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September 10, 2004/Elul 24 5765, Vol. 57, No. 1
Desert dweller to rabbiEight rabbis raised in Phoenix recall early years in Jewish community
DONALD H. HARRISON
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 Rabbi Ian Pear, with wife Rachel and daughters Gavriella, left, and Michella, is the spiritual leader of the Shir Hadash community in Nahiaot, Israel. Not pictured is baby Darya. Photo courtesy of Sara Pear |
Some speak almost mystically about the desert, while others remember being from the state that produced Barry Goldwater, a presidential candidate of Jewish ancestry.
Rabbi Judith Beiner
Rabbi Judith Beiner, associate rabbi at The Temple in Atlanta, remembers Herring in his role as director of Temple Beth Israel's summer camp, Camp Charles Pearlstein.
"I think of him as wearing shorts and Birkenstocks - he gave me an out-of-the-robe vision of what a rabbi could be," recalls Beiner, daughter of Linda and Marty Rosenthal.
The Reform rabbi says she still can picture Herring telling her, "I love my life, I can sit here any day and the phone will ring, and I never know what it will be."
Rabbi Eve Ben-Ora
Rabbi Eve Ben-Ora, director of education at the Jewish Community Center in Houston, similarly recalls Taff and his wife, Judy, running a day camp for Beth El Congregation that "was a lot of fun; he just loved singing. They were also advisers of USY."
But another memory eats at her. "At my bat mitzvah, in those days, girls weren't allowed to read from the Torah. They only were allowed to do a little from the Friday night service. It annoyed me that I didn't get to do what the boys could do, not even chant Kiddush. I wrote in my (bat mitzvah) speech that someday I would like to become a rabbi."
Ordained at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati in 1986, she became a rabbi at Congregation Emanuel in Denver, took the pulpit at nearby Temple Micah, and later returned to Congregation Emanuel as an associate rabbi. The move to Houston was prompted when her husband, Rabbi Avi Schulman, took a pulpit position in Sugarland, Texas.
"I went kicking and screaming," Ben-Ora says. After serving a year as "director of resettlement" for her growing family, she took the education position with the JCC eight years ago.
Rabbi Micah Caplan
Rabbi Micah Caplan grew up at Har Zion Congregation in Scottsdale, where his father, Barry, had been the cantor. Barry Caplan later was killed in an automobile accident en route to a Tashlich service in Santa Monica, Calif. "Those experiences were hard for me and my brother, but they helped me form my rabbinate," Caplan says. "I have experienced tragedy ... Phoenix was a good support system."
Phoenix, he adds, had "a very close-knit Jewish community - one place for meat shopping, one bakery, one shop for Judaica. I came to appreciate the closeness of the community."
Today as a pulpit rabbi at Congregation Shaarei Torah, a Conservative synagogue in Arcadia, Calif. - an affluent community near Pasadena that is home to the Huntington Library, the Los Angeles Arboretum, and some location shots for the hit TV series "Joan of Arcadia" - Caplan says that Arcadia, like Phoenix, brings to mind the song from another television show, "Cheers," about a place "where everyone knows your name."
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz and his wife, the former Naomi Grossman, now are rabbi and rebbitzin at the Conservative Temple Beth Sholom in Chula Vista, Calif. Naomi fondly remembers Plotkin as a rabbi in the classical Reform tradition.
"My mom had to beg him to wear a yarmulke at my bat mitzvah because all my relatives were from New York, where they were Conservative and deeply religious. He did."
Jeffrey Lipschultz grew up at Temple Solel, which he described as a breakaway, counterculture Reform congregation started by hippies and led by Rabbi Maynard Bell.
"I remember I had a very hippie bar mitzvah. I had poems from Joan Baez in it, and a song by John Lennon. My brother David's was the same way - he had a song by Joni Mitchell."
Desiring to learn more about Judaism at age 16, "I remember going to the rabbi and trying to get into some educational programs but there was nothing. He said, 'you could come to a class once a week but you would be the only one under 70 there.'"
So Lipschultz took classes at the JCC in Phoenix, "which was a hell of a shlep" from Tempe, where his mother had moved after divorcing his father. At Durango College in Colorado, Lipschultz decided to become active in the small Jewish community of Fort Lewis, eventually leading him to religious study in Israel.
Rabbi Ian Pear
Israel is where Rabbi Ian Pear ultimately made his home, founding the Orthodox Congregation Shir Ami in the Nahlaot neighborhood of Jerusalem. The son of former Phoenix JCC Director Martin Pear, the rabbi spent his high school years at Phoenix's Beth El Congregation after moving to Arizona from Florida. Participation in the Alexander Muss High School program in Israel, which was offered through the Bureau of Jewish Education in Phoenix, was a major factor in the younger Pear's career choice.
Attending Georgetown University, Pear was impressed by the seriousness of religious purpose he found among the Jesuits who operated the school. He became more observant, eventually deciding to study at a yeshiva in Israel before returning to the United States to get a law degree from New York University and ordination from Yeshiva University. His wife, Rachel, is the daughter of Robert Abrams, the former attorney general of New York. He jokes that going to Israel saved their marriage; had they remained in the United States, he would have wanted to live in Arizona, while she preferred New York.
The Orthodox congregation they founded features Shlomo Carlebach-type singing, and attracts a wide variety of Israelis ranging from fellow immigrants from America, streimel-wearing Hasidic Jews, Sephardic Jews from North Africa and native Israelis, Pear says. In a city where Jews sometimes define themselves by their differences, the Pears emphasize "Am Echad" - the notion of "one people."
Rabbi Wendy Drucker Pein
Rabbi Wendy Drucker Pein "grew up at Temple Beth Israel" and was "very active in BBYO at the old Phoenix JCC." She recalls how Plotkin once told her, "you'll make a great rabbi someday."
"I spent all my afternoons growing up at the Phoenix JCC," she recalls from Rye, N.Y., where she is a part-time rabbi at Congregation Emanu-El of Westchester County. "I spent my summers at the JCC Day Camp, first as a junior counselor and then as a senior counselor."
"The Jewish community was very tightly knit; I felt a very close connection," she recalled. "Everything we did outside of public school was Jewish - Hebrew High, JCC, summer camp and that formed a very strong identity."
She went on to Stanford University, where she majored in human biology, but spent much of her time at the Hillel house.
Rabbi Elie Spitz
Rabbi Elie Spitz belonged to Beth El Congregation during the days of Rabbi Moshe Tutnauer, whom he described as "a master rabbi, a master teacher, and probably the first person I encountered who took ideas very seriously and taught with nuance and passion. He was also a man who lived ideas, which included in those years - the 1960s to 1970s - marching in Selma, Ala., speaking for racial equality in the pulpit and being opposed to the war in Vietnam."
Other strong influences, he says, were Rabbi David Rebibo of the Phoenix Hebrew Academy, at whose home he often was a Shabbat guest, and Rabbi Barton Lee, the Arizona State University Hillel leader. Rebibo taught him "to be comfortable in Orthodox settings" and during "four years that I lived in Jerusalem, I prayed mainly in Orthodox settings," he says. "(Rabbi Lee) gave me a respect for the integrity and seriousness of Reform Judaism."
"I was born in Arizona in 1954 at a time when Phoenix was a big town, not the city it has grown to become," he says. "My parents were immigrants. I had an outsider-insider perspective. I grew up with parents with thick accents in a big cowboy town. Literally at Little League, Native Americans danced. Rodeo was a big event. I grew up feeling very much simultaneously an insider and an outsider. It was the place I knew, I did the things kids did, so I was an insider, but I also was an outsider. I had a strong Jewish identity."
After ordination in the Conservative movement, Spitz has served for 17 years as pulpit rabbi at Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, Calif. He is the author of the book, "Does the Soul Survive? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives and Living with Purpose."
Rabbi David E.S. Stein
Rabbi David E.S. Stein lived in the Arcadia district, an area dominated by citrus groves. "It was hard to get anywhere without a car, so as a child I got used to being by myself - making do at home." He had his bar mitzvah at Har Zion Congregation and attended Judaica High School at Temple Beth Israel.
He briefly attended ASU, where Lee, Hillel's rabbi, "impressed me a great deal with his strong values, equanimity and graciousness. He made the idea of being a rabbi very honorable."
From ASU, Stein went on to Stanford University where he obtained a degree in engineering. Next he went to Philadelphia, where he became a rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
Stein took a pulpit at a Reconstructionist Congregation in Baltimore, then became a free-lance editor of articles about Judaica, having the Jewish Publication Society and the Union for Reform Judaism as major clients. He works today from his home in Redondo Beach, Calif.
The geography of Phoenix "affected my choice of the rabbinate," Stein says. "I always found the upper Sonoran desert to be breathtakingly beautiful, a remarkably spiritual place. One of the remarkable things about Har Zion (Congregation) is that it was located on a couple of acres of creosote desert.
"I used to love staring out the window during services, being inspired by the quiet and the magnitude," Stein continues. "I could relate to the idea of Torah being given in the wilderness or being apprehended in the wilderness. It seemed that the desert spoke to me - messages of equanimity and serenity. When I think of some of the Psalms, composed presumably in Jerusalem at the edge of the desert, it made sense to me. For example, Psalm 19, which speaks about a big sky, gives me a sense of place within a larger scheme of things."
Ben-Ora says the Arizona desert made a greater impact on her after experiencing Israel's deserts. However, she says, she does remember that "when we were in USY, we did a sukkah-building project for families, and I remember using palm fronds, which were available there. When I moved to Ohio, we built them with corn husks, but a sukkah to me is supposed to have palm fronds."
Pear says he felt a kinship with Israel in the Arizona desert, particularly when he went hiking. "In Israel they say you get a mitzvah every four steps you hike, so I got a lot - in both places."
Lipschultz says while he was at Solel, "we had this really cool Hebrew school teacher who would make us dress up like the Israelites and we would wander around the desert. That was one of the 'alternative experiences'; they no longer do that anymore. ... They have become more straight."
Caplan says he remembered Lee doing "a Sukkot thing in the desert" in imitation of the Israelite experience.
On the other hand, Beiner remembers Phoenix not for the "sand" desert but as being a "Jewish cultural desert."
"Ultimately my husband (who runs a Solomon Schechter School in Atlanta) and I ... knew we needed a larger Jewish community. This (Atlanta) is an incredibly dynamic, growing place."
Pear draws a parallel between the pioneers of Israel and pioneers in Arizona, like the Goldwater family.
"Arizona feels like a very new place, built on the pioneering spirit, cowboys coming in, people making their fortunes," he says. "The dream is that everything is open, and I felt that in Arizona, and now view Israel, as a place of opportunity. Everyone is an immigrant, and you feel that same pioneering spirit; you feel the whole world is open to you."
Even though the 1964 Republican presidential candidate was an Episcopalian, Lipschultz remembers that "there were Goldwaters who I grew up with whom Rabbi Plotkin had as members of his synagogue." The idea that Goldwater never tried to hide his Jewish roots "made you less scared of the gentiles. I never felt any anti-Semitism" in Phoenix, he says.
Says Caplan: "There was a store in the Paradise Valley Mall - Goldwaters - and every time I saw that store, it gave me a sense of security and comfort in that community. It was kind of like when (Joseph) Lieberman was running for vice president (in 2000). A potential president of our country having a patrilineal connection - it gave me a sense of being OK."
Donald Harrison is a free-lance writer based in San Diego, Calif. He is the former editor in chief and co-publisher of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage.