By Toby Tabachnick

Keny Deren, the principal of Yeshiva Schools of Pittsburgh for 30 years, and the matriarch of a prominent Lubavitch family that includes Rabbi Yisrael Deren and his wife Vivi of Chabad of Fairfield County in Stamford, died Tuesday, Jan. 21. She was 83.

Deren was the daughter of Chaya and Rabbi Sholom Posner, one of the first Lubavitch couples dispatched by Rebbe Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn to engage in Jewish outreach across the United States. In 1943 the Posner family was sent from Chicago to Pittsburgh to found what would become the Yeshiva Schools and Lubavitch Center of Pittsburgh. Deren began teaching in the school while she was still a teenager, and helped to foster its eventual growth from a handful of students to well over 400.

In 1949, she married Rabbi Yechezkel Deren z”l, a Polish-born yeshiva student who fled the Nazis by escaping through Japan and occupied Shanghai. The couple lived for a time in Davenport, Iowa, where Yechezkel Deren served as a shochet (ritual slaughterer), but soon returned to Pittsburgh, where Keny Deren resumed her work at Yeshiva Schools. Yechezkel Deren died in 1978.

She was instrumental in convincing many families who were not Lubavitch at the time to send their children to Yeshiva, according to a friend, Charles Saul.

William Rudolph recalled meeting Deren in the late 1980s, when Deren suggested that he and his wife, Lieba, consider enrolling their children in Yeshiva.

“Even though it wasn’t really aligned with our practice of Judaism at the time, we were totally besotted with her personality, her effect and her unbelievable commitment and passion,” said Rudolph, who has two children now married to grandchildren of Deren’s.

Deren became one of the first recipients of the Rudolph Jewish Communal Professional award, the first day school administrator to receive that award.

“To have met her was to understand her intellect and her wisdom and her regalness,” her friend Sharon Saul said. “She spoke to others with respect. You just felt liked and validated and heard. And her way was articulate and eloquent and warm. When someone like that authentically speaks to you from their heart, it touches you.”

Many of Deren’s more than 100 descendants are serving as Chabad emissaries throughout the world.

In addition to Rabbi Yisrael (Vivi) Deren, she is survived by her children: Sonia (Rabbi Elyakim) Wolff of Morristown, N.J.; Chavie (Rabbi Leibel) Altein of Brooklyn, N.Y.; Blumie (Rabbi Yisroel Rosenfeld) of Pittsburgh; Rabbi Yosef (Batsheva) Deren of Pittsburgh; Rabbi Mendel (Braindel) of Lod, Israel; and Chanie (Rabbi Berel) Lazar of Moscow.

She is also survived by her siblings, Rabbi Zalman Posner, Rabbi Leibel Posner, Rabbi Zushia Posner, Bassie Garelik and Sara Rivkah Sasonkin.

This article is reprinted from chabad.org.