Green Bay — So what’s a Jewish woman who spent most of her life in Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas doing in a northern town like this?
For one, she is making a bit of Wisconsin Jewish history.
On Aug. 1, Shaina Bacharach became the first woman rabbi to be the full-time spiritual leader of a Wisconsin Conservative synagogue and the second woman rabbi to have that position in any state synagogue. And she is dong so in a shul-rabbi shidduch apparently born of love-at-first-sight.
Bacharach said in a telephone interview that she had visited several other congregations, but “the moment I got to Green Bay, almost from the time I got [to the synagogue, Congregation Cnesses Israel], I knew it was the right place,” she said in a telephone interview. “Everybody was enthusiastic and warm, they helped us unpack” and did other welcoming things “above and beyond the call of duty.”
As for the members of Cnesses Israel, “We felt an immediate affinity with Rabbi Bacharach and how she views Judaism and even with her sense of spirituality,” said synagogue president Leah Abrahams in a telephone interview. “Some people said we’re just getting started in our search and maybe should interview more candidates; but the consensus was, if we find someone people feel positive about, why wait?”
And what people felt positive about, said search committee chair Dean Rodeheaver, was the “maturity and integrity” that Bacharach, 52, brings to the synagogue.
“Her answers to some of our questions suggested somebody with very good pastoral skills, somebody who’s very thoughtful, and who has a good sense of who she was,” Rodeheaver said.
Indeed, that Bacharach decided “to become a rabbi at a mature point in her life … attracted us, rather than having a young person inexperienced in life,” said Abrahams.
‘ Girls have weddings’
Bacharach knew she wanted to become a rabbi as a girl growing up in Clarksdale, Miss. However, at that time “girls couldn’t do that.”
In fact, although the town’s one synagogue was Reform and Bacharach had “truly loved my time in Hebrew school,” she had to insist on having a bat mitzvah ceremony, which “wasn’t very common even for Reform” she said. “At that time, my mother said, ‘Girls have weddings, boys have bar mitzvahs.’”
As an undergraduate majoring in journalism at the University of Oklahoma in Oklahoma City, she drifted away from Judaism. She dropped out, got married, had twin daughters (Elise and Jenny Fischbein, now grown and living in Oklahoma City), got divorced and returned to the university to earn a nursing degree.
As a nurse and single mother, “I knew I needed more religious and spiritual underpinning.” She explored Buddhism, but “it wasn’t me.”
Then, at a synagogue raffle, her parents won a trip to Israel, which they gave to her. That visit in 1985 “kicked open a doorway that had been there all along since childhood,” she said.
Back in Oklahoma City, she became active in the city’s two synagogues, and “the more I did and studied, the more I wanted.” She eventually left nursing to become a full-time teacher in the city’s Jewish day school and decided she identified with the Conservative movement. In the process, the idea of becoming a rabbi grew until it became irresistible.
She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1999. During a summer break, she returned to Oklahoma City and met information technology instructor Robert Dick; they married while she was still a rabbinical student. (Dick will be working in Green Bay as a programs analyst; and the younger of his two sons, Simon, 15, will attend high school. The older, Sean, 19, studies at the University of Texas in Dallas.)
After serving for four years a small synagogue (about 80 memberships) in Waco, Texas, Bacharach decided she wanted “a more active community,” one “a little bit bigger” but small enough that “I could know everybody.”
At the century-old Cnesses Israel, with about 150 memberships, Bacharach particularly wants to focus on “trying to revitalize” the Jewish education program, especially a Hebrew high school and youth group.
Abrahams added that the congregation also wants Bacharach to work on adult education offerings. “People here are really hungry for knowledge,” she said.
Bacharach will have to deal with a religiously diverse congregation. The previous spiritual leader, Rabbi Sidney A. Vineburg, who left the post in 2002, characterized the members as “Reconservadox” in an article about Green Bay Jewry that The Chronicle ran in 2001.
So Rodeheaver also hopes that Bacharach will be “somebody who understands what [congregants] who consider themselves Reform are interested in, and, at the same time, what Conservative Judaism has to offer those folks.”
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