To lead a synagogue in a small town is often the beginning of a career for a newly graduated young rabbi. For Cantor Jeffrey Conn, however, becoming the spiritual leader of the Moses Montefiore Synagogue in Appleton is a climax of his involvement in Jewish life.
For while this position, which he began in March, is his first full-time job in Jewish communal work, Conn, 56, has been active and studying ever since he was a child at Milwaukee’s Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue.
“I don’t like sitting still,” Conn told The Chronicle in a recent telephone interview, and indeed he hasn’t. During the time he was a full-time high school English teacher in Ozaukee County public schools, Conn continued his Jewish learning and did part-time Jewish communal work.
He earned a master’s degree in Jewish studies from the Spertus College in Chicago, and is working on a doctorate there. He served as principal of Beth El’s religious school, which won two Conservative movement awards for Best Jewish Supplementary School while he was in charge.
He has pursued private study with Cantor Ronald Eichaker and Rabbi Gideon Goldenholz, and has become a member of the Cantorial Council of America. He has also led informal Jewish education with youth groups and at Wisconsin Jewish camps.
For the last eight years, he has been the part-time spiritual leader of the Anshe Poale Zedek Synagogue in Manitowoc, which “served as an internship for me,” Conn said in a recent telephone interview.
His work there impressed Chuck Orenstein, chair of the board of trustees of the Appleton synagogue. Orenstein and his wife, Nancy, visited the Manitowoc synagogue for one of Conn’s Saturday morning services, and found him “very professional and easy to listen to. He has a very good singing voice” and in his overall deportment “seemed to be the kind of person we would want to have.”
Orenstein and other Appleton Jewish leaders were particularly appreciative of Conn’s background and expertise as an educator, for his “prime function is to teach congregants and children” at the 80-member family synagogue, Orenstein said.
Conn agrees that one of his projects will be “to improve and reinvigorate the curriculum” for the some 20 students in the religious school. This will include bringing to Moses Montifiore the computerized Jewish education program that he helped develop at Beth El, he said.
Conn also said congregants have told him that they want adult education – to study Bible and Hebrew; learn about Judaism’s thinking on “life and death issues, such as abortion”; and they want “to know more about the meaning of prayer.”
Conn has plunged right in, holding a long study session for adults on the eve of Shavuot and has been convening regular adult study at his residence, the house that the synagogue owns.
At the end of his third month, Conn said he has found working in Appleton to be “very enjoyable,” in that the congregation has been “welcoming and I’ve been able to do programming here.”
He and his wife, Susan, also like the fact that Appleton is close to Madison, where their adult daughter and her family live, and to Milwaukee, where their adult son and Conn’s mother and brother live.
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