Madison — “So many on the West Coast” are attracted to careers in news and entertainment media, and the Los Angeles-raised Rabbi Jonathan Biatch (pronounced like “bite” with a “ch” on the end, or “beitch”) was one of them — at first.
But after majoring in radio and television broadcast management at California State University, Biatch decided to go to Israel for a year, to see what it was like to live away from home and as an outgrowth of his long-standing Jewish involvement.
He worked in Israeli television, but his experience there completely transformed his professional direction. “I decided I wanted to serve the Jewish community,” Biatch told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
And he has done so, first as a Jewish community worker and now as a synagogue rabbi. As of July 1, Biatch, 50, is the new spiritual leader of Temple Beth El (Reform) in Madison, the largest synagogue in the state’s capital city with almost 700 membership units.
That breadth of work in the community was one of the traits that attracted the congregation to him, according to Lottie Frank, co-chair of the search committee and the synagogue’s president-elect (she will begin her term in May 2006).
“It showed us that he had varied life experience in dealing with lots of different kinds of people,” Frank told The Chronicle in a telephone interview.
Moreover, Frank continued, “We felt that he was very warm and very insightful. He had glowing recommendations from past people he had worked with. He just seemed to fit well with Madison.”
While acknowledging that a rabbi “can’t do everything,” Frank said the congregation hopes Biatch will “help us grow and reach out to the community. I think that people are also looking for support for seniors and youth.”
Biatch himself said his goals for his work at Beth El will include “bringing people to greater appreciation of spiritual life through prayer and education,” plus “to bring people to awareness of how Judaism encourages us to be in the world, to participate in improving the world we live in,” and “to strengthen in whatever ways I can people’s appreciation for Israel and how we can strengthen Israel.”
Loomed large
It indeed appears that Israel has loomed large in his thinking ever since that first year he lived there. That period “showed me something I had not understood before about Jewish identity,” that “the strength of Israel depends on the strength of the world-wide Jewish community; and the strength of Judaism depends on the strength of the identities of Jews all over the world.”
With that epiphany in his head, Biatch entered Brandeis University’s School of Jewish Communal Service, obtaining a master’s degree in 1980.
For seven years, he held such positions as head of the Jewish community relations council in Buffalo, N.Y., and worked in planning and allocations for Jewish federations in St. Louis and Houston.
He said he enjoyed this work, but “it did not address a need I found to touch people at a more individual level,” he said. That led him to consider the rabbinate, a field that one of his three older sisters entered in 1982. (He also has a younger brother.)
He spoke with his sister and other rabbis, and “I decided my interests and skills are better utilized in the synagogue world.” So he entered the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion’s rabbinical program and graduated in 1992.
Biatch has served synagogues in Virginia and comes to Madison from Temple Sinai of Glendale, Calif. He has found this kind of Jewish community work “more satisfying. As my pastoral skills grow, I am able to be with people at times in their lives that are difficult, and I’m able to help people through those difficult times. I’m finding that life in a synagogue addresses so many needs.”
Biatch came to Beth El partly out of a feeling that the Midwest is “a place whose values are real and healthy,” and partly because the people he met at Beth El “have a tremendously high sense of ownership of the community. Everybody has a hand in what goes on here. That can only be healthy.”
Biatch is joined in Madison by his wife, Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, whom he met during his HUC year in Jerusalem and who has what he called a “social action rabbinate.”
She works as an “Internet commuter” for the Washington, D.C.-based Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, directing the Clergy for Choice Network. They have two children, Samantha, 11, and Joshua, 8.
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