Interview with Rabbi Helene, Beit Chaverim

 

Interview with Rabbi Helene

Beit Chavarim

St. George, Utah

 

Interview takes place at Rabbi Helene’s Home Office

April 12, 2016

 

Matt:       I’m here with Rabbi Helene Ainbinder the Rabbi for the Beit Chavarim of Southern Utah.  Please, Rabbi, let’s start with your biography, as young as you want to go.

Rabbi Helene:  When I was young, I’m from New York City and Long Beach, Long  Island and then, eventually, the Huntington area of Long Island, New York, and Centerport.  I lived in an Orthodox family, meaning they’re very traditionalist in Judaism in their observances.  When we moved to Long Beach I was exposed to a diversity of different Jewish people but we still stayed within an Orthodox portion of religious observance.

M:          So were there lots of Jewish people where you were at?

RH:         A huge amount.  Just as there were huge amounts of Christians.  We didn’t see Muslim communities.

M:          Did you have Jewish neighborhoods?

RH:         Not where we grew up.  We lived within communities that had large Jewish communities, but not like Burough Park where there is just isolation or, you could say, Little Italy or China Town.  Where I grew up it wasn’t that kind of a setting.

            When we moved to Long Beach I met and married my husband.  He was a Conservative Jew, but didn’t practice.

M:          What does that mean?

RH:         That means he didn’t keep kosher, didn’t go to synagogue, didn’t believe in an organized religion.  But we were married Jewish, traditionally.

M:          So, secular.

RH:         Secular.  Absolutely secular.

            When he decided to retire we moved to St. George, Utah, only because we looked for a couple of years in the West where we would like to retire.  Altitude levels, because we were at sea level so I had altitude sickness in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  St. George had a city and a community and there were Jewish people.  I was retiring so I figured, “That’s that.”

            Getting to how I became a Rabbi. . .

M:          Well, tell me a little bit about your childhood.  You were born into an active Jewish family.

RH:         Very active.  My father was a Kosher butcher and later, after my grandfather passed away, he worked in the meat industry but not in a religious setting like he was.  I had a brother, also a secular Jew.

M:          Is that a term people use?

RH:         No.  That’s a term I’m using for your clarification.

M:          Does that mean the same thing as Conservative?

RH:         No.  Secular people are . . .It’s a broad scope.  They are Jews that might take part in the High Holiday services which are Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur.  They might not keep Kosher.  They might never go to shul, or the services, or a synagogue or a temple.  These are the different classifications of our houses of worship.  They might just show up once in awhile if it’s someone’s child becoming a bar mitzvah or a wedding or if, unfortunately, they lose a parent or a sibling or, heaven forbid, a child.  What I would call “life cycle events” bring them back.

            There’s three forms of religion, sects, in the Jewish community that are dominant.  Up until the 1850s all Jews practiced traditional Judaism and there was no such thing as Conservative, Reformed, Reconstructionist, Orthodox, Ultra-Orthodox, you know, all the different things.  In Germany there was a reformation, a reform movement.  They wanted to be part and parcel of the society.  They figured that instead of only praying in Hebrew, “We’re gonna get rid of that.  We’re gonna pray in German, they native tongue of the country we live in.  That way we’ll be more accepted into the society.”  The very Orthodox, meaning traditionalists, said, “Absolutely not.  Hebrew is the only language which we’re using in services.  It’s a holy language.  We won’t even speak it.”  They spoke Yiddish or German.  You could read Hebrew and study it, but you weren’t allowed to speak it out loud like a common language like French or Italian.

            The Conservative movement said, they’re forming their theisms within Judaism, they felt, “Maybe we’ll do a little German,” or whatever the language of that country would be, and predominantly it would be Hebrew.  No music.  The Reform movement said, “We could add music just like the Christians and we don’t have to keep Kosher.”

            The Conservative says, “No music.  We’re gonna keep Kosher.”

M:          Is Conservative the same thing as Orthodox?

RH:         I call certain Conservative movements “Conservadox” because they lean more towards the Orthodox even though they don’t have to.  They don’t accept women as part of their minyan, which is a representation of 10 people of the community; in order to pray, in order to, if someone dies, to have a service within the mourners home, only men.  Women are not allowed.  Conservative also can swing as far as totally egalitarian, meaning men and women in equal roles, equal participation, equal everything.  Then there’s the one’s in between where they pick and choose how observant or how not so observant to, what we would consider, the traditional beliefs.

            Reform Movement throws it all out the window.  They’ll use music.  Anything to enhance the service.  Instead of Friday night and Saturday morning until Saturday night.  Here in Utah they have one Friday night.  Traditional Judaism or Orthodox and Conservative will not take the Holy Torah, the Five Books of Moses, out of the Arc.  But the Reform movement felt, if you have people there, and they’re only coming on a Friday night, then you can take the Torah out.  Some Reform Movements do have Friday night services and a short Saturday morning, but it’s mostly all English, very little Hebrew.  Each division, or each sect of the religion has how they want to practice because we have boards, too, that hire rabbis, or hire cantors that lead services.  They more or less tell you, “This is what our congregation’s like.  This is what we want.”  And we’re like an employee, and yet we do give spiritual guidelines and try to stick with halakhah Jewish law rather than minhah which is customs.

M:          So there are these three main divisions:  Orthodox, Conservative, Reform.

RH:         There is also a Reconstructionist, which I think, but don’t quote me, they’ll keep kosher and they’ll adhere to certain aspects of the traditions but they’re Reformed in other ways of their practices.

            It’s a matter of where you live.  Now I’m going to take you more or less into the modern era because we have people like Madonna, who wants to study and be a kabbalist.  That’s part mysticism, part philosophy within the Jewish faith.

M:          Madonna the singer.

RH:         Madonna the singer is who I’m talking about.  We even had Sammy Davis, Jr. who converted to Judaism.  We have a lot of celebrities who are Jewish.  I’m taking her because she wanted to reach her inner soul or spirit or whatever and she felt that the Jewish mysticism of kabbalah will help her attain whatever her philosophies were.

            We have all these little new things that are coming up within our religion; makes it more flexible.  I was told last week, the Orthodox community ordain a woman Rabbi.  That’s unheard of!  That means, just so you know my background, because I was Orthodox, I was the first woman in my family to go to college.  Up until 18, regular public school. . .Maybe there were other Jewish people that I know of that did go to college, but in my family, my father’s father, my mother’s father and mother, were secular-type Jews.  Non-practicing.  Didn’t keep kosher.  It was like the two extremes.  In our house we were kosher.

M:          Your family was Orthodox?

RH:         In their traditional. .

M:          The men in your family went to college, but not the women.

RH:         Most of them.  But none of the women.  I broke a barrier.

M:          Did that concern anybody?

RH:         It concerned my father’s father.  “Aren’t you gonna get married?  Aren’t you gonna have children?”

            And I said, “Eventually.”

            My cousins, who the oldest one didn’t go to college.  But the others, one’s a lawyer, one’s a psychologist, one’s a teacher, I think.  The rest are all men.  They’re professionals or businesspeople.

M:          So you family went to Synagogue regularly?  Weekly?

RH:         Yes.  Oh, yes!  Friday/Saturday. . .From Friday night to Saturday it was Synagogue and then the Sabbath.  When we moved to Long Beach it wasn’t so rigid.  We were able to play with our friends after services.  But women sat on the other side of a wall or barrier called a mechitza, a separation of men and women.

M:          Could you see each other?

RH:         No.  Unless I stood up.  I wasn’t allowed in that section.  Some of the Synagogues that were Orthodox, the women would be up a level, and you could look down.  Our voices would be too alluring and they shouldn’t be heard because the men have to really devote their attention to praying to God.

M:          And the women are just there?

RH:         Well, we pray quietly and privately.

M:          I imagine, with these divisions, there is quite a bit of discussion within the Jewish community about these things, like the role of women.

RH:         Absolutely.  Within each seminary, women have been striving over the last 40 years to get our voices heard, to be full participants within the religion.

            I wasn’t brought up that way; to learn Hebrew, to learn about the real studies of the Jewish faith.  I knew how to light candles and do blessings over the wine and the halal and everything like that.  But not to read Hebrew, not to worship in Hebrew.

            The other thing is that. . .I’m like a unique person because when we moved, we had children, my son blew out, he was about 5 or 6, he blew out my hanukiah which is the Hanukkah menorah.  I wasn’t affiliated with a synagogue back then.  I called up my father.  I said, “What do I do?  Do I light the menorah again?”

            He says, “Do you light your Shabbats candles every week?”

            I said, “Well, you know, not really.”

            He says, “How do you expect him to understand who he is as a Jew if once a year you go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, and now there’s a holiday of Hanukkah.  He’s torn apart because there’s the Christian holiday of Christmas and he sees all the lights and his friends who aren’t Jewish.  If he doesn’t have a good foundation,” I guess my father was trying to say, “or knew his Jewish identity what would happen?”

            Then I joined a synagogue, an equalitarian one at the time.  I didn’t know men could sit next to women.

M:          Where is this?

RH:         Long Island.  Huntington.

            What happened was, my father said, “You belong to a shul?”

            I go, “No.  It’s the Huntington Jewish Center,” it was called.

            And he said. . .This one had an organist who was an older woman and they didn’t want to fire her, so she would do some of the music on a little organ.  Then the old Rabbi left and a new Rabbi came in and said, “No more music.”  There’s a division on that.

            I became part and parcel.  I said, “Gee.  This is interesting.”  But, once again, I didn’t know Hebrew.  You could learn the melodies and you could learn some of the words by rote because they do it each week.  If you go each week you pick it up.

            When my son started religious school, he was learning Hebrew.  I told my husband, “You had a bar mitzvah.  You can do this.  I haven’t seen this since I was 13.”  At this point in time, I wanna say early-80s, the men used to be the teachers.  The Hebrew schools decided to do it directly from public school.  A lot of men can’t leave their jobs before 5 o’clock.  There was a void of teachers.  Women started to fill that need.  But we didn’t have the education.

M:          What kind of teachers are you talking about?

RH:         Religious teachers.  Rabbis.  Rabbis would primarily do the teaching, or learned laity would teach.

            But at this point there was such a shortage that the Jewish community, through UJA and Koger, these different philanthropic organizations, developed a marsha (?) for the conservative movement, and I think the reform movement, also, but I can’t speak for them.  I went through the conservative, so I’m speaking with a conservative point of view.  It’s free of charge.  It’s called a marsha, it’s a teachers learning institute.  It was at night, two nights a week – 2 and 2 - for about 4 hours.  My husband said, “As long as the kids showered, bathed, and in bed, go ahead.”  He didn’t want to deal with the children at night.

            I said, “Fine.”  He figured it would be a passing phase.  Within 6 months one of the educational directors or teachers of the school, one of the lecture individuals, she hired me to teach in her school.  I said, “I really don’t do Hebrew.”

            She says, “I’m letting you do an early grade where they’re just learning the letters.”  Just like I was.  “And all the vowels.”  I worked for her for six years.  Then I moved up in different levels.

M:          These are schools outside of. . .

RH:         They’re usually in congregations.  Synagogues have schools and they teach their congregants.

M:          After they go to their secular-type school they come to religious school?

RH:         Yes.  Some are once a week, some are twice a week, some are three days a week.

M:          But they aren’t like, say, Catholic schools where they learn math and. . .

RH:         We have, in the Conservative Movement, a Solomon Schechter kind of set-up where you’re in a setting where you have the secular and the religious together.  But for the secular Jews, which could be Reformed, Conservative, and even Orthodox, and they don’t go to one of those specific Yeshivas or (hay.ders)? that cater just to religion.  They’ll go to the public schools during the day and then, from let’s say 4 or 4:30 to 6-6:30, they’ll be in a religious setting and they’ll learn about their religion.  Not all people participate.

            So this is that kind of setting.  They go to public school and then I would be teaching in the evening or afternoon, 4:30 until 6:30ish.  Now what happens is, I was intrigued and I wanted to learn more.  They had an advanced class.  I went for three years.  We started with about 20 men and women.  Out of those 20, 6 of us graduated.  They were all women.  All of us had teaching jobs.

M:          You were teaching while you were taking the classes?

RH:         Absolutely.  That’s how bad the shortage was.  Over the course of time there was no more shortage, nor more need, and no more funding and the Marsha closed.  I graduated with, I think it was the second class.  What happened was that I went to Hofstra University, cuz they had a Judaic Studies department.  In New York.  In Hempstead, New York, on Long Island.  If you want to know my schedule:  I got up in the morning, got the kids on the bus, went to Hofstra which was about 45 minutes to an hour away, depending upon traffic, from where I lived.  Took various courses.  Came home.  Picked up the kids.  Either they stayed home or, I had a neighbor who we did a carpool.  I would drive them to the religious school on my way to my job – I couldn’t work within my congregation, it was not allowed, for many reasons.  She would pick them up and I would come home and make dinner, do their homework, do my homework.  And the routine would go.  That was only about two days a week, during the week.  Sunday School, when I taught on Sunday, my husband took them to and from the religious school.  I got a bachelors in Judaic Studies and a minor in Fine Arts.  I was a fashion designer and merchandizing buyer in New York City.  I graduated Fashion Institute.  That’s how I met my husband, in the city.

M:          What did he do?

RH:         He was a furrier.  We met on the Long Island Railroad.  You meet people, you talk.  That’s how I met him.

M:          When you were young, what kind of school did you go to?  Did you go to public school?

RH:         Public school.

M:          An integrated school?

RH:         Absolutely.  My brother went to religious school.  His Hebrew school was three days a week plus he had to be in shul Friday and Saturday.  I don’t think they did Sundays.

M:          So you went to the public schools, and then did you go to religious school.

RH:         I did not go.  I went one day and told the wrong grandfather that I went to a religious. . .And he goes, “What does she need it for.?”  So I didn’t go.  Not saying that my mother and father didn’t want me to experience it, it’s just that it created a riff within the family.  Other girls went.  It depended upon their families.

            So, from having my bachelors I was very content teaching and I was happy that I had all this extra knowledge on an academic level.  Then they needed, the communities of the Jewish people grew in such volume, they needed, the larger synagogues and temples, needed not one Rabbi but two Rabbis, because there were so many families.  If they couldn’t afford a second Rabbi, one would be the head Rabbi and the other would be, maybe, the Assistant Rabbi that would take care of family needs or family events.  The head Rabbi would do the traditional 24/7, if you need a clergy, he did everything.  What happened was some of these institutions and religious houses of worship couldn’t afford the salaries of two Rabbis.  They instituted what became a Jewish Family Educator.  It’s like a Masters within the religious community.  That was another two years of study of Sociology, Psychology, methodology, how to deal with certain situations within an institution and how, of course, to deal with people in various situations throughout lifecycle events.  Yes, we don’t get paid as much as an Assistant Rabbi or a Rabbi.  I was very happy doing that.  Helping out and doing that kind of a thing.  But I never was hired.  They were hiring men over women.  And I said, “Oh well.”  I was teaching in, if you can imagine, three different schools, part-time.  Monday and Wednesday was one school, Tuesday/Thrursday was another, Wednesday night I taught art at a regional Hebrew high school.  And I raised my family.  Everything was moving smoothly.  Everybody was happy.  I was also part and parcel of the Women’s League for the Conservative Movement.  I moved my way up to being the president of a region in New York which they called branches back then, but now they’re regions.  I sit on the board of the Torah Fund, which is the fundraising aspect of the Jewish Theological Seminary.  We make donations and help give scholarships to students that can’t afford to go to the Seminary, and other things that we do with the funds.  I was very much into that and I might lecture once or twice for them.

M:          Were you parents from the United States?

RH:         Yeah.  They were from the United States.  My father’s family, all but four of them, died in the Holocaust.  The reason that I’m alive is that when my great grandmother, my father’s grandmother died, she died at childbirth of my grandfather.  When he became 13 he was in Poland and his new mother said, “Go live with your mother’s family in New York.”  You have to understand that my great great, my grandfather, great grandfather, was a Rabbi, married to a Rabbi’s daughter.  He had to have more than one child so the second grandmother, great grandmother had another 11 children.  Out of those 11, which are half-brothers and sisters to my grandfather, two made it to, after the Holocaust, which we found out many years later, to Palestine which is now Israel, on got off the boat in Cuba, the boat to nowhere that’s called the St. Louis, the other one wound up in Argentina.  All the rest of the family perished.  My father studied to be a doctor.  He was just shy of. . .

M:          Your father was born here?  And your mother, too?

RH:         Born here.  Lived here.  Both Americans.  Born here.  Legal Americans.  In fact my mother’s mother was born in America.

M:          So your grandmother was born in America.

RH:         My grandmother was born in America.  But not my great grandparents.

M:          All in New York?

RH:         All in the New York City area.  What happened was that my father couldn’t afford medical school.  He graduated college with an economics degree, he’s an economist.  He wanted to be in the medical field so he joined the armed forces.  He said that he won the lottery.  He talked very little about the war years.  What happened was he went into General Bradley’s division as a medic.  When the war broke out, General Patton said, “I want your trained people.”  He fought along side General Patton for 5 years through the war.  He was part of their medical team and he liberated 5 concentration camps.  The last one, he found out, all his family were killed there.  He never went back to practicing medicine.  It’s sad.  Stephen Spielberg called him a few times.  He was doing a documentary on the liberators of the camps.  My step mother, after my mother passed, she said that his secretary’s or people would call, and he just wouldn’t talk about the war.  Towards the end of his demise, I have little snippets of information.  That’s the old war map of the 9^th Division [she is showing me a map that she has framed], 1^st Infantry.  The photographer died and that’s how my father got the map.  This is the Octofoil.  These are all the battles and the movements.

M:          That’s the original?

RH:         This is original.

            What I have to do is contact people.  When you go through something like that, he probably had what we call today, Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  That probably made me part of who I was, not knowing until later in life.  But now, years gone by, I’m a Rabbi 7 years now, 6 or 7 years, what happened was one of my friends, her son was going to get married to a non-Jew.  She’s said, “You can marry them.”

            I said, “I’m not a Rabbi.  And most Rabbis won’t do an interfaith marriage.”

            “Yes, you can do it.  Go finish your degrees.”

            I said, “I really don’t want to do all this.”  With the invention of computers I could do a lot online.

M:          So you’re not in New York, anymore?

RH:         I was still in New York.  I’m only here about 3 ½ years full time. 

M:          But you were in Mexico for awhile?

RH:         That’s a second home.

            “Alright, I’ll look into it.”  I can’t go to the Jewish Theological Seminary.  They require a year living in Israel.  I can’t uproot and live in Israel for a year.  Same with the Reform Movement.  But there’s this online seminary.  I gave them all my information.  I worked 8 years, like I said, with the Israelis.  They grandfathered it in.

M:          You worked 8 years with the Israelis?

RH:         Right.  I was on a grant where I went up and back to Israel.  I worked on educational programming.

M:          While you were doing your teaching?

RH:         Yes.  They needed a team from different synagogues and different sects of the Jewish community, and my Rabbi said, “Did you look at the papers?”

            “What papers on my desk?”

            He goes, “It’s a trip to Israel.”

            “Whoa whoa whoa!  What does it entail?”  It entailed once a week meetings learning about Israel:  the culture, what we needed to do, how to form relations, how to build better understanding within the congregations (Israelis and Americans), and how to develop programs within our educational system to bring everybody together.  I wrote a lot of educational programming.  It was written up in Haaretz and in the Jerusalem Post.

            So this is how I was able to fulfill working with the Israelis and doing all this kind of study rather than living and being part of the culture in Israel for a year.  The other parts are writing, I don’t have to tell you, to go through a ordination.  Doing it via the computer.  That took awhile.  I was confirmed or ordained by a Betin or Rabbis of a seminary.  They confirmed my ordinations.

M:          When you say you don’t have to tell me about the writings, what do you mean?

RH:         You have to write thesises and reports and school work.  There are other things that you have to do as a Rabbi.  You have to follow another Rabbi around.  Certain things that it entails for a clergy.

M:          So it was an online program.  Does it have a name?

RH:         Yes.  Esoteric Theological Seminary.  Esoteric meaning “all encompassing.”  They’ll have different religions.

M:          So it wasn’t just a Jewish place?

RH:         No no no.  It was all different religions.  Her son didn’t want me to marry him because he wanted me just to be a guest at the wedding.  So I said, “Okay,” and somebody else married them.

            So I told one synagogue I was working with and they refused to recognize my smicha, my ordination.  The other synagogue I was working in wished me a mozel tov, good luck, great, and I was their educational director.

M:          Why wouldn’t one recognize it?

RH:         Because I didn’t go to what they call the JTS.  Privately, that other synagogue, their Rabbi didn’t graduate the JTS.  He graduated from the Reconstruction Movement.  Yet he was the Rabbi for a Conservative synagogue.

            So my husband says, “Just leave the synagogue.”

            I said, “Absolutely not.”

Also, the cantor, who was Orthodox in his ways, a very Orthodox man, he said, “I didn’t speak Hebrew well enough.”

      I said, “I’ve been leading your family services for six years or seven years.  I think I speak Hebrew well enough.  And I’ve been teaching your young grade all the way up to seventh graders.  Not only can they read the Hebrew, they know the words and they understand the Hebrew.  You teach them the melodies.”  I said, “Fine.  You want me to study.  You want me to do this, but I also corrected Chancellor Ismar Schorsch, who was the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary not once, but twice, because of little discussions and lectures he was doing and Vice Chancellor Labo (?), or his secretary, printed the wrong tractate.”  So I said, “Before you write this in the journal for the Conservative Movement, I could be wrong, but. . .”  And I wasn’t.  By the way, Chancellor Schorsch got his ordinations and doctorates in Semitic Languages.

      I was so engrained at the time and studying so hard.  Like my husband says, “You were probably the only one that read the Hebrew of the tractate or whatever papers you had while everybody else was just listening or leaving the lecture.”

      So I said, “Fine.  You want this cantor, you want me to do this”

      And my husband says, “Why are you doing this?  You don’t need the job.  Just leave.”

      And I said, “No.  Because if there’s another woman who gets credentials and it’s not to their liking, then she’ll have to go through what I’m going through.  And I don’t think that’s fair for another woman to do that.”  So I stayed the whole year.  Unfortunately they lost the grants in Israel, they lost the money, they lost the connections.  But I still maintained it at the other place where I was the educational director.

      Now I still have to deal with this small Jewish community.  When I was in Israel they found out who I was and what this cantor did.  Eventually the whole grant system went to another area in the United States where the Israelis were working with another group of people.  Which is fine.  But I felt that my teachings and program could’ve gone further.  Better relations and connections with the children who are now in their early-30s would’ve made a big impact in both communities.

M:    Fast forward to today.  Did you just decide to retire to St. George?  Did you research it at all?

RH:   We did.  My husband and I are golfers.  I wanted a community.  I wanted a city.  I wanted a Jewish community where I at least could pray with fellow Jews.  I Googled (God bless Google) “Jewish Community of St. George, Utah.”  Beit Chaverim came up.  I met with one or two of the people.  I said, “I’m not a pulpit Rabbi, I’m a educational Rabbi.  I ran a school.”

      They said, “You’re the only Rabbi in town.”

      I said, “I’ll advise you.”

M:    At this point you’ve already moved here.

RH:   I was still going up and back.  When they finally approached me at that time. . .I’m here full-time, but I’m still going to go back to New York.  I thought we were gonna do six and six.  Six months here, six months, or four or five months when it’s hot, back to the east coast.  I needed eye surgery.  So that first year I didn’t want commitments and I still wanted to get acclimated to the society that I’m dwelling in.  I said to this nice lady, “Okay.”

      She says, “Would you be interested in being part of the Interfaith Council?”

      I said, “Sure.”

      “Oh, good.  The meeting is this Friday.”  I didn’t even unpack my boxes and I became part of the Interfaith Council.  I got to meet all the different various clergy and the different religions that are in the community.  The people.

      After my surgery and came back, my husband said, “We’re not going back to Long Island.  It costs, number 1, a fortune.  We’re gonna stay here.  We’re gonna golf.”  He started to play Bridge, that’s where he is now, more than golf.  I golf and he’s a Bridge player.

      I said to their lay leader, who was moving back to Florida, she said, “Good!  You’re here full-time.”  She and her husband moved back to Florida.

      I said, “Alright.  I’ll be your Rabbi.”  It was a matter of, when I first came to their congregation they would do one line in Hebrew and I was continuing in the Hebrew, and they would go, “No.  We do the rest in English.”

      I was like, “Oh, okay.”  I realized it’s a Reformed congregation.  When they asked me, it was a matter of meeting with their board and saying, “Look, this is what we expect of you.  We don’t want you to do so much Hebrew.”  Then over the last year or so, I added more Hebrew because we have an Orthodox Jewish man who can’t go up and back to Vegas anymore and he wants to feel comfortable.  We have Conservative Jews.  We have Reformed Jews.  We have Jewish people who are interfaithed married and want to have their spouses feel comfortable.

      “And we want you to do the service in one hour or less.”

M:    What’s a typical. . .

RH:   A typical service on a Friday night could be an hour, hour and a half.  Outside of Utah, in most synagogues, temple, whatever, houses of worship.  Orthodox is longer.  Saturday morning, they could start anywhere from 9 o’clock and go all the way to 1:00.  Some could go from 8 in the morning to 1:30.

M:    And this is every week.

RH:   Every week.  So I said, “If we’re meeting Friday night. . .”  Someone brought a Torah back from Israel and wanted it used.  The woman who is in charge, which was Reesa Baum?  I can’t.. . .I think Baum was the original Reformed Rabbi who opened the synagogue.  But when she went back to California they took pieces of how to do the service but had no rhyme or reason or flow to it to make it meaningful.  But it was good for the group, the congregation.  So I went with them over the service and I said, “I know it goes against my grain to take the Torah out on a Friday night because I’m used to it being out on Monday, Thursday, or Saturday morning only.  But when in Rome.  And if you’re the only synagogue or temple in town, you’re Reformed, the Reformed movement says you can have it.  You have your people and you want them to be closer to the Torah.  And it’s permitted.”  So now I’m Reformed.  Now I’m reformed.  I said to them, “If I take the Torah out there’s blessings you have to do before, blessings after, and it’s in Hebrew.  And I have to wear a tallis.  Some of them were a little against it because I was becoming too religious.

      I said, “It’ll be fine.  I’ll do it as I’d do a family service, like I do on a Saturday morning way back in the day in New York.”  On a Saturday morning, there’s three parts of the morning service:  Shachar, which are the morning blessings and prayers; then you have the Torah service, with the what was happening in the Torah; and the haptorah, which is the Prophets and the writings at that time.  When we couldn’t read the Torah, practiced reading and studying the Torah because of persecutions through the centuries, we would read the Prophets and their writings and what happened.  Now we do it together on a Saturday.  We finish with an afternoon service because a lot of people don’t want, Conservative people, don’t want to go up and back for an afternoon, and they put it all together within 3 ½ hours.

M:    You don’t do that here.

RH:   No.  I do it all on a Friday night in one hour. You witnessed the rosh chodesh which is the announcing of a new month.  That’s why I was like, “Wait, don’t go there.”  Some people are anxious and they think they know, and they have an outline of our service.  I go, “Nope.  I have to announce a new month.  We’re leaving one month and we’re coming into Nissan,” which is for the month of Passover.  Then there’s other stipulations that go with it.  I said, “That’s what you get with a Rabbi.”

      I’m a volunteer.  I do not get paid.  It seems to be working out.  They kind of like me.  This is my second year.  This past September, 2015, I started my second year.  I go from September to September, not January to December.  It seems to be working.  Now I’m a Vice President of the Interfaith Council.  There was a shortage of a diversity of chaplains and I took courses and became a chaplain.  Now I’m the Jewish Chaplain at the regional hospital.  Also, we invite people from the church that loans us, or lets us pray. . .

M:    The Presbyterian Church.

RH:   The Presbyterian Church that allows us their educational buildings to worship in or use in our holidays when we get too many people and it’s overflow from the small little room, we use their bigger, educational wing.  We invite their members to our Passover Seder.  Anybody’s welcome to come to our services, it doesn’t matter if you’re Jewish or not Jewish, it’s just open to the community.  One of their members said, “You should do ICL.”

      I said, “I don’t know what ICL is.  Let me look into it.”  And about a year and a half ago, this will be finishing my second year with them.  ICL is the Institute for Continuing Learners; you have to be 55 and older.  I became their Judaic Studies lecturer.  I have all this knowledge and what do I do with it?  I felt there was a need in the community and I wrote a book, A Novices Guide through the Jewish Holidays.

M:    I need to get a copy.

RH:   Here.  I’ll give you one and sign it.

      I wrote it primarily for the people who are interfaith married.  Both my children, by the way, are interfaith married.  My daughter’s raising her children, my two grandsons, Jewish.  They’re going to the after school religious schools.

M:    Where do they live?

RH:   They live in Pennsylvania.  She’s married to an Englishman.  Half English, half American.  His mother is English, his father is . . .

M:    He’s Christian of some kind?

RH:   He’s Protestant but he believes now in the Jewish faith.  He was never totally taking on the faith.

      My son married a girl from Holland, the Netherlands, whose mother’s Dutch, she was born in Holland, became American.  Her father’s British.  They’re also Protestants in their belief.  My son’s Jewish.  Yeah, she’ll put up the Hanukah Menorah but, like he says, he’s not eating Matza.

      I said, “Wharever, Ian.  Just as long as the little one knows that there’s two religions.”  My daughter-in-law tries.  I’m happy as long as they’re happy.

      I wrote the book so that they would have an understanding of the . . .Why are their holidays not on Easter.  I had so many phone calls from the community, religious people of different faiths, “Why wasn’t Passover this Sunday?”

      I said, “Did you not read my article?”  I write articles for The Spectrum.  “Why are the Jewish holidays so late this year?  Because it’s a Leap Year.”  In my book I wrote about the calendar system.  We’re lunar as opposed to the secular calendar that’s Gregorian.  All the holidays.  I put it so people could have a guideline, an outline, what they would need for the holidays, what the holiday’s are.  Some are in the Torah, most of them are.  Then we have what are known as, after the Torah was codified and finished, Hanukah came after.  Hanukah was made into a festival holiday.  Then we have Israel.  And before Israel we have the Holocaust.  It became part and parcel of our beliefs and culture.  We have holidays, observances, and memorial for what’s gone on.  That’s in the book.  People don’t know why they eat certain foods at certain times of the year, so I put in the recipes that pertain to the holidays and why you’re eating them and why you’re doing certain things.  And since I’m an artist I put an artwork so that if they wanted to make masks or things for Purim or if they wanted to make a halakuh because you cover your hala, it’s in there.  And then some background of .. .a bibliography of books to read if you want further.  It’s geared more for interfaith, multigenerational, type of families.  The publisher I used didn’t have a davka which is like a Hebrew printing.  I said, “It doesn’t matter.  The Jewish people probably can’t read Hebrew,” so I wrote it in transliteration.  I felt it was a need and I think the Jewish community here.  Hopefully it comes full circle.