Rabbi Daniel Grama

Director of Recruitment
Year Honored: 2022

Valley Torah High School
Valley Village, CA

Biographical Information:

Rabbi Daniel Grama exudes kindness, caring and true admiration for the young men he has taught at Valley Torah High School for more than a decade. Rabbi Grama is the school’s director of recruitment for incoming ninth graders and teaches Torah, Talmud and Halacha to students who come to VTHS with less prior exposure to Judaism, focusing on building relationships and sharing his positive outlook on life. Talmud, with its foreign vocabulary and lack of punctuation and sentence structure, is always a challenge, so Rabbi Grama has developed special worksheets to help students apply their knowledge of text and uses relatable examples to discuss Talmudic concepts. 

In addition to Torah, Rabbi Grama leads the school’s Sephardi Minyan, making sure students from Sephardic families maintain their rich culture and customs. Outside of school, Rabbi Grama leads the Westside Shul and hosts a weekly “Torah Tuesday” program on Instagram Live with his daughter Aliza. He holds certificates in rabbinical studies Beth Medras Eeyun HaTalmud in Monsey, New York (1991); rabbinical ordination (S’Micha) from the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (1996); and master’s degrees in educational leadership from Bellevue University (2019) and social work from Yeshiva University (2022). 

Rabbi Grama cites his parents, both educators, and his ninth grade rabbi as role models and inspiration for his career in education. He sees his role not just as teaching Torah, but also as inspiring and motivating youth to continue living a Jewish life and studying religion: “I want them to value themselves both as people and as Jews connected to our Torah history.”

Note: This biography was current at the time this educator received the Award