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Rosh Hashanah, 5761. More than 200 Jews sit on folding chairs in a bare-bones, 60-year-old, obviously retrofitted building where the sound of the shofar has never before been heard. Both men and women are draped in tallit, while a long-haired woman rabbi dressed in Birkenstocks and a white robe leads the service on an improvised bima (the reading table for the Torah). Above her hang colorful cotton banners, one for each day of creation. The Torah rests in a plain, but fine, wooden ark carved by a woodworker in the congregation, on an altar decorated with sunflowers, gourds and apples.
Participants look with wonder at the freshly-painted walls of this former Baptist church. Many must be thinking of time spent this summer cleaning and painting the building. The transformation is amazing.
Members of this modest congregation are teachers, doctors, social workers, artists, retired librarians, public servants, employees of non-profit organizations, carpenters, helping professionals. Many are members of interfaith families, some are part of same-sex households, and quite a few are single parents.
Most moved to New Mexico from other places, and most have never before been affiliated with a synagogue. Most are "returning" to Judaism; virtually all are seeking a Judaism that feels more meaningful than that with which they were raised, if they were raised at all Jewishly. As the community has created this physical home, they are simultaneously creating, with the leadership of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, that new kind of Judaism.
Albuquerque, N.M. may not seem a likely spot for a historic breakthrough in Jewish life, but no one has refuted the city's title as home to the first congregation founded by a woman rabbi to acquire its own synagogue.
In this small Sunbelt city of fewer than 12,000 Jews, five synagogues and two havurot (informal Jewish groups that meet regularly for discussion or prayer), Rabbi Gottlieb has guided her Congregation Nahalat Shalom (Inheritance of Peace) for 18 years from living rooms and backyards to rented churches and schoolhouses and finally to this former church.
Situated on a half acre, the building at 3306 Rio Grande Blvd. NW was vacant and suffering from neglect. Now it has been transformed into a basic but warm 225-seat sanctuary, an art gallery, library and cheder (study) room.
It has been nearly a three decades-long journey to her first permanent home for Rabbi Gottlieb, who began her rabbinical studies in 1972 at the Reform branch's Hebrew Union College in New York. When she was refused access at the Conservative branch's Jewish Theological Seminary, she sought private instruction with several prominent rabbis, including Rabbi Irving Greenberg, an Orthodox rabbi and an unorthodox thinker about the role of the Holocaust and Israel in Jewish history.
From 1973 to 1979 she served as rabbi to Temple Beth Or of the Deaf in New York City, mastering sign language in the process. Over the next seven years she was accepted for study with rabbis and teachers across the spectrum, including Zalman Schacter, Everett Gendler, Wolf Kelman and Elie Wiesel, finally reaching her goal of private ordination in 1980. Rabbi Gottlieb was one of the first 10 women rabbis ordained in the United States.
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A Home at Last
