Ellyn and her husband, Marty Kaufman moved to Leisure World in November 2020 from Annapolis. She has been a Jewish educator for the past 51 years. Her love of Hebrew started when she was a child growing up in Portsmouth, VA. Most children will not tell you that they love going to Hebrew School but she did. Ellyn found the modern Hebrew language to be expressive, rich with vocabulary while still in the process of being developed. Hebrew is a combination of terms from the Bible, great scholars from all times, some Arabic and incorporates many other languages within its own.

As a teenager, Ellyn was active with United Synagogue Youth (USY) and went with other teenagers to Israel for the summer of 1971. After starting college at VCU in Richmond, Virginia she begged her parents to allow her to switch to college in Israel. She lived on a kibbutz near Ashkelon, where there were only two English speaking members; so her command of the language was strengthened. When the Yom Kippur War broke out in 1973, she was living four miles away from the Gaza Strip. She had to help kibbutz members maintain the kibbutz, milk the cows, jump in the cotton gins and work with the children in the "gan" (nursery). It was quite a challenging time, but as a kibbutz member, she was expected to fill in as needed anyplace on the kibbutz.

After the war, Ellyn attended school at David Yellin Teachers College in Jerusalem where she studied early childhood and elementary education. Later, she transferred to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as an Israeli student and all her classes were in Hebrew. She double majored in Sociology and Economics.

When she returned to the US, she lived in Norfolk, Virginia where she taught at the Hebrew Academy of Tidewater and went back to school at Old Dominion University for her Masters degree in Education Administration. When she accepted the position at Beth El Hebrew Congregation as the Director of Education for their Hebrew school, her family moved to Alexandria, Virginia. She continued in her position as Director of Education, transferring to the Annapolis area in 2000. As the Principal of Temple Beth Shalom Hebrew School for 12 years, the school grew to include almost 300 students from Kindergarten through grade 12. She semiretired from Jewish Education in 2016. She currently teaches Hebrew to pre-B’nai Mitzvah students at Temple Isaiah in Fulton, Maryland.