Rabbinic match game

Job market for rabbis is booming

JOE BERKOFSKY
Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Recently ordained Rabbi Judah Dardik of Congregation Beth Jacob in Oakland, Calif., speaks with congregant Ruth Smith.

Photo courtesy of Congregation Beth Jacob

For more than two decades, Suzanne Singer produced TV news, documentaries and other programs, rising to the top of her field and winning two Emmys.

The daughter of a woman who survived Auschwitz, Singer still felt vaguely dissatisfied with her life. She began studying Midrash, then Hebrew. She enrolled at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Los Angeles for a master's degree in Judaic Studies, then decided to go for a doctorate.

But in 2000 she switched to HUC-JIR's rabbinic program.

This summer, at age 50, Singer became the assistant rabbi at a 900-family Reform congregation in Oakland, Calif., Temple Sinai.

"I felt like I had found myself," she says.

The rabbinate may be Singer's true calling, but she also could hardly have followed a more opportune career path.

The rabbinic job market is booming.

Buoyed by an apparent growth in young people seeking spiritual pursuits, especially after Sept. 11, 2001, and by older people seeking a second career, the rabbinical seminaries are boasting record registration levels.

Upon ordination four to five years later, newly minted rabbis have an unprecedented array of career paths open to them. In addition to pulpit jobs, they are choosing positions in day schools, Jewish communal organizations, social agencies and at chaplaincies.

Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, director of rabbinic development for the Conservative movement's Rabbinical Assembly, says clerical unemployment in the movement has been nearly zero for at least the past five years.

For most rabbinical job hunters seeking a full-time job and willing to be flexible about location, Schonfeld says, "there is opportunity for nearly 100 percent employment. There is an ongoing trend for a demand for clergy."

The forces pushing this rabbinic explosion began emerging decades ago, during the post-World War II economic boom.

Urban Jews moved to the suburbs and built new synagogues, many of whose congregations grew large and wealthy enough over the years to staff several rabbis.

Gender not an issue in finding rabbi job

"All you need is a couple of dozen Levittowns and there's a job for every rabbi," says Rabbi David Komerofsky, associate dean of the Reform movement's HUC-JIR campus in Cincinnati.

These days the rabbinic assembly line is humming. Each year, the Reconstructionist movement fills an average of 24 pulpits; the Reform movement around 75; the Conservative movement between 50 and 75 and the modern Orthodox movement 48, largely via the seminaries affiliated with New York's Yeshiva University.

Such post-denominational seminaries as the Academy of Jewish Religion in New York are also churning out graduates.

Rabbi Andrea Myers, dean of admissions at the academy, says there were 12 graduates in 2003, nearly twice the average. Hebrew College in Newton, Mass., is launching a new multidenominational rabbinic school this fall.

Those numbers don't tell the whole story, however. Placement officials in the movements say that in most years some pulpits lie fallow - not for a shortage of rabbis but because the synagogues are not among the more plum assignments.

Observers say that in the Orthodox world pulpits often remain empty because graduates of Yeshiva's rabbinical school - modern Orthodoxy's main source of rabbis - pursue non-rabbinic careers. Aside from the field of education, many of Yeshiva's rabbinic graduates go on to become lawyers, businessmen or other professionals.

Other movements also have problems with insufficient rabbinic supply to meet the demand for pulpit posts.

"There are always 20 to 25 congregations that go unfilled every year," says Rabbi Arnold Scheer, placement director for the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform rabbinical group that's the largest of all the movements.

Those synagogues are typically smaller, isolated temples in shrinking Jewish communities, often in the South or Midwest, he adds.

But the path one rabbi took to just such a smaller venue reveals the spiritual power many feel pulling them to the job no matter where they end up.

Steve Gutow, 54, was a lawyer and political organizer who, like Singer, embarked on a new career in the 1990s.

In politics, Gutow launched the southwest chapter of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Washington-based National Jewish Democratic Council.

But he began relating to people largely as political assets, he recalls. "I wasn't looking at people as humans."

In 1992, his younger brother was killed in a bike accident, and Gutow began a spiritual trek that took him to Israel, Cambodia and, finally, to teach Sunday school in Dallas,.

He was invited to speak at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the movement's seminary in suburban Philadelphia, the day after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995.

The RRC "was like a spiritual haven," he says. "I walked away from there with tears in my eyes, positive that's where I would be going."

When he graduated this spring, Gutow looked for a smaller, more low-key synagogue, aiming to avoid a job where he would be required to spend a good deal of time raising money.

Gutow interviewed for a solo pulpit job in Montana and for an assistant post at a larger Washington, D.C., synagogue, but he settled on the Reconstructionist Minyan of St. Louis, a 15-family, startup congregation, where he says he found a connection.

"I want to ensure a sense of holiness, that we maintain a sense of integrity of a holy institution that brings people together in a common cause."

Like Gutow, Valley resident Bonnie Morris chose to apply to rabbinical school in mid-life. She had been the director of education at Temple Solel and helped establish The Pardes Jewish Day School.

"I was in a comfortable professional position," she says. "Not one bone of my body was sick of Jewish day school."

But she adds that she could not avoid the decision to become a rabbi.

Morris comes from 36 generations of rabbis on her father's side, dating back to Yaakov Embden, she explains. This rabbinic legacy directed her to pursue a career in education.

This career path began to change with the retirement of Temple Solel's Rabbi Maynard Bell. Morris explains that she began to help Rabbi Alan Berlin with "rabbinic functions," such as leading worship services and assisting congregants.

"This put me on the rabbinic path," says Morris.

The decision to study at the Academy of Jewish Religion, a five-year rabbinical program based in Los Angeles was "burdensome at this stage in life," she notes. She has had to commute to Los Angeles, three days a week to fulfill her studies, she says. She is scheduled to be ordained next year.

Morris says she plans to become a congregational rabbi because of the diversity of responsibilities.

"Every day is different," she says. "It is a gift when human beings open up to you," whether during tragedies or celebrations, she adds.

Among the latest crop of graduates who went straight to rabbinical school from college is Yeshiva graduate Yechiel Morris, 27, who this summer replaced an 18-year veteran at the Young Israel of Southfield, Mich., a 120-family shul.

It was something his grandfather, one of several rabbis in his family, said to him about baseball that sparked his interest in the rabbinate.

Before the World Series one year, his grandfather likened being a rabbi to being a pitcher - "the most important player of the game."

The recent rush to rabbinical school has sent enrollment skyrocketing.

At the RRC, enrollment has hovered between 19 in 1999 and 14 in 2003, one of the few seminaries to see a slight drop.

At the HUC-JIR's three campuses in New York, Cincinnati and Los Angeles, the total incoming class size shot up from 37 in 1999 to 67 in 2003 - the largest class since the Vietnam War a quarter- century ago.

The Conservative movement's rabbinical schools, the New York-based Jewish Theological Seminary and the University of Judaism in L.A., have also seen strong enrollment.

At JTS, rabbinical school enrollment for the new class climbed from 26 in 2001 to 31 in 2003, while the University of Judaism, which began its ordination program in 1999, mushroomed from six to 20 students.

And Yeshiva's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, the flagship school of modern Orthodoxy, has seen enrollment for its newest students climb from an average in the low-60s for the past four years to 86 in 2003.

All would-be rabbis have their own reason to seek a pulpit, but Rabbi Martin Cohen, of the Shelter Rock Jewish Center in Long Island, N.Y., a Conservative congregation, says the recent bounce in numbers was spurred in part by a "shock wave" rumbling from the horrific events of Sept. 11, 2001.

"While 9/11 was not the impetus for people to drop what they're doing and become clergy, 9/11 was the catalyst for people to think about what they're doing with their lives," says Cohen, who has recruited a few JTS students from among his own congregation.

"The idea of living every day as if it were your last is a very palpable notion today," he says. "Some incoming students wonder how they can be engaged in a career, an occupation, an avocation, that will have a lasting impact.''

Editor Barry Cohen contributed to this article.

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