As Rabbi David Cohen steps away, Jacobsen embraces a new beginning that she didn’t see coming
“It all started with meeting a nice Jewish boy,” said Rabbi Ora Jacobsen. “My husband!”
Jacobsen started as Congregation Sinai’s new Rabbi this month, but becoming a Jewish professional was not her original plan. She was not born into a Jewish family.
Before meeting her “NJB,” she pursued an undergraduate degree in theater management at Ithaca College and spent the beginning of her professional life working in audience services.
However, when Jacobsen’s now-husband, Ryan, proposed, his mother encouraged the couple to meet with a rabbi to discuss the logistics of an interfaith wedding. “We met with him, and everything made sense,” Jacobsen said.
They sat across from the rabbi on a black velvet couch, a tissue box placed between them on the coffee table, she said. It was almost as if there was an “expectation that somebody would cry … [and an] openness for vulnerability was created just by the setting.”
“I didn’t know that religion could be meaningful until I met a rabbi who opened that door,” Jacobsen said. “I just wanted to keep learning.”
And keep learning, she did. With the help of that same rabbi, Daniel M. Cohen of Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in South Orange, New Jersey, Jacobsen studied her way through a two-year conversion process. When that didn’t satisfy her drive for spiritual learning, she went to rabbinical school at Hebrew Union College and was ordained.
“From the very beginning, Rabbi Jacobsen exhibited a remarkable passion for Jewish study,” Daniel M. Cohen said. “Her desire to question and then look for answers made it clear to me that she would be a lifelong learner, and her decision to channel this quality into becoming a rabbi is particularly powerful.”
Now, Rabbi Jacobsen is joining the Milwaukee community, as Congregation Sinai’s own Rabbi David Cohen (no relation to Daniel Cohen!) enters his retirement from the congregation. Rabbi Jacobsen is looking forward to collaborating with Cantor Newman and continuing the good work that David Cohen has been doing throughout his career, she said.
“I’m excited to learn who Sinai is a little bit more intimately than in my interviews,” Jacobsen said. “I’ve already started to learn [things] about Sinai that I’m excited about … I love the idea of an intimate congregation. I want to know my congregants. I want them to know me.”
Jacobsen also expressed excitement that Sinai takes an interest in the arts. “I really appreciate that the arts are part of a learning modality [in the synagogue’s core values],” she said. “That speaks to me as somebody who came from performing arts. That’s a little bit of how I like to enter the world myself.”
For the past year, Jacobsen has been serving the New Jersey community as a multifaith hospital chaplain. The experience was deeply affirming of her choice to become a rabbi, Jacobsen said.
One patient Jacobsen visited confided that they had had a negative experience with the Jewish religion in their past, she said. “I got to be the rabbi to say that shouldn’t have happened … I was able to allow a certain amount of repair to their Judaism.”
“My background has shown me the value of pure openness for curiosity and letting people just ask questions. It took a rabbi to show me that, and that’s the [kind of] rabbi that I want to be.”
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