, solutions, and possibilities with her.

Our weekly senior staff meetings are another example of how Karen truly makes a difference. Her astute mind both analyzes real world outcomes and envisions future opportunities. Karen leads in a way that makes everyone in the room feel safe to share their own ideas, because she is as interested in the workings of each person’s realm as she is in her own.

For years, PTS has worked with a trusted advisor, Rabbi Lou Feldstein, who coaches synagogue presidents and boards all over the country. Several months ago, Lou was in town and came to our home for dinner. When I told him we were soon to lose Karen to retirement, Lou said: “Karen is one of the top people in country in that role.” I always felt that was the case, but Lou confirmed it.

I hope you will all take a moment in the coming weeks and months to wish Karen well as she heads full-time to Sonoma to enjoy a well-earned retirement. She has led with true vision, compassion, humor, and intelligence and we at PTS have been made better for her commitment to our synagogue and to all of us. I will miss my colleague and friend tremendously and will always be grateful for all that she has given to our beloved Peninsula Temple Sholom community.♦