The change of senior rabbis from Ronald Shapiro to Noah Chertkoff at Congregation Shalom is not just a transfer of leadership. It is a shift of generations.
When Shapiro arrived to assist Shalom’s founding Rabbi Harry Pastor, in 1978, he was a young husband and father of small children. Now he is a grandfather, and Chertkoff is a young husband and father.
Shapiro will become rabbi emeritus and Chertkoff the senior rabbi on July 1.
The generation shift is one of the reasons Shapiro felt it was time to retire. “I could see how young people in their 30s with young kids related to [Chertkoff] so nicely,” he said in an interview on May 19. “I want the congregation to remain strong and I could see it remaining strong with him.”
For his part, Chertkoff said, “What’s really wonderful for me is that I’m surrounded by people who have moved through those life stages and who can give really sound advice. It’s not just that I’m going to be connected to people who I’m moving through those life stages with at the same time.”
One of those people who will “surround” Chertkoff will be Shapiro himself. As rabbi emeritus, he will still have an office at Shalom, will participate in services and lifecycle events, teach and “meet with people who knew me for years and want to confer with me.”
Moreover, the synagogue will be creating a “museum of Judaica” named after Shapiro and his wife Judy, built around Jewish objects that they have brought back from their many trips to Israel, Shapiro said.
Chertkoff will not only move into Shapiro’s office, but that office will be split into two to have another for the new assistant rabbi, Rachel Kaplan Marks, who will start on July 1.
Shapiro, 68, is a native of Minneapolis who was ordained at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati in 1974.
When asked about the highlights of his 37 years at Shalom, Shapiro first mentioned “the support of the congregation in allowing me to do a number of things.”
One of these included disappearing for two weeks in the early 1980s. Shapiro was involved in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry. He went on a clandestine trip to the USSR to deliver clothes, Jewish books and other items to refusenik families (i.e., families that had been refused permission to emigrate and were suffering retaliation as a result).
Shapiro said the synagogue members supported him in this and many trips to visit Jewish communities in Europe. “Of course, they were able to hear great stories” when he returned, he said.
But he didn’t only travel alone. Shapiro said another highlight was his having participated in 12 congregational trips to Israel, involving an estimated total of 750 to 1,000 people. This created “a wonderful sense of community” in the synagogue, he said.
Yet another highlight for Shapiro was interfaith work, which the congregation also supported. Among many such activities, he is a former co-chair of the Catholic-Jewish Conference. After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, he got together with a Lutheran minister at a neighboring church and they organized an interfaith service.
And “I still do this,” he said. On May 3, he was one of 12 religious leaders who spoke to nearly 140 people meeting at the Brookfield Mosque at a dialogue on prayer event organized by the Interfaith Conference of Greater Milwaukee. “It was really beautiful,” he said.
Finally, he said, “I emphasized in my rabbinate a lot of pastoral work. It was important for me to get to see people in hospitals and nursing homes, to be with them near the end of life… I would say that took up the majority of my rabbinate.”
Chertkoff, 36, is a native of Toronto, and noted that he will become senior rabbi on Canada Day. He was ordained at the HUC-JIR in 2009. (See the September 2011 Chronicle for more about his background.)
He said that in his four years at Shalom, he and his wife, Lauren Berger (young leadership director of the Milwaukee Jewish Federation), discovered that Milwaukeeans generally have a powerful sense of interconnection.
“In bigger cities with larger Jewish communities, part of what we try to do is convince people that they’re all interconnected,” he said. “I think Milwaukeeans know this instinctively…
“Milwaukeeans are quick to show up at the door of a loved one or even somebody that they know tangentially when they are suffering and need help, and they’ll be there for each other.”
When asked if he felt scared about following Shapiro, Chertkoff said, “I would feel scared were Rabbi Shapiro not standing with me… It would be a scary thing if I didn’t feel his support and the overwhelming support of the community.”
He added that in Hebrew, the same word means fear and awe; and “I feel a sense of tremendous awe.”
As for the future, Chertkoff said, “My stamp is going to come about because of who I am.”
He said he will be “building on the legacies” of Shapiro and Pastor in seeking to have Shalom “continue to be a beacon of liberal Judaism in Milwaukee,” in reaching out to the general community and the greater Jewish community, and in having the synagogue be “a place of celebration and solace.”
“Am I going to do it in my own way? Absolutely,” he said.
Loading ...