Mothers across Westchester will be feted this month, praised for excelling at that most feminine of accomplishments: multitasking. Today’s moms frequently juggle not only multiple kids but multiple meetings. They mete out allowances while they serve up math lessons, travel to Israel one week and cook Shabbat dinner for 20 the next, tend both sore throats and weekend prayer routines. In the phenomenally busy, vigorously achievement-oriented culture of Westchester County, these moms play a critical role.

Jewish mothers, in other words, are a lot more than matzah ball soup and guilty-joke punchlines.

Here, a look at how three local mothers — a teacher, a rabbi and an advocate for special-needs children — are making a difference every day in the lives of their community.

Teacher-mom: Michele Saks

Michele Saks once took a year off from her various teaching jobs to stay home in New Rochelle with her children. It drove her so crazy that she ended up working anyhow, writing a companion book of lesson plans.

As she tells it, spending all day dealing with the same children in the same room turned out to be far more stressful than juggling multiple jobs and family obligations.

“I have a lot of respect for mothers who stay at home,” said Saks, who teaches seventh and eighth grade math and science, as well as third grade science, at SAR Academy in Riverdale. Saks also coordinates the third through eighth grade math and science curricula. “By four or five o’clock, I was tired of dealing with the same problems all day.”

With four children (ages 5 through 12), her job at SAR and another job teaching lifeguarding and CPR at Yeshiva of Flatbush, not to mention her other role as a board member of the summer camp her children attend, Saks is the very carpooling, Shabbat-dinner-cooking picture of busy — and she loves it.

“My kids know I come home at 5 and I’m theirs until 9. They’re two entirely different parts of my life, and no matter what, my family always comes first,” said Saks, who is married to Mark, an attorney. “When I leave school, I leave the emotional piece right there. I have a different emotional energy for my own kids, to do the baseball games and the dinners at night.”

Saks said she is lucky to enjoy teaching, a profession she entered at age 12 in her native Charleston, South Carolina, where her mother was a school principal. There weren’t many people skilled in Hebrew, so the preteen Saks was drafted to teach Talmud Torah Sunday school. After graduating from college at 20, she started teaching at Yeshiva of Flatbush. “I don’t think they realized how young I was,” she laughed. Saks relishes the challenge of teaching children at a difficult age.

“Many of the kids come in math-phobic in junior high,” she explained. “I love being able to bring them out and show them it’s not so terrible and that they really can do this. It gives them a confidence, going into high school. You have to be on their level, to be sarcastic and all that, and also to show them respect.”

Saks takes the same approach to her own kids, who attend SAR. “I stay away,” she said. “I don’t go near their class areas . If I have a message, I send it through someone. They need their own space at school.”

Advocate-mom: Barbara Levitz

Barbara Levitz of Cortlandt Manor enjoyed her career as a special education teacher. But when her first child, Mitchell, was diagnosed with Down Syndrome, her career became personal.

At the time — the 1970s — doctors recommended that parents of Down babies institutionalize their children immediately. A friend of Levitz’s, whose child was also born with Down, was even advised to tell her family that the baby had died. When Levitz and her husband decided to ignore the advice and raise Mitchell at home, doctors told them not to have any kind of expectations for the child.

Levitz took the exact opposite position. “While everyone around us was telling us to lower our expectations, we decided to be optimists. We expected the world of this child, and he has made us proud,” she said. “If there is one thing I always wanted to tell people about Mitchell, it was this: ‘Give him a chance.’ ”

Marshalling her professional skills, Barbara founded the first local support group for parents of Down children. With the support of husband Jack, she took on the role of Mitchell’s advocate, ensuring that he was included in mainstream classrooms at school.

Vindication came the day of Mitchell’s bar mitzvah.

“He worked so hard,” Barbara recalled. “He led the whole service, and his Haftarah was really long. That day was a triumph for Mitchell, for the family, for the whole community.”

Today, Mitchell, 36, lives independently and works as a disability specialist for the Westchester Institute for Human Development, where he is a colleague of his mother, who continues to coordinate special-needs services. Mitchell is also involved with the Self-Advocacy Association of New York State and serves on the board of directors of the National Down Syndrome Society.

“As he’s gotten older, our roles have shifted,” noted Barbara. “When he was a child, I was his advocate. Now, he is his own advocate in things like getting access to health care, and he has become an advocate for others.”

In 1990, Barbara decided that Mitchell’s unpredicted success, as well as that of a close friend who also has Down, Jason Kingsley, would make an interesting book.

As a result, the two men co-wrote “Count Us In,” which features interviews on a variety of sensitive and engaging topics, along with commentary from the authors’ families. The book was recently reissued with an afterword. It has been widely lauded for breaking the silence surrounding Down Syndrome and for offering positive, successful role models.

“Mitchell is doing important work, making a difference in the lives of others,” said Barbara.

It’s a statement that could easily be applied to herself — and it reveals how strong maternal influence can be.

Rabbi-mom: Joan Glazer Farber

For some years now, as her children have celebrated their respective bar and bat mitzvahs, the joke has been that Rabbi Joan Glazer Farber, a talented needleworker, only crochets one thing: kipot.

“For each one, I crocheted 200 of them,” groaned Farber, laughing. “Now we’re getting started for Yael,” who is 11. “We only have a year and a half.”

Crocheting kipot is arguably the most hands-on of the rabbi’s Jewish activities, most of which center around her role as adult learning director at the Union for Reform Judaism in Manhattan. She coordinates “10 Minutes of Torah,” a daily e-mail blast to 20,000 people in the U.S., and organizes the annual Kallah, a five-day program of study, relaxation and renewal attended by 120 adults from around the country.

Making sure Reform Jews take time out from worldly concerns to contemplate the spiritual is at the core of what Farber does.

“As adults, we should set aside 10 minutes a day to study something of Jewish interest, to connect with our Judaism,” said Farber.

As she spoke, Farber was preparing to escort 22 adults to Israel for a two-week Jerusalem Kallah. Business trips, along with other time demands like the middle-of-the-night hospital emergencies she used to deal with when working in congregations, have meant a difficult family balancing act for the rabbi. In addition to Yael, the Tarrytown family includes 21-year-old Miriam, a Brandeis student, and 17-year-old Adam. “When the children were all little, there were things I missed sometimes. That was tough,” said Farber.

She and her “fantastically supportive” husband, Andy, had one hard-and-fast rule: one parent had to be home for dinner each night.

But giving up her career in Judaism was never an option, she said. A fifth-generation Reform Jew, “I always knew I wanted to do this,” she said.

Now, the next generation is taking up the mantle: Miriam and Adam have served on their regional National Federation of Temples Youth Board, and Miriam is involved in her campus Hillel.

“It’s hard to be the children of clergy in any religion,” admitted Joan. “It’s a kind of fishbowl. There was the expectation that they would always be well behaved in services, when they would rather be a normal pain in the neck teenager, or act out in the classroom without having to think, ‘My parents are going to know about it instantly.’ ”

On the plus side, having a mom who has coordinated summer camp activities means “their friends think I’m fun! But more importantly, my kids live and enjoy being Jewish.

They feel strongly that they are part of this community, and that’s what makes it all
worth it.” WJC