Rabbi Alysa Stanton made news and history a year-and-a-half ago.
Jewish and national news media, including Time magazine, wrote about her becoming “America’s first female African American rabbi” when she received her ordination at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (Reform).
Since then, Stanton, 46, has been the part-time spiritual leader of Congregation Bayt Shalom, a Reform synagogue of 53 members families in Greenville, N.C.
As she explained in a brief interview before she spoke at Milwaukee’s Harry & Rose Samson Family Jewish Community Center on Oct. 26, her first year of rabbinical work “has been a learning and growing experience. I have met wonderful people in the congregation and the community at large.”
And she has learned about what it is like to be the leader of the one Jewish institution in a small Jewish community some 40 miles away from the larger Jewish communities of Raleigh and Charleston — a community whose Jews are “spread out all over,” and where there is not a federation or a JCC.
So it may well be that some of the novelty is wearing off, so she can be, as she put it, “a rabbi who happens to be an African American woman, not the African American woman rabbi.”
Still, she remains novel enough that she gets invited to speak all over the country. She has appeared at universities and even at the White House.
And when she speaks, she talks about “my journey to the rabbinate, where I came from” — her Pentecostal Christian upbringing in Ohio and Colorado, her discovery of Judaism, her conversion when she was in her 20s, her previous career as a psychotherapist.
“The tapestry of who I am comes from my history as well as the journey itself, and what I’m learning along the way,” she said. “It’s a journey about hope and faith.”
“My goal is to help people in their spiritual path whatever that may be,” she added.
Stanton appearance was the first in the Nashim Project’s first series. The next planned event on Tuesday, Dec. 7, 9:30-11:30 a.m., will be the screening and discussion of a documentary film, “Making Trouble: Three Generations of Funny Jewish Women.”
The film explores the question of whether Jewish women have a special type of humor, and examines the careers of comediennes from Molly Picon to Joan Rivers. Writer and journalist Joanne Weintraub will lead the discussion.
Later programs, all held at the JCC except the last one, will be:
• “Mamadrama: The Jewish Mother in Cinema,” a documentary about the portrayal of the Jewish mother in feature films, to be screened and discussed on March 15.
• “Blessed is the Match,” a documentary about Hannah Senesh, the Zionist poet who parachuted behind Nazi lines to try to rescue Jews, was caught and killed, and has been revered as a Zionist martyr since; to be screened and discussed April 7, 7:30-9 p.m.
• The series will conclude with a for-women-only exploration of the mikvah (ritual bath) on May 5, 9:30 a.m.-noon. This will take place at Congregation Agudas Achim Chabad in Mequon and will include a film screening, a panel discussion, and a tour of the mikvah on the premises.
Cost is $10 per program or $40 for the series, which was created by the JCC, plus the Coalition for Jewish Learning, the education program of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation, and the MJF Women’s Division.
For more information and to register, visit www.milwaukeejewish.org or call 414-390-5700.
Loading ...