Teacher Audrey Brackman Bernstein dead at 84

In 1956, Audrey Brackman Bernstein walked into a small synagogue in Lawrence to teach and, as she always said, to learn.

Brackman Bernstein, who remained at Temple Sinai for 48 years before retiring in 2006 as director of its religious school, died Wednesday at the Hospice Inn in Melville of congestive heart failure. She was 84.

"Everybody knew Audrey," said Rabbi Paula Winnig, spiritual leader of Temple Sinai, which named its religious school in her honor when she left. "She was committed to instilling Jewish heart and ethical values in all of her students so they would become responsible citizens of the world.

"She had students of students," Winnig continued. "People always came back to see her" in her office where her dachshund, Heidi, was usually by her side.

Brackman Bernstein and the temple connected because of another of her dogs. When her springer spaniel ran away, she placed a newspaper ad seeking help in finding it. While looking at the ad, she noticed a help-wanted ad for a teacher. She never found the dog but got the job.

Throughout the course of her career, Brackman Bernstein touched the lives of thousands of students. Starting as assistant to then Rabbi Abram Vossen Goodman, she became director of education and administrator of the synagogue in 1968.

While a new and larger facility was being built in the late 1960s, Brackman Bernstein carried the contents of the temple's office and religious school in her Dodge Dart as she traveled from one temporary location to another, said her daughter, Lynda Cooper of Great Neck.

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"Audrey was strong-minded, strong-willed and yet sweet-tempered," said a stepson, James Bernstein of Sea Cliff, a Newsday reporter. "She loved books, particularly mysteries, her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And anyone who knew was fully aware of her love for night talk-radio, mostly NPR."

Born in Manhattan, she moved with her family to Far Rockaway, where her father, George Rivkin, opened the first dental practice on the Rockaway Peninsula in the 1920s. Brackman Bernstein attended Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, and later received a degree in religious education from the Hebrew Union College in Manhattan.

She married her high school sweetheart, Arthur Brackman, in 1946. He died in 1966. In 1979, she married Louis Bernstein, and the couple lived in Lawrence. Bernstein died in 2007.

Aside from her daughter, Brackman Bernstein is survived by a son, Robert Brackman of Stamford, Conn.; four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. A service will be held at 11:30 a.m. Sunday at Boulevard-Riverside Chapel in Hewlett, followed by burial at New Montefiore Cemetery in West Babylon.